Funeral for Alan Bauerschmidt (1927-2023)

Readings: Isaiah 61:1-3; Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 36-37; John 6:37-40

Death is a catastrophe.
It ends a world:
an irreplaceable and unique set 
of experiences and events.
In my father’s case, it has ended an experience 
of deprivation in the Great Depression;
of sacrifice and struggle in the Second World War;
of years of hard work at everything he put his hand to;
of thousands of books read;
of scores of jigsaw puzzles finished
and genealogical puzzles untangled;
of days tending blueberry bushes and Gerber daisies,
swimming laps in a pool and playing bocce,
watching the stock market 
and predicting an imminent crash;
of a lifetime of loving my mother, 
and then my brother and me,
and then six grandchildren.
All of those experiences 
are suddenly vanished from our world,
leaving behind a gaping void.
And so we mourn.

Oh, we can say lots of things—
true things—
that seem to suggest we should not mourn:
death is natural, a part of life;
everything happens for a reason;
the dead live on in our memories
and in our hearts;
death is the entrance into eternal life.
But all of this 
is just whistling past the graveyard.
None of these things we say,
true as they may be,
change the fact
that death is a catastrophe
that opens a void in our world.
And so we mourn.

Some people ask, “Was it sudden?”
To which I can only answer,
well, it took ninety-five years;
but, yes, it was sudden.
It was sudden because every human life
ought to last forever, 
yet for some reason does not,
and this is a catastrophic truth about our world.
Over 166,000 people die each day,
nearly two every second,
but that doesn’t make death less catastrophic.
It simply gives us some idea 
of the scale and scope of the catastrophe.
And so we mourn.

Pascal pointed out that our sense 
of the catastrophic character of our existence
is a sign that something has gone wrong.
We are, he says, fragile reeds that snap and break,
but we are also, when we are not distracting ourselves,
thinking reeds, aware of and outraged at our fragility.
Our sense that even ninety-five years are too few,
that even one death is too many,
points us to a truth:
we are made for something more,
we are meant for something greater.
Pascal writes, “For who thinks 
he is unhappy not to be king
other than a dispossessed king?” (Pensées S149)
Like royalty sent into exile,
we sense the wrongness of our state,
the height from which we have fallen,
the treasure that has been taken from us;
though, also like many a ruler sent into exile,
we know deep down
that we bear responsibility for our state.
For we human beings 
have turned from the source of our existence,
rejected the love that called us out of nothingness,
squandered our inheritance
and fallen into the catastrophic abyss of death.
And so we mourn.

But here is the funny thing about Christianity:
without denying our fallen state,
without ignoring the abyss into which we fall,
we believe that the love 

that called us out of nothingness,
has pursued us into that abyss;
we believe that the Word 

through whom all things were made
has taken flesh and dwelt among us
and entered even death’s exile,
to fill the void of nothingness
with the light of eternity.
We all fall into the catastrophic abyss of death,
but there, in the very heart of the catastrophe,
we find Jesus:
binding up the broken-hearted,
proclaiming liberty to those 

captive in death’s exile,
giving us garlands instead of ashes,
and the oil of gladness instead of mourning.
We find Jesus, 
from whom nothing can separate us:
neither death nor life, 
nor things present, 
nor things to come, 
nor height, 
nor depth.
We find Jesus, 
who loses nothing 
that his Father has given him,
but raises it up to eternal life.
And what the Father has given him is us:
he holds in his heart each of our lives,
in their irreplaceable uniqueness,
so that none of it is lost.
We mourn, because our loss is real.
But Jesus loses nothing;
Jesus loses no one.
The thinking reeds that snap and break
will be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.

Faith commits us to the truth of this reality,
though it is for now hidden from our sight;
faith turns us back 
to the love that has loved us into being
and plants us in the heart of Christ.
John and I are, by vocation if not disposition,
quite public about our faith;
it is sort of in our job descriptions.
Our father was not.
But he was nothing if not faithful—
the world’s most reliable man:
faithful to his family,
faithful to his labors,
faithful to his God.
He spoke to me once a few years ago
about how he imagined heaven:
it would be a place where he would find 
all those people he had lost
to death’s catastrophe:
family and friends,
all those people from whom 
the fabric of his life had been woven,
all those people whose lives 
were so meticulously documented
on his genealogical charts,
even those who had faded from his memory,
but whom God remembers.
I pray he will also find jigsaw puzzles
and Gerber daisies.
And I pray that he will find all of us,
loved and treasured 
in the heart of Christ.

