I remember my father’s favorite pastime once he hit his seventies. It was not golf or watching the Boston Red Sox but rather seeing if his friends or acquaintances were in the obituaries. He had lived in the area all his life and had been a businessman, so he knew a lot of people, as was made obvious virtually every morning when he unfurled the morning paper and went straight to the obits. There was always someone there, and often more than one. He himself figured he would die at age 80, which was well within reach at his age then, although even at 84, when he did die, his search in the obits was still almost as if he were looking for himself.
I am in my mid 60’s and am not doing that, at least not yet, but still I find myself discovering that people I have known on the level of contemporaries or near- contemporaries are dying at an unsuspected rate. Last week, a friend from back East where I was raised sent me the obit of my high school girlfriend, a relationship that had ended badly because of me, but one that had surprisingly turned into a sporadic friendship later on. She was the girl obliquely mentioned in my book Dream Weaver, chapter 7, and one of the two big reasons that I hit the road in such a desperate state. I had almost sent her the book several times before, but now never will. Dead at age 65. I hadn’t figured on that at all. I even remembered that, if she had lived five more days, she would have made 66.
On about the same day, I learned that a woman who I had had a lively conversation with just two months before had also died. She was eleven years my senior and had been sick with this or that, but still had retained the unbounded, often too-unbounded, energy for which she was known. Now dead. Just this Saturday as I walked into the church for her funeral, there she was, set out for one last silent conversation. She looked “so life-like” as is often said, and given the energetic way I had last encountered her, the fact that she was dead seemed impossible. That is my way, it is true: it always takes me a few months to really believe that someone is dead, but this was much harder. I expected her to jump up and say, “Oh, come on Fred, can’t you take a joke?”
In the Catholic Church the funeral mass that is held for the dead has all the necessary elements that lead to the Eucharist, or communion, including the homily which is almost always given by the priest. Thus it was for this funeral, but I knew the relationship that this woman had had with the priest. She was an activist, a social justice warrior who thought the Church needed a kick in the pants to help remedy racism – she was raised on the early 60’s civil rights movement and had never given it up – as well as homelessness and so on. Father P., on the other hand, believed that social activism should be secondary to spiritual awareness and growth, the latter being far more important for the individual than social justice in this world. She, “M,” steadily forwarded all sorts of projects for the Church through Father P, most of which were shot down as impractical (most, in fact, were) which caused her no end of anger and frustration. It reached such a point that it was widely reported that she had actually punched the priest in the stomach. This was undoubtedly true, as her later actions largely proved. I had never seen her in this mode, but people had shown me text messages that she had sent that were filled with anger. They were hard to read and harder to believe, but they, too, were undoubtedly true.
So I was wary as to how Father P would treat her life, death, and the suspected fate of her soul. Not surprisingly, he did mention her at-times excessive energy and talk; surprisingly, however, this took a back seat to a far rosier eulogy than I had thought possible. As he went over her life and then her death, it became apparent that Father P was actually in awe of her – not because he had had a change of heart about social activism, but because of how she had died. I had seen her two months before, and it was at about this time that her health had taken a sudden plunge and she had gone to a hospital. And it was at this time that Father P’s faith was raised not by the fist of rebellion but by an unexpected outpouring of faith and redemption. As Father P said, “About two months ago, all her anger and shouting had stopped and she began to submit to the suffering of Jesus.”
He then became more specific. In her progress towards a death she knew was soon to come, she saw herself repeating the stages of suffering that Jesus had gone through, from the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the judgment, the scourging, the carrying of the cross, and so on. Moreover, she had not imposed this comparison on herself, but was shown this by the actual, at least to her, presence of Jesus, right there in her hospital room. Said Father P, “Jesus appeared to her and gradually taught her the value of her suffering, just as his suffering had value.” (note: these quotes are all paraphrases.) As she sloped towards death, he said, she became more peaceful, more accepting, and more radiant with faith. Jesus, he said, had taken to her and then had taken her altogether. In Father P’s professional opinion, she had been embraced and was on her way to heaven.
The sincerity with which this was said was shocking, although in a good way. It was obvious that he believed that Jesus had come to her. Father P had been there, just as he had been there for hundreds of other dying people, and if anyone would know, he would. He had seen something special in her which had renewed his faith, however necessary for him that might have been.
