Yesterday, during the prayers for the dead,
a section of each Holy Mass before the Our Father, a beloved-priest monk,
deceased some years ago, a dear friend, retreat-master and someone with whom I
often exchanged letters filled with spiritual richness – from him I stress –
came powerfully anew to my heart and I reflected with come confidence that he is
face to face with the Beloved of his life.
After Mass, however I realized I am now
deep into, perhaps further along than I suspect, an unexpected journey.
About to face, sometime in the future, as
yet totally unknown to me, of not just the journey’s end, but the final stage
of a battle I have been engaged in for over seventy years!
In many ways the entire journey through
life, what is actually a pilgrimage to the Absolute, is, if not purely an
unexpected journey, certainly a journey filled with, sometime fraught with, the
unexpected.
From the moment in chronological time the
Holy Trinity breathes life into us, with the cooperative love of a man and a woman,
who co-create new life with the Trinity, we have begun the journey.
The first door we pass through, the first
complete stage of the journey is through the door from within our mother’s heart
and womb out into the birth-reality from the, as it were, enclosed universe within
her, into the ever-expanding universe from life at home, to life away from
home, on a planet itself but one place within an even greater universe.
Change, movement, experience, growth, aging,
joys, tears, success, failure, love, love lost, hopefully found again, the ebb
and flow of friendships and perhaps encounters with enemies – yes the journey
is one of constant discovery, of learning, of choosing.
For we human beings created in the image
and likeness of God with the immortal soul breathed into us, our body, with its
senses, mind, will, imagination, emotions, is not the sum of being: being is who we are, mindful the soul gives
form to the body and the body itself is a temporary abode.
We are in a sense nomads on the journey
carrying the ‘tent’ of our bodies wherever we go.
For us then death is but the final and
greatest doorway which when passed through allows us to step into the reality
of true being, into an immensity greater than the entire created universe, a
place of no more tears, neediness, nor lack of love and beauty because it is
our true home, which is the place of everlasting communion of love with the
Holy Trinity: the real purpose of our being.
That said these more than seventy years
death and I have been in a battle wherein mostly I have used my wits and
energies, and since ordained, my priestly power to frustrate death at every
turn.
I realize now that death at some point, I
know not when exactly, will turn and no longer flee from me the pursuer but will
come towards me and this time – though I admit as yet I lack enough faith and
trust to do so – I will stop, stand, wait and, if granted the grace of absolute
faith and trust, surrender to death’s embrace, confident the embrace is not my
being overcome or destroyed, rather death’s embrace is actually the door being
flung open!
Two passages come to mind at this juncture.
The first from the Holy Gospel:
Then
Jesus told His disciples, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself
and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever would save his life will lose
it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what will it
profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a
man give in return for his soul? [cf. Mt.16:24-26]
And from St. Paul:
Bear
your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God. He
saved us and called us to a holy life, not according to our works but according
to his own design and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus before time
began, but now made manifest through the appearance of our Saviour Christ
Jesus, who destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through
the gospel. [2 Tim. 1:8-10]
There sure are lots of ‘heroic’ ways to
deny ourselves and some are called to do so, such as those who voluntarily give
up all the security of marriage, family etc., to embrace the monastic,
religious, priestly life.
However, I would argue the true heroic way
is to embrace what Jesus is asking by being faithful to the duty of the moment,
as moms do when their baby needs to be fed at two in the morning, as dad’s do
when going to work each day, what they both do at day’s end by giving the
children all the attention they need during supper and bedtime rituals. THAT is
self-denial in spades!
Self-gift to other, in marriage,
parenthood, priesthood, in military service, policing, teaching, shelf-stocking
in a grocery store, etc., etc. – the fullness of what Christ asks is not to be
found in any particular vocation or profession, rather it is within our
vocation/profession living out the simple principle: God first, the other
second and I am third.
This is also how we live out what St. Paul
is asking through the strength we get from God: when it seems we are just way
too fried to carry on, way too ‘giving’ empty to spare another drop, we can
draw upon the strength of the very grace Jesus asked for in the Garden: “Not my
will but Yours be done”, the grace of strength is the very grace we ask in the
Our Father: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Again, it has taken more than seventy years
of the unexpected journey for me to barely begin to embrace the above, much
less live it out!