Memorial Mass for Angela Christman (1958-2020)

Readings: Wisdom 3:1-9; 2 Corinthians 4:14-5:1; John 12:23-26

Angela was my friend and my colleague,
and I am not quite sure 
how to separate those things.
From the day we met in the Summer of 1994,
new faculty members at Loyola College,
our friendship grew within a matrix
of studying, teaching, and arguing about
the Catholic intellectual tradition: 
a tradition of inquiry we believed
to be liberating and lifegiving.
No one who ever worked with Angela,
whether in the Theology Department, 
the Honors Program,
the Catholic Studies Program,
or on the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee
could possibly doubt her fierce commitment 
to that tradition of inquiry.
But she was no less fierce 
in her commitment to her friends,
her care for her students,
and her love for her family.
To be her friend or student or family member
was to be invited into her passions.

Because Angela knew that “catholic”
means “according to the whole,”
she understood that one 
could not place arbitrary limits on what 
the Catholic intellectual tradition encompassed.
Her passions were truly catholic: 
art and music and literature ancient and modern,
thoughts of the intellect and crafts of the hand,
bees and butterflies and native plants.
All of these were for her part of her vocation
as one called to love God with both heart and mind.

Her love and concern for the natural world
stands out in particular,
and I can’t help but think that she approves
of Tom and Sidney and Cecilia’s choice
for today’s Gospel reading,
in which Jesus uses nature’s pattern of life and death
to speak of the call of the Christian: 
“unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,
it remains just a grain of wheat;
but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”
Angela, of course, would want to insure
that this was a non-GMO, native species of grain,
and that the ground to which it fell
would be free of chemical fertilizer.
She would also note how the natural world,
carefully and studiously observed,
can point us toward the mystery of God,
the mystery of faith, hope, and love
that death cannot defeat.
Angela believed that there is wisdom 
in the dying grain of wheat,
in all the rhythms and cycles of nature,
wisdom about life and death, 
about sorrow and sacrifice.

But Angela also believed 
that nature itself was not enough—
that the book of nature remained a volume
of obscure hieroglyphs dimly perceived
apart from the light shed by Jesus Christ 
and the grace and glory of his cross.
In Christ, the natural world 
that Angela loved so much
has a destiny beyond itself,
lifted beyond the rhythms and cycles 
of birth and death.
The natural world, 
no matter how studiously observed,
cannot free itself from death and decay.
But Angela had a better hope,
a hope “that the one who raised the Lord Jesus
will raise us also with Jesus.”

One of Angela’s great intellectual passions,
an expression of her catholic mind,
was to search for echoes of classical literature
in early Christian writings,
particularly in her beloved Ambrose of Milan.
So I think she will not disapprove
if I quote from Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon:
“Zeus, who sets mortals on the path to understanding, 
Zeus, who has established as a fixed law 
that ‘wisdom comes by suffering.’ 
But even as trouble, bringing memory of pain, 
drips over the mind in sleep, 
so wisdom comes to men, 
whether they want it or not. 
Harsh, it seems to me, is the grace of gods 
enthroned upon their august seats.”
Aeschylus, observing nature’s laws of birth and death,
recognized that wisdom is born of suffering,
a suffering and a wisdom given 
by the harsh grace of the gods,
who impart it to us indifferently, 
whether we want it or not.
 
The biblical book of Wisdom also speaks of suffering:
of the souls of the just being tried by God
like gold being refined in a furnace.
But these just ones are not being tried
by the harsh grace of the gods of Aeschylus,
but by the one who desires 
that we abide with him in love,
who has mercy on his holy ones
and cares for his elect.
Indeed, the wisdom of suffering is dispensed
not by deities enthroned upon their august seats,
but by a God who has made the cross his throne,
a God who has joined himself to our nature,
so that he might become the grain of wheat
that falls to the earth,
so that he might be ground 
into the bread that gives us life.
Aeschylus saw a truth—
that wisdom comes by suffering—
but only through faith can we see
that divine Wisdom itself 
has come to dwell among us
as one who suffers,
to suffer beside us and within us,
to save us and redeem us.

We know that Angela suffered.
We know she suffered physically,

as cancer consumed her body.
We know she suffered spiritually,
as she worried 
about how Tom and Sidney and Cecilia
would carry on without her,
as she felt herself torn
from the people and things she loved so much.
 
But we also know that in the midst of her suffering
she believed that the affliction of our present moment
is, as St. Paul writes, “producing for us 
an eternal weight of glory 
beyond all comparison.”
She believed that even as her earthy dwelling
was being destroyed,
she had in Jesus Christ,
“a dwelling not made with hands, 
eternal in heaven,”
a dwelling in which all that she loved in this life
would find a place, transfigured by divine glory.