I am still somewhat bewildered by it all – by her death, by Father P’s reaction, by this mark of faith and actual presence of Jesus, and now, even by my own understanding of it all – of life, of suffering, of death. In a lesser way than to Father P, the story of her death, even though it is second hand to me, has opened my eyes one little bit more in the realm concerning suffering. This is the toughest thing to understand, as in Christianity this is also combined with the belief that God is absolute love. How could a loving God allow suffering?
What I have learned from M’s life and death, then, is this: that God’s love is sacrifice, a willingness to help and even suffer for others, rather than some jolt of youthful hormones usually associated with love. In her life she sought to sacrifice for others, even though this sacrifice was often misplaced or even counterproductive. But in her death she was led by Jesus to the ultimate sacrifice, in that hers’ became a sacrifice for the love of God, just as God in Jesus had sacrificed his all for her and for all of humanity. This sacrifice was, as St. Paul noted, a “completion” of Jesus’s sacrifice – not that His was incomplete, but that ours’ was, or is until is passes through Him. We have to take up the cross to follow him, as they say. Suffering is what is meant by that – and the pain and fear of death can be that necessary sacrifice.
All this to understand what love really is. This is what Father P saw. It is still hard to understand all the angles on this most critical and fearsome matter, but this much is true: no greater love is found in the world than that found when we sacrifice our well-being and life for another. This is true for Christians and non-Christians alike, and is still known as the “Roman Virtue.” How this can be done by our own suffering and death through Jesus remains in part a mystery, at least to me. On the other hand, I get it, or rather, a part of me gets it. A ray of light has shown forth from M’s death to help me understand, and to grasp a little bit more what this, this fallen world that is still in God’s hands, is all about in light of the perfect, ultimate truth: that, to overcome the selfish we must sacrifice to any and all, and in this way we become, in actions, like God. And in this way, as we become like him, we may join him.
On the one hand, simple; on the other, far, far away. But she saw this truth and let it be known through Father P. For those who search, then, she at last gave what was needed to achieve her goal of social justice - not a sacrifice for this side or that, but rather for all.
I remember my father’s favorite pastime once he hit his seventies. It was not golf or watching the Boston Red Sox but rather seeing if his friends or acquaintances were in the obituaries. He had lived in the area all his life and had been a businessman, so he knew a lot of people, as was made obvious virtually every morning when he unfurled the morning paper and went straight to the obits. There was always someone there, and often more than one. He himself figured he would die at age 80, which was well within reach at his age then, although even at 84, when he did die, his search in the obits was still almost as if he were looking for himself.
I am in my mid 60’s and am not doing that, at least not yet, but still I find myself discovering that people I have known on the level of contemporaries or near- contemporaries are dying at an unsuspected rate. Last week, a friend from back East where I was raised sent me the obit of my high school girlfriend, a relationship that had ended badly because of me, but one that had surprisingly turned into a sporadic friendship later on. She was the girl obliquely mentioned in my book Dream Weaver, chapter 7, and one of the two big reasons that I hit the road in such a desperate state. I had almost sent her the book several times before, but now never will. Dead at age 65. I hadn’t figured on that at all. I even remembered that, if she had lived five more days, she would have made 66.
On about the same day, I learned that a woman who I had had a lively conversation with just two months before had also died. She was eleven years my senior and had been sick with this or that, but still had retained the unbounded, often too-unbounded, energy for which she was known. Now dead. Just this Saturday as I walked into the church for her funeral, there she was, set out for one last silent conversation. She looked “so life-like” as is often said, and given the energetic way I had last encountered her, the fact that she was dead seemed impossible. That is my way, it is true: it always takes me a few months to really believe that someone is dead, but this was much harder. I expected her to jump up and say, “Oh, come on Fred, can’t you take a joke?”