Death, in my experience through most of my
life, is a sneak, a thief, arbitrary, sometimes cruel, occasionally as
unexpectedly quick with the speed of a striking snake, at other times lingers
for no apparent reason, and throughout human history is often in league with
pandemics, warmongers and terrorists and not infrequently a co-conspirator with
people who hate.
That said my first experience of this
sneakiness of death was when I was a small child just after the war, during
family supper when suddenly my Grandmother moaned, clutched her chest and fell
to the floor.
She was dead.
In those days, deceased family were waked
in the home and so within hours there she was in the open casket, cold, stiff
to the touch and my battle with death had begun – death the sneak, death the
quick, death the thief.
Within seemingly quick succession over the
next couple of years my Great Uncle, who in many respects was dead in body and
spirit from his First World War wounds, was gone, quickly at the end, and then
my Grandfather, with him death lingered cruelly and his death filled me with
both anger and a grief, I admit, which sometimes these sixty plus years later
still pains.
First in the newspapers, then in magazines,
and books, in the years immediately after the Second World War, pictures of the
concentration camps, and the victims of death’s abode piled like tossed debris,
as well as pictures of emaciated survivors, men, women, children, were rather
common both because of the Nuremburg trials, and because everyone was trying to
do the impossible: understand how this could have happened.
I remember my first perusal of a book about
the camps, likely I was by then five or six and already possessed with a mind
of keen observation, analysis and memory. I asked the Aunt whose home I was
visiting: why the people were naked, that it was wrong for people to have their
picture taken when they had no clothes on.
She gently re-opened the book which I had
slammed shut in disgust and explained things to me.
This did two things within me: made me from
then on fiercely opposed to war, discrimination, hatred and made me see death
even more as the enemy.
Some years later death as the cruel
co-conspirator with disease was brought home to me and seared me deeply
emotionally during the polio epidemic.
Many children, including classmates, died,
and an awful lot of those afflicted ended up in what were called iron lungs.
I remember when we were given the polio
vaccine after the epidemic sensing this battle death had now lost!
When I was sixteen the seductive sneakiness
of death tried to overpower me.
I was working, having left home two years
before, high in the rafters of a barn replacing the rotted boards of a catwalk
and could look down from my perch, through the immense and empty hayloft, it
was the beginning of summer and the cattle were on pasture, down all the way to
the cement floor and this idea took hold, telling me how easy it would be just
to let myself fall and then all the adolescent angst, the pain, the confusion,
the disenchantment with life would be over.
At the time, when eventually I completed
the job and got down to the barn floor the normal way, by the ladders, I had no
idea why I did not let myself fall, did not surrender to death.
Today I know it was grace.
Not a grace I was consciously aware of or
said a clear yes to at the time, but a grace nonetheless.
The grace of the power of the constitutive
passion to live placed in all of us at our creation.
In life each moment of each day is preparation
for life forever with Him, if in each moment, no matter the particular pain or
darkness, we choose life!
As we know the repercussions of WWII
rippled throughout the remainder of the 20th century with a seemingly
endless series of civil wars and revolutions from China to Iran, extending even
into the 21st century, as well what became known as proxy wars
extended from Korea to Vietnam to
Afghanistan; civil rights movements and other struggles, sometimes indirectly,
sometimes deliberately, increased assassinations of political and civil rights
leaders, opponents of oppressive regimes; plagues from AIDS to Zika unfolded
along with terrorism from the Red Brigades to Al Qaeda to ISIS, while even
today famine is death’s chariot to move among whole nations.
Within such chaos comes another type of
death: that of rational morality, common sense and social cohesion unravels.
There are today, since the end of the 20th
century fewer democratic governments around the world, a growing gap between
rich and poor, an angry clamoring for ‘rights’, without an equal voice for
personal responsibility, and finally people who actually believe and practice,
for example their Catholic faith, are becoming a remnant, while others gather
on the edges as either extreme fundamentalists or as cafeteria Catholics.
In religions without a solid base of
central wisdom and guidance, such as Catholics have in the person of the Pope,
extremists misuse sacred texts to justify their death-dealing angry illusions.
