“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”
— Psalm 23:4, ESV
There is a place where the priest eventually runs out of words.
I think I have spent much of my priesthood trying not to arrive there.
Priests are supposed to have words.
We preach.
We teach.
We pray.
We bless.
We read Scripture.
We speak words over bread and wine.
We speak words at baptisms and marriages.
We speak words over the sick.
We speak words beside graves.
People come to us carrying questions that have been keeping them awake at night, and somewhere inside us there is often this terrible pressure to have an answer.
But death is different.
Death takes many of our carefully arranged words and lays them on the floor.
Standing beside a dying person, I cannot honestly explain everything.
Standing beside the dead, I cannot tell you exactly what the soul experiences beyond death.
Standing beside someone whose husband, wife, mother, father, child, sibling, or friend has just died, I cannot make the absence disappear.
I cannot make the body breathe again.
I cannot close the wound grief has opened.
I cannot tear open heaven and show anyone what lies beyond it.
And perhaps I am finally learning that I was never supposed to.
I am a priest.
I am not the gate.
I am not the resurrection.
I am not the judge.
I am not the Savior.
I am someone standing at the veil.
And Christ is Lord on both sides of it.
That distinction has changed something in me.
The Veil
When I speak about the veil, I do not mean that I possess secret knowledge about another world.
I mean the threshold.
The place where what we can see meets what we cannot.
The hospital room after the breathing changes.
The hospice bed when everyone knows the time is becoming short.
The telephone call in the middle of the night.
The moment a family hears, “They’re gone.”
The silence immediately after death.
The funeral home.
The coffin.
The ashes.
The cemetery.
The freshly turned earth.
The empty chair at home afterward.
These are places at the veil.
The veil is where certainty becomes smaller.
Where mystery becomes enormous.
Where faith must learn to stand without controlling what happens next.
Death places us before something we cannot negotiate with.
No amount of money stops mortality forever.
No title exempts us.
No education solves it.
No position within the Church allows us to walk around it.
Bishop, priest, deacon, religious, atheist, believer, rich, poor, powerful, forgotten—we all eventually approach the same threshold.
And there, strangely, many of the distinctions we spent our lives defending become very small.
“For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
— Genesis 3:19, ESV
At the veil, I remember that I too am dust.
That may be one of the first requirements of this ministry.
Humility.
The Priest Does Not Own the Threshold
There is a danger in any ministry surrounding death, grief, mysticism, or the departed.
The priest can begin imagining himself as something more than he is.
Mystery can feed ego just as easily as applause can.
If people begin seeing you as someone particularly comfortable around death, someone spiritually sensitive, someone who prays for the departed, someone interested in the mystical life, it would be very easy to start believing that you possess the mystery.
But mystery cannot be possessed.
God cannot be possessed.
The departed cannot be possessed.
And the veil is not mine.
A priest standing at the veil is not its gatekeeper.
He does not control who passes through.
He does not command the dead.
He does not possess hidden knowledge merely because he wears a collar.
He does not become Christ simply because he serves Christ.
The priest’s authority must always remain servant authority.
At the veil especially, ego must become very small.
Because the dying person is not there to make my ministry interesting.
The grieving family is not there to validate my calling.
The departed are not objects through which I prove my spirituality.
This is sacred ground.
Take off your shoes.
Speak carefully.
Listen carefully.
Pray carefully.
And remember whose ground you are standing upon.
I Am Not the Savior
This may be the most difficult lesson God has been teaching me.
I cannot save everyone.
For much of my life, I have tried.
Maybe not consciously.
But I have tried to carry people.
Fix people.
Protect people.
Take responsibility for people’s pain.
Take responsibility for whether ministries succeeded.
Take responsibility for whether people found God.
Take responsibility for whether communities formed.
Take responsibility for problems far beyond my ability to solve.
Eventually the soul becomes exhausted from trying to do Christ’s job.
A priest cannot carry the whole world.
Christ already did.
The priest at the veil has to understand this perhaps better than anyone.
I can anoint.
I can bless.
I can pray.
I can hold someone’s hand.
I can listen.
I can sit beside the bed.
I can celebrate the Eucharist.
I can commend the dying to God.
I can pray for the departed.
I can walk beside the grieving.
I can help bury the dead with dignity.
But I cannot redeem them.
That belongs to Christ.
There is tremendous freedom in finally saying:
This soul belongs to God, not to me.
The Ministry of Presence
I used to think ministry was primarily about doing something.
