Monday, November 18, 2013
Black Vestments, Suicide, and My Funeral
"Neglecting to face these realities and presuming the heavenly bliss of the faithful departed is a presumption that is rather lacking in charity in point of fact -- like presuming a sick family member is not so sick as to need care and tending and therefore going merrily along our way without regard for them or their current state."
- Shawn Tribe
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Excellent homily, Father.
ReplyDeleteIf I may make an additional suggestion: it would help to fight our culture's pervasive efforts to deny death if we would stop using words like "pass, passed and pass away" instead of "die, died, dying, dead and death." I get that "for those who have been faithful, life is not ended, merely changed." But almost without exception when we say "Dave has passed" we are trying to blunt the reality of "Dave is dead." We don't say "Jesus rose after passing away," we say "Jesus rose from the dead." To say that "one day we will all die" seems, to me, a whole lot more "reality" than "one day we will all pass away.
Just a thought. Your homily was excellent, even with all the references to variations of the word "pass."
Doesn't St. Paul employ a euphemism for death when he speaks of faithful Christians that have "gone to sleep"?
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