Not very long ago, I accompanied a Jesuit priest who lives in my community to a funeral Mass at a nursing home operated by religious sisters.
I knew neither the deceased nor his family, and so I sat near the back of the chapel to be less conspicuous. The congregation was relatively small, half of them being the gray-habited sisters and residents of the home. The three generations of the deceased’s family sat in the front few pews and moved about as if in a daze. They didn’t manifest any strong emotions, perhaps because of shock or a sense of stoic propriety.
Strangely, judging from my own back-pew vantage point, I might have been the only one to cry during the Mass. It all seemed too familiar to me because, five years ago almost to the day, my father died after a short fight with cancer. Like the deceased’s family, I, too, did not cry at my father’s funeral Mass. The tears came later. Yet as I prayed at the funeral of a man I did not know, my father’s love was again made present to me.
Acts of love are eternal whether we remember them or not. They are not erased by a bad act or negligence. In some mystical way, love endures.
That man likely did not know his great-grandchildren very well, yet his loving fidelity to his wife and children became realized in his great-grandchildren, as it will in their great-grandchildren.
That is why I believe that my relationship with my father has grown after his death and why I continue to shed tears when I remember and pray for him. As I look back and recognize his acts of love toward me, he becomes even more present and real to me. And each act of love, no matter how simple, was a promise that he would always be with me.
Jesus communicated a promise of unconditional divine love to the Apostles when he told them that he would be with them “until the end of the age.” One way he remains with us is through the sacraments. Each Mass, I remember and participate in Jesus’s sacrificial act of love on my behalf. That love is totally and gratuitously gifted to me through his body and blood. That love even extends beyond the Mass through Eucharistic adoration, where I can bask in that love eternal. That divine love is experienced in the confessional where his boundless mercy heals me and strengthens me to try again. It is a love that cannot be won or earned; rather, it is a love that can only be accepted and shared. The Church, despite all its blemishes, is a living link to the heart of Jesus and the joy of his presence. This is why I am a Catholic.
After Mass, the father’s casket was processioned down the main aisle of the chapel toward the hearse. His family followed behind him, an eternal stream of love pouring out from his own heart.
Hellenbrand is a Jesuit novice of the Midwest Province of the Society of Jesus. He grew up in Waunakee, Wisconsin, with his six siblings. He has degrees from the University of Chicago and Notre Dame Law School. Hellenbrand normally lives at the Jesuit novitiate near St. Thomas More in St. Paul, but currently he is teaching at a Jesuit high school in Indianapolis. He enjoys playing basketball and pickleball, reading and cooking.
