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| Let us cross over to the other side |
Please let me take this opportunity to thank you all for your kindness to me and my family over the past weeks. Your concern and your prayers were a prop and gift to us, in a way simultaneously startling and organic. Ours is a family small in number, but the connection nurtured by grace and sacrament here in the parish extended and embraced our family, effectively multiplying both membership and affection.
Earlier this year, for the twentieth anniversary of the death of Pope Saint John Paul II, I shared with you some of the notes I sent from Rome, where I was privileged to be a close participant in the events around his funeral. As I was preparing for my own dad’s funeral, I was reminded of something I had written then, and I want to share with you now what I wrote the evening of April 8, 2005.
But these vast dimensions, and all the coverage, all the narrative, all the lights and cameras and action, all of it made it very tempting to overlook something: what happened today, though vast in scale, unprecedented in its participants, unheard of in its impact, was totally ordinary. It happens all the time. It is what families do. It is what Christians do. It is simply what we do.
This is what we do when we lose a loved one. We take him to the altar. We welcome our Lord and God who comes in the Eucharist, right into our midst. Then we all stand up and in one voice present the one we have loved and lost to that same Lord. Take him home!
And then we bid him goodbye.
All this is ordinary, in the sense that it is a part of life; necessary, and even good. But by no means easy. We lost a father. Today, it just took a while to say goodbye.
Ordinary, and extraordinary. Death is universal, loss of a loved one, universal; loss of a mother or father after a long life, good and even holy, is not universal by any means, and therefore worthy of extraordinary gratitude. To be surrounded by prayer and faith in the midst of that is extraordinary indeed, and cause for even greater gratitude. God bless you all.
Monsignor Smith