Now I am beginning to understand how much ministry consists simply of being there.
There are moments when there is nothing useful to say.
A person is dying.
A family is frightened.
Someone is crying.
Someone else is angry.
Someone has not spoken for an hour.
Someone keeps asking God why.
Someone has lost their faith.
Someone is bargaining.
Someone is staring at the floor.
And there is the priest.
What should he say?
Sometimes nothing.
That may sound strange coming from someone whose vocation involves proclamation.
But silence can be pastoral.
Silence can say:
I am not frightened by your grief.
I am not going to hurry you.
I am not going to make you perform faith for me.
I am not going to tell you that you should be grateful.
I am not going to explain away your pain.
I am willing to remain here.
That is ministry.
The priest at the veil must learn the difference between silence caused by helplessness and silence chosen out of reverence.
One is emptiness.
The other is attention.
Jesus Wept
There may be no better preparation for ministry among the dying and grieving than two words:
“Jesus wept.”
— John 11:35, ESV
Jesus knew what He was about to do at Lazarus’s tomb.
And still He wept.
That matters enormously to me.
Christ did not treat grief as theological ignorance.
He did not rebuke the mourners because resurrection was coming.
He entered their sorrow.
He wept.
That tells me something about priesthood.
I do not have to protect God from people’s grief.
I do not have to correct every angry prayer.
I do not have to become uncomfortable when someone says:
“Why did God allow this?”
“Where was God?”
“I am furious.”
“I cannot believe right now.”
“I don’t know whether heaven is real.”
“I prayed and nothing happened.”
Those words do not frighten Christ.
The Psalms contain worse.
The priest at the veil can let people grieve honestly.
Perhaps that is part of loving them.
The Mother Standing Nearby
And once again I find myself returning to the Sorrowful Mother.
She has become inseparable from my understanding of this ministry.
Mary knows the veil.
She knew the threshold between promise and fulfillment.
She knew the strange threshold of the Annunciation.
She knew childbirth.
She knew exile.
She knew fear.
She knew watching a child become a man whose mission would eventually take Him beyond her ability to protect Him.
And finally, she knew Calvary.
“But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother…”
— John 19:25, ESV
Standing.
That word continues to haunt me.
She stood.
She could not stop the crucifixion.
She could not remove the nails.
She could not make the soldiers compassionate.
She could not prevent death.
She could only love.
And remain.
Perhaps that is why I understand her as the Mother at the threshold.
She teaches the priest something very difficult:
You do not have to be able to fix suffering in order to remain faithful beside it.
Sometimes love cannot rescue.
Sometimes love keeps vigil.
Sometimes love holds the body afterward.
Sometimes love prepares the grave.
Sometimes love returns later with spices.
Sometimes love waits through Holy Saturday.
The Sorrowful Mother does not teach me how to control the veil.
She teaches me how to stand near it without running away.
The Body at the Threshold
The priest at the veil must also remember the body.
This is becoming increasingly important to me.
Christianity is incarnational.
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…”
— John 1:14, ESV
God entered flesh.
Therefore, I cannot behave as though the body becomes irrelevant the moment breathing stops.
The body deserves dignity.
The body deserves tenderness.
The body deserves reverence.
These hands once held someone.
These eyes once looked upon the world.
These feet carried someone through an entire lifetime.
This skin felt sunlight.
This mouth spoke names.
This chest rose and fell thousands upon thousands of times.
This heart beat while someone loved, feared, hoped, grieved, sinned, forgave, laughed, worried, and prayed.
And now the body is still.
The priest should not be frightened by that stillness.
Nor should he romanticize it.
He should reverence it.
The dead body is not an object for spiritual curiosity.
It is the remains of a human life deserving care.
That distinction is sacred.
The Forgotten
But what about the person who has no priest?
What about the person who has no family?
What about the body nobody claims?
What about the grave nobody visits?
What about the name nobody remembers?
Those questions pierce me.
Because some people die surrounded by love.
Others disappear quietly.
Some funerals fill churches.
Others have three people.
Some graves receive flowers for generations.
Others disappear beneath weeds.
And something inside me refuses to believe that human worth can be measured by how many people attend your funeral.
The forgotten dead matter.
The lonely dead matter.
The person whose family rejected them matters.
The queer person buried by relatives who never truly knew them matters.
The homeless person matters.
The addict matters.
The person who died estranged from the Church matters.
The person whose life was complicated matters.
The person whose faith was uncertain matters.
