A Homily for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost

+ One can only imagine the grief of the widow of Naim that is placed before us in the Gospel of this Holy Mass. Her only son was dead. This was not only a profound personal loss of which only a mother can begin to know the full impact, it was also—given that she had also lost her husband—the beginning of a grave social and economic crisis for her. There was no one left in the world to care for her and to provide for her. Her times did not have any form of social security. The Government would not be coming to her aid. The angst of her maternal grief was mixed with a profound fear for her own future survival.

We can find ourselves plunged into grief without warning. At one moment all is well and life continues apace and then, in an instant, tragedy intervenes in one guise or another and everything ends. In an instant life stands still. Nothing will ever be the same again. The impact of this is profound. It disturbs all that we had assumed hitherto. Our hopes and plans for the future are put into question. If we are not very careful they can be derailed. We ourselves may even collapse under the impact of the shock and the unforeseen burdens grief imposes.

This is most certainly true of the sudden and unexpected death of a loved-one—a devastation for which very little can ever prepare us. So too, other ‘deaths’ can render us grief-stricken, most particularly the unforeseen wounding or even ending of relationships built up on trust and love over time and seriously injured or even murdered by the successful seduction of one party or another by the Prince of Lies and his panoply of false promises. If we are not vigilant, the grief that ensues can also kill our own capacity to love and to trust and plunge us into that default position of suspicion and fear in and through which the devil and all his empty promises thrive without challenge.

It may also be said (on this annual weekend of the Journées du Patrimoine when it is our pleasure to open the monastery buildings and to welcome the public) that a building may be grief-stricken. Indeed, one does not have to travel very far in continental Europe or the British Isles to encounter the stone ruins of the high ideals of Christendom lived radically and fruitfully, destroyed by ideologues and potentates of different centuries and standing now as a cold reminder of fervent love and humble trust violated and despoiled.

This very monastic church was one such example—transformed into a dormitory for farm workers following the French Revolution, with a kitchen built into the apse where the Altar of God once stood! One can only begin to imagine the grief of those who laboured to sculpt these stones and to place them in perfect Romanesque harmony several centuries earlier, let alone the grief of those saints and sinners, those Benedictine monks and Augustinian friars, the Knights Templar and the Knights of Malta and the pilgrims who passed by, who prayed and worked here in filial trust and love.

Yet, in God’s Providence, the death and indeed the destruction of this place of worship at the Revolution was not the end. The grief of these stones may have endured for more than two centuries and they may have witnessed events and happenings for which this edifice was never built, but in God’s mercy and through His inscrutable Providence they have been restored to life—their beauty once again sings the praises of Almighty God in perfect harmony with the worship of Him for which this church was built over a thousand years ago. As in the Gospel of this Holy Mass, the Lord saw and took pity on the long, silent grief of this building and has given it new life.

So too the Lord sees our grief. He mourns the many “invisible deaths”—as St Augustine describes them at matins this morning—that occur when sin occludes and even succeeds to expel all that is true, beautiful and good in a relationship. He hears the bitter sighs that arise in the depths of our hearts that give voice to that unattended pain arising from the void that should never have been created. And He responds to each of us: “Do not weep.”

For grief is not that which God became man in Jesus Christ came to bring. He came to bring life—new and everlasting life in which “he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4) Through Baptism we share in this life here on earth; through the Blessed Eucharist we have the consolation of a foretaste of is glory—even as we must daily persevere in what the Salve Regina rightly describes as this “valley of tears”.

My brothers and sisters, the Holy Gospel teaches us that in Jesus Christ a great prophet has arisen and that in Him God has visited His people. If we persevere in faith in Him and are faithful to the teachings of the One, True Church He founded, be we invisibly dead due to sin, or be we facing physical death due to illness or old age, or indeed be we grief-stricken because of the death of a loved one, or even of love itself, our Lord insists: “Do not weep.” If we place our faith and trust in Him, that which is dead can and shall be raised to life once again—a reality which we both celebrate and from which we are nourished in this and every offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. +