Week 3

In the rising of the sun and in its going down,

we remember them.

In the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter,

we remember them.

In the opening of buds and in the warmth of summer,

we remember them.

In the rustling of leaves and the beauty of autumn,

we remember them.

In the beginning of the year and when it ends,

we remember them.

When we are weary and in need of strength,

we remember them.

When we are lost and sick at heart,

we remember them.

When we have joys we yearn to share,

we remember them.

So long as we live, they too shall live,

for they are now a part of us, as

we remember them.

Taizé Prayer:

In the earliest attempts at the reform of our Catholic liturgy, as directed by Vatican II, the text of the Mass of Requiem, known from the first word of its entrance song, was replaced by a text called “the Mass of the Resurrection.”

An important thing happened in the first blush of that liturgical change.  People discovered that, with all the new emphasis on the hope for resurrection of the dead with Christ, mourners had no fitting ritual way to express their grief.  The celebration of the joys of the last day, which no one but Jesus had experienced in their fullness, not even the blessed, was premature.  The church’s prayer was calling on people to rejoice and be glad, when at the moment their greatest need was to grieve.

And so, quietly, almost imperceptibly, after a year or two, the triumphant “Mass of the Resurrection” yielded to the more realistic “Mass of Christian Burial.”  Its prayers and readings are filled with faith, but they are less euphoric.  The Lord will in the future wipe away the tears from every eye – but not now.  The person who is dead has been totally freed from the power of sin – but we who live on have not!  Jesus knew something of the glory he was called to – we simply do not.  We do not know where our loved ones have been taken to and we want them back.  The pain of separation is intense, as it was for Jesus’ friends after they lost him.  We may not forget that the Eucharistic meal that we eat commemorates a departure: a wrenching, tearful separation.

Your grief is your own, all the days of your life.  Let no one deprive you of it, not even out of love.  Pain is inseparable from love; that is a truth we must live with.  It is a proof of our true inner reality, a judgment of ourselves, as to how and with what courage we face and accept that truth.

Gerard S. Sloyan

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, not present things, not future things, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Romans 8:38-39

Hope is, in its most general terms, a sense of the possible, that what we really need is possible, though difficult, while hopelessness means to be ruled by a sense of the impossible . . . What I hope for I do not yet have or see; it may be difficult; but I can have it – it is possible.  Without this way of feeling about ourselves and things, we do nothing.  We do not act or function.  There is no energy because there is no wishing.  And there is no wishing because there is no sense of the possible.

William F. Lynch

Here is a man suffering on his bed of pain, and the church comes to him to perform the sacrament of healing.  For this man, as for every person and the whole world, suffering can be the defeat, the way of a complete surrender to darkness, despair and solitude.  It can be dying, in the very real sense of the word.  And yet it can be also the ultimate victory of a person and of Life in that person.  The church does not come to restore health in this man, simply to replace medicine when medicine has exhausted its own possibilities.  The church comes to take this man into the Love, the Light and the Life of Christ.  It comes not merely to “comfort” him in his sufferings, not to “help” him, but to make him a martyr, a witness to Christ in his very sufferings.  A martyr is one who beholds “the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God”.  A martyr is one for whom God is not another – and the last – chance to stop the awful pain; God is his very life, and thus everything in his life comes to God, ascends to the fullness of Love.

Alexander Schmemann

We seem to give them back to thee, O God, who gavest them to us.  Yet as thou didst not lose them in giving, so do we not lose them by their return.  Not as the world giveth, givest thou, O Lover of souls.  What thou givest, thou takest not away, for what is thine is ours also if we are thine.  And life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon, and a horizon is nothing, save the limit of our sight.  Lift us up, strong Son of God, that we may see further; cleanse our eyes that we may see more clearly; draw us closer to thyself that we may know ourselves to be nearer to our loved ones who are with thee.  And while thou dost prepare a place for us, prepare us also for that happy place, that where thou are we may be also for evermore.

Attributed to Bede Jarrett