The Divine Mercy

About 18 months ago, late 2003 or early 2004, my brother Mike, the composer of the music for the Gospa Oratorio, phoned me up to ask me if I had any literature I could let him have about the Divine Mercy. Even though he still wasn't going to church (he was still a lapsed Protestant) he had become very spiritually inclined and was always working on new sacred music ideas. He had been exposed to the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy in Medjugorje and, what with having a Polish wife and Pope John-Paul 11 declaring Sister Faustina the first new Saint of the new millennia, he felt drawn to attempt a musical setting.

In the summer of 2004 we went back into the studio and recorded a sung version of the main part of the chaplet, '' For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world''. A few weeks later Mike and I met up at Fawley Court, a beautiful riverside stately home at Henley on Thames near Oxford in central England. The reason for meeting up was for Jamie Mulgrew, the voice of Our Lady on the Gospa CD, to sing a live version of Mike's new work because Fawley Court is the home of the Divine Mercy Apostolate for England and they were having an Open Day. Mike had been corresponding with a young Polish priest there, Father Mariusz Jarzabek, and they seemed to get on famously. We had a lovely few hours together and it was time for me to drop Mike at the railway station before I had to head back home to the North of England. Just as we were leaving Father Mariusz came sprinting over the car park in full priests robes and presented Mike with a copy of Sister Faustina's Diary. I know Mike was really touched and it motivated him to complete a new full Meditation on the Divine Mercy.

As a result, in February this year, 2005, we paid yet another series of visits to Andy Summers' recording studio and we completed a recording of the full work. Whereas the hallmark of the Gospa Oratorio music, for me, is it's extraordinary ability to convey the peace and spiritually of Medjugorje, Mike's music for the Divine Mercy has moments that I can only describe as majestic.

Just a few weeks after completing the recording I received a telephone call from Dover, it was Mike telling me that he had a problem with his chest. He had been a smoker all his adult life apart from giving up for the last few months. A few weeks' later tests confirmed the worst and Mike was told he had only about four months to live. I informed our circle of prayer friends around the world, via the internet, and Mike told me that he felt lifted up on a wave of prayer. God was indeed merciful and he only lasted for three weeks or so. He was admitted to a hospice in Canterbury for the last week of his life and I monitored his decline every day by phone from the North because he did not want to receive any visitors in his condition. When the hospice informed me that he only had a few days to live I took it upon myself to phone Father Mariusz. I told him that there were only two priests that Mike really related to; one was John Paul II who had died the previous week and that he was the other. Father Mariusz said that he would pray for Michael and took down the details of the hospice.

The next day when I got back from work I telephoned the hospice again to be told that Mike probably wouldn't last the night. I had a talk with my wife Carla and decided I would drive to Canterbury, well over 200 miles away and try to get there before 3 o'clock in the morning to pray a chaplet of the Divine Mercy with him. I was halfway down the motorway when I received a call on my mobile phone from Carla. She told me that Father Mariusz had prayed overnight for Michael and even though he had only met him the once for a few hours a year before, he felt compelled to drive half way across England to see him. Mike wasn't receiving visitors but some how he got in and he received Mike into the Catholic Church there and then. I arrived a few hours later but the nurses had their instructions and they wouldn't let me in to see him, but by then it really didn't matter.

God had it all in hand, even to the extent of sending Mike his very own Divine Mercy priest to receive him, give him absolution and the sacrament of the sick. The very next day Mike died peacefully. He had been Catholic for precisely one day. It is never too late to come home so please keep praying for your friends and loved ones to return. I sent out an e-mail to all our friends thanking them for all their prayers and Suzanne de Decker in Texas contacted me and asked what time he died. She told me that at exactly the time Mike lay dying, a mass and rosary were being said for him at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Fort Worth.

A week later I returned to Kent with Carla and my daughter Camilla for Mike's funeral at which some of his music was played. When it was all over I took the wreathe from his coffin, with his wife's permission, and drove the few miles to the ancient and beautiful little church in Bishopsbourne. Mike and I had worshiped there fifty years earlier as little children whilst at the local orphanage and it seemed right to me to mark the fact that Mike's life had come full circle but the church was locked so I laid the wreathe on the church steps. I had long forgotten the name of the church over the years, I was astounded to find that it was dedicated to the same person as the church I got married in. That person was . . . St. Mary. . . we hadn't realised. . . but she had been with us all along.