Is here anything we dread more than the horror of death?
The most frequent theme in movies is not romance, or love, or comedy, but death. Only thirteen films have won more than seven Oscars, and all but two of them have had at least three deaths. The top three: Ben Hur, Titanic, and Lord of the Rings I, were all about life and death and the struggles and suffering on the way.
Not unlike today’s Gospel: replete with the anger, mourning and horror of death:The agony of Martha: Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would never have died!
The sorrow of Jesus, who trembles and weeps at the grave of his friend
And the Horror of death: 4 days in the tomb...a stench
Is there anything we work to deny more than this?
Yet when this Cathedral was founded, death in downtown Worcester was impossible to deny. The average life expectancy was forty years and one in four babies died before reaching their first birthday. Indecent housing, cesspools running into the Blackstone canal, contaminated water, poverty, and hunger allowed diseases like typhus, typhoid, diphtheria, rickets,tuberculosis and scarlet fever to thrive.
One history tells the story of a woman who was born at home, along with eleven other children. Four of the babies died as infants at home, where they were waked in the front parlor and carried by their parents to the cemetery.
This intimacy with death and dying is reflected in the epitaphs on 19th century gravestones, like this one, found frequently throughout New England:
Remember friend, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I.
And as I am, so you shall be,
So prepare now, to follow me.
Used to be that everyone was waked at home, and almost everyone died at home. Now death is no longer an everyday event, whether for kids or for us old people. We often grow old in nursing homes, where the rigors of aging go unseen. Then we die in an ICU and are waked in a Funeral Home.
Now much of this is an improvement, but some of it is driven by a denial of death and a refusal to admit that this tongue now speaking to you will someday cease (I promise you!), and this body will be lowered into the ground with prayers and tears (lots and lots of tears, I hope!) and that just as surely as the bodies of my grandparents rest in the cemetery, so will I!
Yet we’re so afraid of death, and we spend so much time denying it!
We euphamize death like no other reality, suggesting that she has just passed away, crossed over, expired, gone to meet her maker, in a better place, at rest, denying that we have a perfectly good word in English which we studiously avoid: she’s dead.
We glorify youth and seek nothing more than to distance ourselves from “the ravages of age,” citing statistics about how much longer we will live than the last generation. But Willard Scott has never raised the age of the Smucker honorees and when, in not too many years, he joins their ranks, his segment on the Today Shows will end.
We console ourselves by billboards and journals, that heart disease has never been more treatable, chemotherapy more effective, or pharmaceuticals more available....but how many more years do any of them add? Ten? Five? Two? The end of the story is always the same, for Ponce de Leon never found it.
We memorialize, paying now by the column inch and the carved letter in stone, telling ourselves that we will be immortalized in the hearts and minds of generations yet unborn! But, as Emily Dickinson once reminded us: “After a hundred years -- no one knows the place;”
Yet despite all our efforts, the operative question is not if I’m going to stop breathing, but just when and how. For from the creation until today, not very many of us have made it out alive.
Christ
We’re so afraid! But in Christ, we need never be afraid, ever again! For he has defeated death definitively! It is Christ Jesus who said:
I am the resurrection and the life….
He who eats my body and drinks my blood will never really die...
Lazarus, come out! Untie him! Let him go free!
All this is an invitation to admit your deepest fears, to place them into God’s hands, and to never be afraid again. It is an invitation and to walk the next fourteen days to Easter with Christ, as we celebrate the holiest moments of the Church’s year.
An invitation to the next week at morning Mass, when the intrigue mounts and the forces of this world plot to kill the Christ, to have done with him!
An invitation to the Sunday of the Passion and the Palms, when, as in life, the victory is but a prelude to suffering, and sufferings are transformed into perfect joy.
An invitation to the Sacred Paschal Triduum, to the Mass of the Chrism and the oils and the Priesthood, to sitting with Jesus in the Upper Room, to walking with him on the road of sorrows, and to waiting at a tomb in the middle of the night.
I invite you to join me on this journey not just because ‘it’s good to go to Church,’ but because the most desperate parts of our hearts NEED to go to Church;
That profound sorrow you felt when you lowered that person whom you loved into the grave with tears falling on the dirt….you need to join it with the death of Christ!
That little, mourning, painful place behind your heart that never healed…that still aches exquisitely whenever you think of the loved one who died? ...you need to join your heart to the one pierced for our salvation.
All those fears and deaths and sins and pains...we need to join them to the Cross of Jesus, to cry with Mary, to suffer with the Christ, and to sing joyful songs at the empty tomb.
For his sorrows are our sorrows. And his victory is our victory. And these coming days are the meaning of our lives!
Monsignor James P. Moroney
Rector
