Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do. (Pope St. John XXIII)

Saturday Morning: The baptism of three wonderful, beautiful children.
Saturday Afternoon: The wedding of a happy and holy young man and young woman.
Wednesday afternoon: The anointing and prayers for the preparation of death for an elderly gentleman.
Wednesday Evening: The anointing blessing of a young woman whose child died in utero and prayers of blessing for the child.

Life and death are part of the normal pattern of life. Although we often don’t dwell too much on the latter and in truth most people don’t want to think too much about death even with the reality that it will come to us all. Our faith tells us death is part of life and in death we enter eternal life. As you can see above life and death flow through the daily ministry of our parish communities with the blessing of God entering into the joy and sorrows, the excitement and heartbreak of families.
Thankfully my weeks aren’t always filled with these great highs and lows of joy and sorrow but they do occur in all families and in all places. Of course, with the coming of All Souls Day, we will be talking more and more about death as we remember those relatives and friends who have gone before us. It will bring up a variety of emotions. Some may be the tears the family of the older gentleman shed as we blessed him and prayed that he would be gathered into the arms of Jesus. These tears were of the many memories of love, the actions and details of life recalled with blessing. They were tears of remembrance and presence recalling the moments of grace that are shared in life. And for others they may be the tears of this young woman and her family where the heartbreak of dreams that wretch at our hearts. Where the hopes seem to be filled with the black emptiness swallowing our cries that feel empty and without resolution.
With all this said, this is where family life and the blessing of love comes into and helps to heal the brokenness and hurts of life. It is the baptism and weddings, the birthdays and holidays, the normal weekday routines and the dinner table conversations that inform the holiness of life and allow us to move through suffering and sadness, not forgetting or masking them, but proportioning them into the greater picture God has painted us into. It is where laughter breaks into tears. I remember coming home after my father had died and with my brothers and cousins sitting around having a drink, one of my brothers remarked, “Well, dad knows about the ewe now.” It was an inside joke, several years earlier, one morning one of the ewes had broken out of the pasture and we had the brilliant idea of scaring her back in by shooting at her. This made much more sense than chasing her. Well, we missed her by at least ten feet. She jumped up, turned and ran for the pasture and fell over dead. We assumed from a heart attack. Never had the courage to tell dad…but now he knows. We all laughed, fell silent and healed a little bit from that silly shared story.
“This is what the LORD says: “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”” (Jeremiah 31:15) I cannot fathom what this young mother feels but I do know that as we prayed together that night and then again blessed the body of her child the next day that she was surround by a family of love. And that is the first step of healing because she is loved…and that love is founded in God. It is also true for the family of the elderly man, they wept as they surrounded him with love as he moved into the eternal life of love.
Both of these families will hold the blessing of All Souls Day a little closer and a little more painfully this year but they will also be healed by our prayers as a Church, as the Body of Christ.
God bless
Fr. Mark