November 17, 2003
Separation
It is life-threatening suddenly to be separated without notice by death from a child or a spouse or a friend. The finality polarizes us. The denial and grief leave us speechless. Our hearts stab us from within.
Our anger and guilt embarrass us. The “what if’s” and the “if only’s” blind our vision. Memory’s images swim in our minds, indelibly permanent. No amount of comfort can stem our devastation.
And then comes the time when our corporate celebration and offering of the life and death of one whom we love and remember can for a moment possibly turn us away from that pain and use its energy in another direction. It takes us below the surface of all that we allow to separate us from one another and reminds us perhaps like nothing else we do of how deeply connected we are.
This liturgy we celebrate at the death of a loved one, this Burial Office Mass, begins our healing by the joy of that membership in one another and in the certainty of St Paul’s great assurance that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rms 8.38f).