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| The Chapel at Campion Center |
It seems only appropriate that this should be short today. In those first months working at the retirement home I found myself around many good, holy, men who were close to their time to meet the Lord. Over the course of those first few months there were a good number of funerals in the cavernous expanse of the Chapel at Campion Center. Sometimes the Chapel would be filled with people, others it seemed empty but for a few family members and as a novice, it got me thinking.
There was a part of me that found those small funerals sad, and it seemed like the family and the Jesuits of that community who were present were bracing themselves against the crushing enormity of the empty space that they occupied. As I reflected on it more later though, I realized something... “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” The measure of our lives is not by what we have accomplished, or by how many people are gathered about our grave, its measured by our relationship with God. I knew some of those men with small funerals, and it wasn’t because they weren’t loved, it was just because they had lived longer than most people that they knew in life. Slowly the people, places, jobs, and things that they had had in their lives all turned to ash or dust. This is not, however, as sad as it seems to be. One of those Jesuits told me that he had seen so much of his life turn back into dust that he felt like he too was slowly going back to the one who had made him. He said “In the end all that I have ever really wanted was for there to be nothing left of me.” By this he didn’t mean that he wanted to drift into some sort of oblivion, but be finally consumed by the mystery of the God he had loved for all of those years. For him, ashes and dust weren’t just a sign of conversion, but of hope that he too would some day share in the resurrection. Maybe that’s how all of us should be thinking as we start this Lent.
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| The Jesuit Cemetery in Weston, MA. |
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