739 the seventh word Why boast of your month-, year-, or five-year-long penance? If we will perform solid works of penance throughout all of life, then at least we can expect and await Heaven in not too presumptuous a manner. THE SEVENTH WORD OF THE CRUCIFIED ORATOR “Father, into [Y]our hands I commend [M]y spirit!” (Lk 23:46) We Must Frequently Entrust Our Souls to Christ the Lord, Lest We Want to Fall Often Again and Again. We frequently notice that men — upon departing this world — entrust to their closest ones what they held dearest during their life. Thus did Turnus, King of the Rutuli, otherwise a very brave hero, defeated in a duel with Aeneas the Trojan, “on his knees, humbly raising his hands, with a gaze of supplication pleaded with his victor: If any concern for a parent’s grief Can touch you (you too had such a father, in Anchises) I beg you to pity Daunus’s old age.”128 On the other hand, our Redeemer dying upon the Cross, did not speak to any man or angel, but to His Heavenly Father, entrusting to Him His spirit: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit!” Saint Athanasius, meditating upon these words, stated: “Christ, saying these words from the cross: ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,’ places all people before the 128 Translation from http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Virgil AeneidXII.htm#_Toc6669721.
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