The person whose name has disappeared from human memory matters.
God knows the name.
That must be enough reason for the Church to care.
Perhaps part of the ministry of the priest at the veil is simply refusing to let the forgotten become spiritually invisible.
A prayer can still be offered.
A candle can still be lit.
A name can still be spoken.
A grave can still be tended.
Mercy can still be asked.
The Veil Is Not a Wall
For years I think I imagined death almost as a wall.
Life here.
Whatever comes next over there.
And death separating them.
But Christianity gives us a stranger image.
Christ entered death.
That changes the geography.
The grave is no longer territory Christ has not entered.
“For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.”
— Romans 14:9, ESV
Lord of the dead and of the living.
Those words have tremendous importance for this ministry.
I do not have to know everything beyond the veil.
I know Christ is Lord.
I do not need a map of heaven.
I know Christ.
I do not need to pretend certainty about mysteries Scripture leaves mysterious.
I can entrust them to Him.
This is where faith becomes less about having information and more about trust.
I stand on this side.
Christ is not limited to this side.
Therefore I can pray:
Into Your hands, Lord.
That may be the purest prayer at the veil.
Into Your hands.
Not mine.
Yours.
When Prayer Becomes Small
I used to think powerful prayer required many words.
Death has been teaching me otherwise.
Sometimes the closer we come to mystery, the smaller prayer becomes.
Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Jesus.
Mother, stay near.
Receive them.
Give them rest.
Comfort them.
Remember them.
Be here.
Sometimes that is all the soul can manage.
And sometimes that is enough.
The priest at the veil does not need to impress heaven.
He needs to pray honestly.
There may even be times when he cannot pray.
Then perhaps he can sit.
Breathe.
Hold the beads.
Make the sign of the Cross.
Let the Church pray through him when his own words have gone silent.
Priests are human too.
We become tired.
We become frightened.
We grieve.
We question.
We sometimes stand before mystery with absolutely nothing intelligent to say.
Perhaps humility begins there.
Death as Teacher
The departed have become teachers to me.
Not through secret messages.
Not because I claim knowledge from another realm.
They teach simply through the truth of their absence.
The dead teach the living what matters.
They teach us that time is finite.
They teach us that possessions are temporary.
They teach us that titles eventually become words in an obituary.
They teach us that grudges consume precious hours.
They teach us that the body must be cared for while we have it.
They teach us to say “I love you.”
They teach us to apologize.
They teach us to forgive when possible.
They teach us to stop pretending we will live forever.
Walk through an old cemetery slowly enough and eventually the world becomes very quiet.
You see names.
Dates.
Sometimes photographs.
Sometimes inscriptions.
A beloved mother.
A father.
A child.
A veteran.
A husband.
A wife.
A priest.
A stranger.
An entire life compressed into inches of stone.
And suddenly the things that seemed enormous yesterday become smaller.
The grave has a strange way of correcting our scale.
A Priest Must Know His Limits
There is another lesson I must keep before me if this ministry continues developing.
A priest at the veil must know what he is not.
He is not a physician.
He is not automatically a therapist.
He is not a grief counselor merely because he understands prayer.
He is not a medium simply because someone wants certainty about the dead.
He is not a funeral director.
He is not God.
There are times when the most pastoral thing a priest can do is call someone more qualified.
Hospice.
A physician.
A counselor.
A social worker.
A funeral professional.
A chaplain with specialized training.
Ministry does not become weaker when it recognizes its boundaries.
It becomes safer.
Humility protects people.
And anyone serving the dying or grieving carries an enormous ethical responsibility because grief makes human beings vulnerable.
The priest must never exploit that vulnerability.
Not emotionally.
Not financially.
Not spiritually.
Not sexually.
Not mystically.
Never.
The veil belongs to God.
The grieving belong to themselves.
The departed belong to God.
The priest is there to serve.
Eucharist at the Edge
And then there is the Eucharist.
Again and again my understanding of priesthood returns there.
“This is my body.”
Body given.
Body broken.
Body shared.
Body remembered.
Christ does not save humanity by refusing embodiment.
He gives Himself through it.
The Eucharist therefore becomes extraordinarily powerful near death.
Not because it is magic.
Because it proclaims something profound:
Christ remains nourishment even at the edge of mortality.
The dying person who receives Communion receives the same Christ who entered death and passed through it.
The altar and the grave are not the same thing.
But both stand beneath the shadow of Paschal mystery:
Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.
