Last Rites Under Fluorescent Light: Grace in a Secular Age: Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD

Last Rites Under Fluorescent Light: Grace in a Secular Age

“Is anyone among you sick? Let them call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord.” — James 5:14

Last week I was called upon to administer the Last Rites of the Church to a parishioner. The rite—traditionally called Extreme Unction—consists of prayers, absolution, anointing with oil, and a final blessing. I arrived at the home, spoke quietly with the family members who had gathered, put on my stole, lit a candle, and began. The room was still except for the sound of labored shallow breathing and the muted ticking of a clock. The man before me—a husband, brother, and father—was drifting in and out of consciousness, nearing the threshold of eternity. I anointed his forehead, chest, and hands, prayed the commendation of the dying, and entrusted him to the mercy of God.

As I drove home through the darkened streets that evening, the scene stayed with me. The candlelight, the faces of the family, the whispered prayers—all of it seemed to inhabit that fragile space between life and death, faith and uncertainty. Somewhere along the drive, I began to think of a novel—Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited—and of another deathbed, of another family gathered in reluctant reverence as a priest entered the room.

There are few scenes in twentieth-century fiction more haunting than the deathbed of Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited. Waugh, who understood the contours of grace better than most, allows that entire household—Charles, Julia, the family gathered in dread and disbelief—to watch as the sacrament of the Church unfolds. The old man, the head of his family, long estranged from faith, receives the anointing of the sick. Oil touches the senses, prayers are whispered, and at the end, the dying Lord Marchmain, raises his hand and makes the Sign of the Cross. It is a small gesture, yet it reverberates through the novel like a bell tolling from another world.

Waugh’s novel traces the spiritual and emotional entanglement of Charles Ryder with the aristocratic Marchmain family. It begins at Oxford in the 1920s, where Charles meets the charming and tragic Sebastian Flyte, and is drawn into the beauty, decadence, and moral confusion of Brideshead House. Over the years, his friendship with Sebastian gives way to love for Julia, Sebastian’s sister, and through them both Charles encounters the persistent presence of Catholic faith—a faith he resists even as he cannot escape it. The story unfolds against the backdrop of fading English nobility, war, and the decline of inherited religion. Beneath its elegance and nostalgia, Brideshead Revisited is a meditation on divine grace pursuing a family, and a man, across decades of pride, indulgence, and unbelief.

That deathbed scene is not sentiment. It is sacrament. For Waugh, divine grace breaks in at the last possible hour, the mercy of God refusing to be outdone by human pride or neglect. It is the still point of the whole narrative—a life’s rebellion met, not with judgment, but with forgiveness. Every other thread in the novel leads to that bedside, to that frail hand tracing the sign of faith.

The question, however, is whether such a moment could happen—or could even be imagined—in our own day. Could the “Last Rites” still carry weight in a modern American context, where the vocabulary of faith has grown so faint that few could name what is being offered?

Waugh’s England, for all its moral decay, still inhabited the remnants of a Christian world. Its unbelief was a rebellion within belief. The Church was part of the landscape—her language, her imagery, her very architecture shaping the imagination of a nation. Even those who rejected the faith still understood its grammar. A priest at the bedside might be unwelcome, but he was not incomprehensible.

Our culture is different. We have become a people who no longer die at home, who seldom pray aloud, and who have traded the sacred for the sanitary. The parish priest has been replaced by the anonymous chaplain; the oil by a sedative; the whispered absolution by the efficient hum of machines. Death, like so much else, has been managed into invisibility. The sacramental act—the touching of oil to the body, the sign of the cross drawn in trembling faith—seems foreign now, almost theatrical.

Yet even in this sterile world, grace remains possible. A modern Lord Marchmain might lie in a hospital bed surrounded not by marble and candlelight but by plastic tubing and fluorescent glare. His family might argue in the corridor about whether calling in clergy would “upset” him. Yet perhaps a friend—an unbeliever, even—might recognize that what matters most is not propriety but mercy. The priest would arrive quietly, not as a symbol of triumph but as a servant. The rite would be brief, unadorned: oil, prayer, silence. And maybe, in that silence, a weary hand would rise—unsteady, uncertain—and make the Sign of the Cross.

If it happened, it would be every bit as miraculous as Waugh imagined. Perhaps more so. For grace today must penetrate not only sin, but indifference; not only rebellion, but forgetfulness. It must find its way through the sterility of our secular age to touch a heart that has forgotten what mercy feels like.

The deeper question is not whether the scene could still work dramatically, but whether we still possess the ability to see it. We have become so accustomed to irony, so wary of piety, that a genuine moment of repentance and forgiveness strikes us as improbable. Yet that is the very nature of grace—it is improbable. It is the scandal of the Gospel that, at the eleventh hour, the thief is still welcomed into paradise.

The Church has always proclaimed that the sacraments are not magic but mercy. The anointing of the sick, like confession and communion, is not about reward but reconciliation. It is the visible sign that, in Augustine’s words, “the heart turns again to God, from whom it had turned away.” The oil, the cross, the whispered prayer—all are reminders that even death itself cannot close the door to love.

In Brideshead Revisited, that realization transforms not only the dying man but all who witness it. Julia’s resistance collapses; Charles’s unbelief begins to crumble. The Sign of the Cross, made by a hand that had long refused it, becomes a beacon in the darkness. The same could be true now, if only we dared to believe that God still acts in the quiet corners of the world—hospitals, hospice rooms, lonely apartments—where souls are still waiting to come home.

Waugh called Brideshead “a story of divine grace operating in a family.” It is also the story of grace operating against all odds. Whether under candlelight or fluorescent light, grace remains what it has always been: the quiet, persistent mercy of God reaching for us even in our last moments, when all our eloquence and self-assurance have fallen silent.

Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD