1st Sunday of Lent B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2006

One of the suggested formulas when applying the ashes on Ash Wednesday is one we rarely use, but this is the way it goes: Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return! People can hear that differently. The reaction of the ancient Epicureans was, Well, Let’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die!

What got me reflecting along these lines were the funerals in Mildura the week before last of those six young people. In some ways it was a bonanza for the media:  they were young; their deaths were tragic; and there were six of them. The reaction was not unlike that to the death of Princess Diana. The combination there was:tragedy, beauty, if not youth, and popularity. Or even to the death of Pope John Paul II. In his case, there was not tragedy but fame and a certain degree of the exotic, the esoteric. 

I wonder if, as time goes on, anything much will have been learnt from any of those events. In all of them there was a degree of the unreal, a lionising of those who died: they were the greatest, the popular ones, universally loved, etc. What is going on? Why do people need to make them the greatest, the most popular, the most loved? 

Perhaps one answer, among others, is: If we can as it were canonise them, since they are no real challenge to ourselves, then we’re OK. There’s nothing to learn, no need to change – just be sad.

From our faith view, what has happened? One of the Prefaces of the Masses for the Dead has a line that reads: For your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended. Life is not ended. There is a whole new adventure waiting, symbolised in the mysterious event of Jesus’ resurrection – whatever that means.

 If life has been changed, not ended, it will not be the first time for any of the six young people of life changing, but continuing.. Sixteen or so year ago, they moved from nine months of unconscious, comfortable, non-demanding life in the womb (Phase 1 of their lives) through the traumatic experience of being born to life as we know it  (Phase 2). We have all been through it. We couldn’t prepare for it, though our parents did: they gave us our DNA and a lot of other inherited and instilled traits that have influenced inexorably our present experience of living.

 For the next stage of the adventure (Phase 3), DNA won’t matter, inherited traits won’t matter. What will count is who we are, and the groundwork we have put in developing those aspects of our now lives that carry over into the next – basically our capacity to love (not the fall-in-love kind of love but the giving aspect, the serving kind), with its counterpart, the dying to self-interest, to self-centredness, to looking after “No.1”. What mattered for each of the six in Mildura who were in Phase 2 of life one moment and in a flash into Phase 3 was: Were they learning to love? Were they beginning to wake up to their inevitable self-centredness and the peer-group tyranny? Were they learning instead to think for themselves, to choose for themselves, and from there to reach out in love? Nothing else mattered: not intelligence, not sporting skill, not popularity.

 Death is the one absolute certainty; and if properly appreciated, it puts everything else in perspective. Especially it encourages us to get on with living, really living, being truly human, learning constantly to love. From this context, perhaps the alternative Ash Wednesday invitation is preferable: Turn away from sin, and believe the Good News!