The priest is old.
Beyond retirement age, but still energetic, it appears.
And every time he preaches – every time I have heard him, at least, it always comes around to death.
It doesn’t matter what the Gospel or the feast is. Death – its reality, its inevitability, and what Jesus gives us in the face of death – works itself into the conversation. Stories are told about dying and dead people, about funerals.
I don’t mind. And I think about the drive, in contemporary American Christianity of all types, to emerge into relevance, to reach out by interacting with the newest of pop culture, to make it loud and driving and get the place rocking.
What place is there in all of that for a priest with white hair, wrinkles, a slight stoop and a tremulous voice, to talk about death?
Oh, how we do need to reach out, to evangelize, to reach people where they are, to bring in the young, the searching, to be alive to the whispers of the Spirit in the culture.
It clearly opens hearts to Christ.
But in the midst of the relevance, with the like-minded from my own demographic cohort, with those with extroverted and affective personalities, worshipping with someone who looks like us – or looks like who we would like to be – up front -
…what are we missing?
The homily begins and it sounds familiar. I smile a bit and we share a “here he goes again” moment in our pew.
So yes, an old priest muses about death again. A word suggests itself to me as I take a glimpse around me as he takes us down that road again, seeing all ages, from all places, squeezed into the pews, some restless, some bored, some content.
Relevant.
This is why I come around. I think I know who you are talking about, but even if I didn’t, the chills would still be there.
Awesome. Thanks.
John Updike, RIP.
Well, it’s the road we’re all headed down, like it or not.
What Matthew said.
When I grew up in a rural Parish, a circuit-rider priest said mass about every other week. He ALWAYS said the rite for the dead in the Eucharistic prayers, and mentioned several members of his family. If I think back for a moment, I can recall him praying, “my niece Susan, my father Clement, my mother Elizabeth.” Every time he said the mass.
I think some people were put off by that. But I remember as an 8-year-old thinking he must have really loved those people that he never doesn’t pray for them.
Two points, one serious one less so:
1. I am at the moment responding to a request in my parish to reflect on purgatory. When I get to talking about prayer for the dead, one thing I intend highlighting is the idea that the Mass, and in a way every Mass, is offered “for the living and the dead“.
2. “Demographic cohort” – oh, it’s so much cooler than “generation”!
it includes those who are not only my age, but who live as I do, as well.
nice