The greatest wisdom 
is often expressed very simply.
In the early weeks of the pandemic shutdown,
a few days before Angela died, 
a group of Loyola colleagues 
gathered with her virtually via Zoom
to pray with her and to say our goodbyes.
Her very last words to us were simple words,
words of wisdom born of suffering, 
words of faith nourished by the bread of life,
words of hope that bears the eternal weight of glory,
words of love for her friends and her family:
“I will see you on the other side.”
A simple promise to which we can cling.
I am holding Angela to that promise.

But until that day when all the saints
are joined together in the eternal sabbath rest of God,
we say to Angela, farewell on your journey.
Farewell as you enter God’s eternity.
Farewell until we are reunited in that heavenly city
toward which we make our pilgrimage,
that city where at last 
we shall rest and see,
we shall see and love, 
we shall love and praise.

May God grant the gift of rest to our friend Angela,
and may God have mercy on us all.
 

Funeral Homily for Angela Christman

In his Confessions,
a text that Angela loved
and taught a generation of students to love,
St. Augustine tells two different stories about grief.
In the fourth book, he writes of being a young man,
years before his conversion to Christianity,
and losing a childhood friend to death.
He writes movingly of his grief
as he experienced it at the time:
“I boiled with anger, sighed, wept,
and was at my wit’s end.
I found no calmness,
no capacity for deliberation.
I carried my lacerated and bloody soul
when it was unwilling to be carried by me.
I found no place
where I could put it down” (4.6.12).
But as movingly as he evokes this youthful grief,
he also looks back on his earlier self
with a critical eye.
He sees in his grief
a kind of theatrical self-involvement
that the young can be prone to:
his younger self was genuinely suffering,
but was also somewhat impressed
by the depth of his own suffering.
His older self can also see,
looking back at his younger self,
the fatal human error
of investing ourselves too deeply
in our worldly loves:
he writes, “in these things
there is no point of rest:
they lack permanence” (4.10.15).
For, as Augustine tells us repeatedly,
our only rest is to rest in God.

Were this Augustine’s last word on grief
we might think that it is
somehow unchristian to mourn.
We might think it is
unchristian to love anyone so deeply
that their death would leave us
with a torn and bloody soul.

But this is not his last word on grief.
In book nine of his Confessions
he writes of the death of his mother, Monica,
shortly after his conversion to Christianity,
a conversion for which Monica
had persistently prayed with many tears.
And Augustine’s words describing his grief
are strikingly similar to the words he uses
is speaking of the death of his youthful friend:
“my soul was wounded,
and my life as it were torn to pieces,
since my life and hers
had become a single thing” (9.12.30).
But, he goes on to say,
“I was reproaching the softness of my feelings
and was holding back
the torrent of sadness” (9.12.31).
Recently converted,
a sort of adolescent in the Christian faith,
Augustine finds his own grief shameful,
a sign of the power that love for passing things
still holds over him.
So he tries to hide it, even from God.
But he realizes that in denying his grief
he is also denying his love for his mother.
She had wept for him;
could he not in turn weep for her?
He says to God, “Now I let flow the tears
which I had held back….
My heart rested upon them,
and it reclined upon them
because it was your ears that were there” (9.12.33).

We come here to weep at Angela’s grave,
confident that God hears our grief
and knows the love from which it comes,
praying that God will, in time,
heal the grief so that only the love remains.
We come to weep not because we doubt
that Angela has found her rest in God,
but because we remain behind,
still pilgrims on the restless journey
that Angela has finished.
We come to weep because we will miss
the sight of her face and the sound of her voice,
which made the journey just a little bit easier.
We do not grieve as those without hope,
for we believe, as Angela believed,
that Christ has defeated death.
Still, our souls feel lacerated and bloody,
our lives feel torn to pieces.
So we come to weep,
even as we look forward to the day
when we will join Angela—
our daughter, sister, wife, mother, and friend—
in that city of God where every tear
will be wiped away,
for “there we shall rest and see,
see and love, love and praise” (Civ. Dei 22.30).