At the veil, those words stop being liturgical decoration.
They become something to hold onto.
The Priest Who Is Also Dying
There is another truth I cannot avoid.
The priest standing beside the dying is himself dying.
Maybe not today.
Maybe not tomorrow.
But eventually.
The collar does not exempt me.
Ordination does not exempt me.
Prayer does not exempt me.
Someday I will be the body.
Someday someone else may stand beside me.
Someday another priest may speak prayers I have spoken for others.
Someday someone may close my eyes.
Someday my hands will be still.
Someday the Eucharist I celebrated will be celebrated for me.
Someday someone may say:
May he rest in peace.
That does not frighten me in quite the way it once might have.
There is humility in remembering that I am not standing above mortality.
I am walking toward the same threshold as everyone I serve.
Maybe that makes the ministry more honest.
I am not saying:
“I know the road because I am different from you.”
I am saying:
“We are mortal together.”
And:
“I trust Christ enough to stand here with you.”
My Place at the Veil
Perhaps this is what I have been trying to understand all along.
I thought priesthood required me to build something enormous.
Maybe God was asking me to become small enough to stand beside one bed.
I thought ministry required crowds.
Maybe sometimes it requires one grieving person.
I thought success meant a full church.
Maybe sometimes success is a funeral where nobody is forgotten.
I thought I had to conquer darkness.
Maybe I was simply supposed to carry a candle into it.
One candle.
One prayer.
One body treated with dignity.
One frightened person comforted.
One grave remembered.
One name spoken before God.
One family accompanied through grief.
One soul entrusted to Christ.
Perhaps that is enough.
The world teaches us to measure success through numbers.
Christ keeps returning to persons.
One sheep.
One wounded traveler.
One blind man crying beside the road.
One woman at the well.
One thief dying beside Him.
One mother beneath the Cross.
One person matters.
The priest at the veil must remember that.
The Threshold Is Holy Ground
So now I find myself approaching this ministry differently.
With less certainty.
Strangely, also with more peace.
I do not need to know everything.
I need to be faithful.
I need to study.
I need to pray.
I need to learn how to accompany the dying responsibly.
I need to understand grief.
I need to honor professional boundaries.
I need to learn the Church’s prayers for the dying and departed more deeply.
I need to understand the body.
I need to listen.
I need to become comfortable with silence.
I need to know when to leave.
I need to know when to stay.
And above all, I need to remember that the threshold is holy ground.
Not because death is holy in itself.
But because human beings are holy.
Because Christ entered death.
Because grief exposes the deepest places of the heart.
Because love becomes painfully visible when someone is leaving.
And because the person standing before me belongs ultimately to God.
Under Her Mantle, Before His Cross
And perhaps I will stand there under the mantle of the Sorrowful Mother.
Not because she replaces Christ.
Never.
She stands with me because she knows where to point.
Toward Him.
Always Him.
She knows the body.
She knows the Cross.
She knows the silence.
She knows what it means to remain when there is nothing left to fix.
She teaches me how to stand at the veil without pretending to control it.
And Christ teaches me why I can stand there without despair.
Because death is not God.
The grave is not God.
Suffering is not God.
Christ is Lord.
Of the living.
And of the dead.
So when the room becomes quiet, perhaps I do not need a magnificent sermon.
Perhaps I only need to stand there.
Make the sign of the Cross.
Speak the person’s name.
Pray the ancient prayers.
Honor the body.
Hold space for the grief.
And then, when the moment comes, open my hands.
Because the final movement of this ministry must always be release.
Not possession.
Release.
Into Your hands, O Lord.
Into Your hands the person I cannot keep.
Into Your hands the questions I cannot answer.
Into Your hands the grief I cannot repair.
Into Your hands the soul I cannot save.
Into Your hands my own fear.
Into Your hands my priesthood.
Into Your hands even my own death when that hour finally comes.
That is where the priest stands.
Not beyond the veil.
Not above it.
Not controlling it.
At it.
Beside the dying.
Beside the grieving.
Beside the body.
Beside the mystery.
A servant holding a candle at the edge of what he cannot see.
And perhaps that is enough.
Perhaps that is what I was being prepared for.
Not to tear the veil open.
Not to explain what lies beyond it.
Not to become master of mysteries that belong to God alone.
But to stand faithfully at the threshold and whisper into the darkness:
Christ has already passed this way.
And when there are no more words—
to remain.
To pray.
To trust.
And finally,
to let go.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition: 2025.