In the Catholic Church the funeral mass that is held for the dead has all the necessary elements that lead to the Eucharist, or communion, including the homily which is almost always given by the priest. Thus it was for this funeral, but I knew the relationship that this woman had had with the priest. She was an activist, a social justice warrior who thought the Church needed a kick in the pants to help remedy racism – she was raised on the early 60’s civil rights movement and had never given it up – as well as homelessness and so on. Father P., on the other hand, believed that social activism should be secondary to spiritual awareness and growth, the latter being far more important for the individual than social justice in this world. She, “M,” steadily forwarded all sorts of projects for the Church through Father P, most of which were shot down as impractical (most, in fact, were) which caused her no end of anger and frustration. It reached such a point that it was widely reported that she had actually punched the priest in the stomach. This was undoubtedly true, as her later actions largely proved. I had never seen her in this mode, but people had shown me text messages that she had sent that were filled with anger. They were hard to read and harder to believe, but they, too, were undoubtedly true.
So I was wary as to how Father P would treat her life, death, and the suspected fate of her soul. Not surprisingly, he did mention her at-times excessive energy and talk; surprisingly, however, this took a back seat to a far rosier eulogy than I had thought possible. As he went over her life and then her death, it became apparent that Father P was actually in awe of her – not because he had had a change of heart about social activism, but because of how she had died. I had seen her two months before, and it was at about this time that her health had taken a sudden plunge and she had gone to a hospital. And it was at this time that Father P’s faith was raised not by the fist of rebellion but by an unexpected outpouring of faith and redemption. As Father P said, “About two months ago, all her anger and shouting had stopped and she began to submit to the suffering of Jesus.”
He then became more specific. In her progress towards a death she knew was soon to come, she saw herself repeating the stages of suffering that Jesus had gone through, from the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the judgment, the scourging, the carrying of the cross, and so on. Moreover, she had not imposed this comparison on herself, but was shown this by the actual, at least to her, presence of Jesus, right there in her hospital room. Said Father P, “Jesus appeared to her and gradually taught her the value of her suffering, just as his suffering had value.” (note: these quotes are all paraphrases.) As she sloped towards death, he said, she became more peaceful, more accepting, and more radiant with faith. Jesus, he said, had taken to her and then had taken her altogether. In Father P’s professional opinion, she had been embraced and was on her way to heaven.
The sincerity with which this was said was shocking, although in a good way. It was obvious that he believed that Jesus had come to her. Father P had been there, just as he had been there for hundreds of other dying people, and if anyone would know, he would. He had seen something special in her which had renewed his faith, however necessary for him that might have been.
I am still somewhat bewildered by it all – by her death, by Father P’s reaction, by this mark of faith and actual presence of Jesus, and now, even by my own understanding of it all – of life, of suffering, of death. In a lesser way than to Father P, the story of her death, even though it is second hand to me, has opened my eyes one little bit more in the realm concerning suffering. This is the toughest thing to understand, as in Christianity this is also combined with the belief that God is absolute love. How could a loving God allow suffering?
What I have learned from M’s life and death, then, is this: that God’s love is sacrifice, a willingness to help and even suffer for others, rather than some jolt of youthful hormones usually associated with love. In her life she sought to sacrifice for others, even though this sacrifice was often misplaced or even counterproductive. But in her death she was led by Jesus to the ultimate sacrifice, in that hers’ became a sacrifice for the love of God, just as God in Jesus had sacrificed his all for her and for all of humanity. This sacrifice was, as St. Paul noted, a “completion” of Jesus’s sacrifice – not that His was incomplete, but that ours’ was, or is until is passes through Him. We have to take up the cross to follow him, as they say. Suffering is what is meant by that – and the pain and fear of death can be that necessary sacrifice.
All this to understand what love really is. This is what Father P saw. It is still hard to understand all the angles on this most critical and fearsome matter, but this much is true: no greater love is found in the world than that found when we sacrifice our well-being and life for another. This is true for Christians and non-Christians alike, and is still known as the “Roman Virtue.” How this can be done by our own suffering and death through Jesus remains in part a mystery, at least to me. On the other hand, I get it, or rather, a part of me gets it. A ray of light has shown forth from M’s death to help me understand, and to grasp a little bit more what this, this fallen world that is still in God’s hands, is all about in light of the perfect, ultimate truth: that, to overcome the selfish we must sacrifice to any and all, and in this way we become, in actions, like God. And in this way, as we become like him, we may join him.
On the one hand, simple; on the other, far, far away. But she saw this truth and let it be known through Father P. For those who search, then, she at last gave what was needed to achieve her goal of social justice - not a sacrifice for this side or that, but rather for all.
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