Funeral Homily for Clayton A. Sweeney

Readings: Isaiah 25:6a, 7-9; Revelation 21:1-5a, 6b-7; Matthew 11:25-30

Clayton Sweeney was a busy man.
Of course, no one who raises six children gets much downtime,
even if he has a force of nature like Sally Dimond
to do a lot of the parental heavy-lifting.
But you can add to that his work as a lawyer, a corporate executive,
a board member, an adjunct law professor,
not to mention the almost full-time job
of being a sibling to his brother and six sisters,
and an uncle to literally scores of nieces and nephews,
for whom he was always a source
of willing and generous support.
Even in his so-called “retirement” at Lake Chautauqua –
his own version of Yeats’s Lake Isle of Innisfree,
where he sought the peace that “comes dropping slow/
dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings” –
even there his life was a flurry of activity:
serving on the boards of numerous non-profits,
singing in the choir at his beloved parish
of St. Isaac Jogues in Sherman,
hosting an endless stream of family and friends
and friends of friends in his home,
and keeping track of the exploits and misadventures
of his ten grandchildren.
All of this activity bore fruit in a long list
of noteworthy achievements
and significant contributions to his family, his church, and his community.
Clayton was a busy man in part
because he was an extraordinarily talented man
who was often called upon by groups and individuals for his expertise,
and, because he was also an extraordinarily generous man,
he rarely said “no.”

But now we have come to lay this busy man to rest.

When the early Christian theologian St. Augustine wrote,
“you have made us for yourself, O God,
and our heart is restless until it rests in you,”
he put his finger on something fundamental about being human:
we are made by God to live with God,
and God alone can quench our thirst for meaning and love.
No achievement, no honor, no paycheck or bonus
can still the restless seeking of our hearts,
but only the one who says, “Come to me,
all you who labor and are burdened,
and I will give you rest.”
For all his achievements and honors,
Clayton remained not just a busy man, but a restless man.

It does not diminish Clayton’s memory
to say that he was not perfect,
to say that in the restless journey of his life
he labored and was burdened,
for we know that we are saved by God’s mercy,
not by our own perfection.
So, for example, it was rumored that Clayton could be a bit stubborn
(a trait that he passed along to at least a few of his children),
and it could be quite terrifying to watch a Steelers game with him,
particularly if things were going badly.
But he also struggled with demons
more troubling and more difficult to face,
demons that were hardly unique to him,
but seem, in one guise or another, to afflict all of us
in our restless journey through this life.
In the almost thirty years that I knew Clayton,
it seems to me that his greatest burden,
his greatest source of unrest,
was the struggle to let those whom he loved
know just how deeply he loved them.
Again, this struggle is hardly unique to him;
all of us want so badly to let those whom we love
know how much we love them,
but often the words don’t come, or they come out wrong.
Even the best of us,
who busy ourselves with all we can do for others,
all we can give to those whom we love,
can still hold back ourselves,
perhaps afraid that the naked gift of ourselves
will not be enough to merit love in return.

When Clayton died I posted a picture of him on Facebook
from his seventieth birthday celebration,
surrounded by his ten grandchildren,
all engaged in various acts of mischief and misbehavior,
and Clayton looking as happy as I have ever seen him.
It garnered a number of comments,
but one in particular stood out to me:
“What a golden picture, and a foretaste. Eternal rest.”
It was a picture of a happy moment from the past,
but also, I think, a picture of what we now hope for Clayton.
On our restless journey through this life
we are sustained by the grace-filled glimpses we are granted
of what it must be like to rest in God.
For the seer John in the Book of Revelation
it was the image of a new heaven and a new earth
in which God would dwell with humanity.
For me, it is that golden picture,
which captures the busy man in a moment of rest,
surrounded by squirming grandchildren who, like God,
loved him not for anything he had done, but for who he was;
loved him not for anything he had achieved,
but simply because he was their Papa.
“Although you have hidden these things
from the wise and the learned
you have revealed them to little ones.”
Clayton was a busy man, a restless man, who achieved much,
but in the end I think that he, like all of us, wanted only this:
to love and be loved for who he was.
And he, like all of us, was burdened by the fear
that who he was would not be good enough.
But now he can lay that burden down; now he knows:
through the mercy of Christ, it is enough;
it was always enough.
Now he is surrounded, as in that golden picture,
by the love of God,
the love that will strip away from him
all that is fearful, all that is false,
and reveal him to himself as who he truly is:
Clayt, Dad, Papa, brother, uncle, friend,
beloved child of the living God.
The busy, restless man is now at rest.

It seems appropriate in this place to end with words
from another notable Catholic lawyer: St. Thomas More.
On the night before he was executed,
he wrote to his daughter Margaret
words that I believe Clayton even now is saying to us:
“Farewell, my dear child, and pray for me,
and I shall for you,
and for all your friends,
that we may merrily meet in heaven.”

Until then, Clayton, rest in peace.