Remembering Sharon - funeral for a Hodgkin's disease victim - Column

I came across Kenneth A. Briggs's Holy Siege: The Year that Shook Catholic America (HarperSan Francisco) last year shortly after Christmas. Briggs was religion editor of the New York Times for eleven years. He is a Protestant, but singularly well-informed about the Catholic church in the United States, a church that seems to him to be a "ballet without a choreographer" these days. Holy Siege chronicles the American Catholic church from the fall of 1986 to the fall of 1987, the time of the last papal visit before the World Youth Day gathering last summer in Denver. Using a series of vignettes, Briggs focuses on events and issues that provoked passion, anguish, and endless discussion: Charles Curran's loss of the right to teach as a Catholic theologian; the crisis surrounding the Vatican investigation of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen and the church of Seattle; the struggles of women for full participation in the church's life and ministry; 584 pages of these and related issues. It was perfect brain candy for the clerical mind during the lazy days between Christmas and New Year's. But just as I had settled down to read Holy Siege the phone rang. "Did you hear that Sharon died?" a friend asked. And suddenly all those other issues seemed oddly remote.

Sharon, the sister of a friend and fellow priest, was twentyfive-years old and had just succumbed to Hodgkin's disease. I barely knew her really, having only met her briefly several times at social gatherings. But through the eyes of her brother, Ed, I had followed the progress of a three-year straggle--of chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants, of lost hair and beleaguered hope.

I made plans to attend the wake and funeral with another friend, a classmate of Ed' s. We drove in miserable weather to a little town in coal country, north of Scranton, Pennsylvania. We were two jaded New Yorkers trying unsuccessfully to follow directions such as, "bear right at the anchor at the center of town." It all looked like outskirts to us. The parish church was huge and beautiful in a way that Catholics of the last generation would instantly recognize. The marble, the stained glass, the statues, and murals were tributes to the immigrants who had built it and their children and grandchildren who proudly maintain it. The church was full for the funeral with many priests and religious women and more of "the faithful"--what a true and lovely name. Most of Ed's homily consisted of letters to him from Sharon. They were long letters, especially for a young woman who never knew a world before the telephone, and they were funny and full of concern for her parents and brothers and sisters. They were utterly unself-preoccupied; letters, in fact, of one of the faithful. At the end of the homily, Ed played a tape of a song that he had recently heard on the radio by a group called "Escape Club":

Don't be afraid, o my love

I'll be watching you from above

And I'd give all the world tonight,

To be with you.

'cuz I'm on your side, I still care.

I may have died but I've gone no where.

Just think of me and I'll be there.

Just think of me and I'll be there.

Ed spoke of the power of memory in our tradition. When the community gathers to remember the story of the Deathless Christ, the story becomes food and the memory gives life. And so when Sharon' s family and friends remember, we, with her, are swept up in the circle of invincible life. Perhaps the defining moment came after the homily. Sharon's parents presented the bread and wine, and their son and Sharon's brother swept them all into his embrace,juggling the cruets and ciborium in his hands. It was a palpable image of the manifold ways our tradition allows us to give and receive life.

You've probably been to a funeral much like it and that's just the point, isn't it? At times like this we are invincibly the faithful. We are at our best. We are most ourselves. In one of his sermons Paul Tillich tells the story of a witness at the Nuremberg war crime trials. He and some others had escaped from a concentration camp. For a time the only place they could find to live was in a Jewish cemetery. During this time he wrote poetry, and one of his poems was the description of a birth. In a grave nearby a young woman had given birth to a boy. The eighty-year-old grave digger assisted. When the newborn uttered his first cry the old man prayed, "Great God, has Thou finally sent the Messiah to us? For who else than the Messiah can be born in a grave?"

Standing beside the grave of a valiant young woman, we are at our best. We are ourselves, invincibly the faithful, the people born in a grave, looking unflinchingly into the face of absurdity. Simone de Beauvoir, in her memoir of the last days of Jean-Paul Sanre, describes a man preoccupied with stashed bottles of liquor and nubile companions--the man who made a career of thumbing his nose at the existential void. There' s something sad about that--and there' s something spectacular about Sharon and the community that gave her birth and supported her to the end.

At the Final Commendation we sang the "In Paradisum." These are ancient words written in a society in which 75 percent of those born died by age twenty-six--a society full of Sharons. The death of a young person is such a tragedy to us because of its relative rarity. Our ancestors stood at a graveside like Sharon' s far more often than we do and yet launched these words of hope into the void..

May the angels lead you into paradise;

the martyrs welcome you

and take you to the holy city,

the new and eternal Jerusalem.

May the choirs of angels welcome you

and lead you to the bosom of Abraham

and where Lazarus is poor no longer

may you find eternal rest.

The composer of the Final Commendation never heard of "Escape Club," but his or her point isn't too different. We may die, but we're not going anywhere. We are swept deeper into life with the angels and Abraham and Sarah and Lazarus no longer poor, swept deeper into life with the coal miners who threw their quarters into the building fund, with the community of the faithful, born in a grave. I have few illusions about small-town life. I know that plenty of coal miners slapped their quarters down on the counter of a bar as well as into the collection plate. But I also know that in that small town enough people came to the door of Sharon' s family with covered dishes to feed everyone at the funeral and then some. How often we get it wrong but how beautiful we are when we get it right. We, the faithful, the people born in a grave, with food enough for everybody.

After the funeral I got back to Briggs's book, but it had lost some of its appeal. I found the reason for my uneasiness in a poem by John Ciardi titled "Credibility."

Who could believe an ant in theory?

a giraffe in blueprint?

Ten thousand doctors of what's possible

could reason half the jungle out of being.

I speak of love, and something more,

to say we are the thing that proves itself

not against reason, but impossibly true,

and therefore to teach reason reason.

Briggs and I and most of us much of the time are "doctors of the impossible," of ecclesial theories and blueprints. We need to renew our membership in the community born in the grave, "the thing that proves itself not against reason, but impossibly true." It's not that I don't often feel that my vision of the church is under siege from a number of quarters. And I probably won't stop rolling my eyes at the latest inanity in the diocesan paper. But I want to think more about Sharon and her people and mine--the people born in a grave. I want always to hear the response of a woman at Sharon's wake to someone who said, "Such a tragedy; she had her whole life ahead of her." "She still does," the faithful woman answered, "she still does."

Terrence J. Moran, C. SS.R., teaches in the Theology and Religious Studies Department of Saint John's University and lives at Most Holy Redeemer Rectory, New York City.

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