Our greatest concern should not be the
debated impact on climate by human activity, rather it should be the persistent
de-humanizing of the human family, a far greater and more immediate unfolding
of death with the spread of abortion, euthanasia, the dismantling of the family
as a sacred relationship between a man and woman and the children issued from
their love.
I will admit I went through a period overly
influenced by the above matters and did not lose but decidedly rejected and
walked away from Catholic faith and praxis.
It was in the midst of those dark years,
before my conversion of return to
Catholic faith and practice, that death showed me its cruelty and claim to
power in the work I was doing, always I might add on the graveyard shift.
No irony there!
One night the homicide detectives asked
everyone on that shift to find time to go to the morgue and see if we could
recognize, as a person with a name, a body dragged out of the river.
Since my own duty required me, while on
patrol, to answer calls across the whole city it was not until two in the
morning that I had time to respond.
There in the morgue was the body of a young
man, perhaps in his mid-twenties, who had been severely tortured before being
executed.
I stood there, not able to make an
identification, but lingering, wondering if a mother or father, a wife or
children, a lover or friend was wondering where he was, what had happened to
him?
It seemed to me, as anger welled within me
about the way humans cooperate with death in the brutal way this man’s life had
been taken, that maybe death was too powerful, maybe I should stop trying to
beat death.
Then, inside of my mind or heart
or…….somehow I heard yet not hearing as in when someone else is speaking, but
heard in a depth of my being I’d been ignoring for decades: “You will remember
him in your first Mass and pray for his soul and he will be granted peace.”
Terrified, I fled the morgue.
Fifteen years later during my ordination
Mass I remembered him, prayed for him, and continue do so each anniversary of
my ordination for more than thirty years already.
During my years serving as a parish priest,
as is true for all priests, death and I met often: in hospitals, nursing homes,
prisons, family homes, at scenes of highway accidents.
The prescribed prayers of the Church within
the Sacrament of the Sick administered to the dying make it clear death’s
victory is illusory for Christ is greater, the same within the prayers for the
deceased during the wake and funeral Mass where the emphasis is that life has
not ended but changed, changed because Christ IS risen!
While intellectually I believed all the
truth Jesus and the Church teach about the resurrection of the body and life
forever in communion of love with the Most Holy Trinity, deep within my being
there remained doubt.
Until one year when I was on sabbatical I
was able to participate in a Byzantine liturgy commemorating the burial of
Christ.
At the end of Vespers, as I experienced it
almost twenty years ago, four acolytes held the icon high enough that, led by
the bishop and priests, followed by the congregation, we processed under it,
having to bend low, as if to enter the tomb in which Christ was buried.
But unlike the enclosed tomb, we came out
on the other side!
My entire being experienced, finally
without doubt or hesitation, the truth of entering death with, in, through
Christ as the unexpected final steps of the journey.
"Where,
O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" [1 Cor. 5:55]
In the late 90’s Jean Vanier gave the
lectures in the CBC Massey Lectures Series, which talks were eventually
published in a book called BECOMING HUMAN: “We human beings are all
fundamentally the same. We all belong to a common, broken humanity. We all have
wounded, vulnerable hearts. Each one of us needs to feel appreciated and
understood; we all need help.”
That word from Jean Vanier serves me as a
reminder this unexpected journey will someday be not the symbolic bending,
entering, emerging from a liturgical gesture of death, burial, resurrection,
but the actual entering and emerging.
Therefore I, and all the elderly, must
embrace a humble willingness to risk others, the younger, stronger in
particular, seeing our brokenness, woundedness, vulnerability, neediness and
reach out for any help needed.
It also means, in union with the often
rejected and lonely Christ, peacefully accepting the response to our need may
not be instantaneous.
If we love those we need, then we will
trust their love in return and be patient.
Jesus tells us: Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord
will come…….So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an
hour when you do not expect him. [cf. Mt.24:42&44]
However, there is no need to fear the last
footsteps of the journey for Jesus promises us: Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.
In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I
have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a
place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I
am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.’
Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know
the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one
comes to the Father except through me. [cf.Jn.14-16]
At journey’s end, in the most unexpected
moment, we will not be alone, He will be with us.
1 comment:
Beautifuly written, Father, thank you.
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