Pastor’s Desk

Dear Fellow Parishioners,

This past Wednesday, September 17th, my father died as a result of injuries from a fall in his home. He would have been 93 years old next month. This is sad, but not at all tragic in any sense of the word. When he was born in 1932, the life expectancy for men was 62 years, and even that declined during World War II. He outlived that by 30 years.

Death is both the most public and most private event of our lives, and in the lives of our loved ones. Not only is there “no way to get out of this life alive,” there is little way of getting out privately. Two generations ago, it was not at all unusual for small – and medium-sized newspapers to publish not only obituaries, but births, marriages, and (believe it or not) divorces. (Our Sonoma County newspapers did all of that in the past.) Death certificates are public records, and even the cause of death may not remain private.

Death and mourning are also the most personal and individual of experiences, dependent on circumstances as unique as the departed and their mourners. Members of a single family may experience the passing of the same loved one quite differently, and not always for obvious reasons. Some mourn quietly, behind doors. Others mourn loudly and emotionally, like the black-veiled widows ululating in Mediterranean streets. This has been so since before human language, and well since before the time of Christ. Suffering and death are marked in the liturgy of the Church, as last Monday we celebrated the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows, originally based on the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin. The women of Jerusalem wailed, while Mary’s grief, as her joys, were largely kept in her heart. Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus, even though he would soon raise Lazarus from the dead. In this life, death and life are not so much opposites, as that they coexist. Each of our lives is a continual and personal living out of the death-and-resurrection of the once and forever Death and Resurrection of Jesus, the Lord of Life.

Just as Jesus was fully human and fully divine, God can work powerfully on several levels simultaneously. Fear and confidence, mourning and consolation, human and divine, illness and health, death and life.

Jacqueline Kennedy, the late First Lady and no stranger to public grief, once said that while it could be silly about some things, the Catholic Church “understands death.” This is a powerful grace. Countless works of art and music have been generated under the Church’s auspices on the subject of death, an artistic and spiritual patrimony for the whole world. All this, and Heaven, too.

Blessings, Fr. Bill Donahue