The family of the first person from Dumbarton to die in the coronavirus pandemic have asked that we respect their privacy at this stressful time, and we are doing that. However, below, is the text of the homily given by Canon Gerry Conroy during the service at St Patrick’s Church on Wednesday morning to give comfort to his family. Because of the lockdown restrictions, only a handful of people were allowed to be present during the service, which was streamed live on the internet into 429 homes in Dumbarton and across the world, where people mourning prayed in their living rooms. The funeral took place later to Dumbarton Cemetery. A requiem service for a second Dumbarton person who was a victim of the virus, Catherine Sweeney, a home care worker from Silverton, will take place provisionally next Wednesday at 10am in St Patrick’s, where she too was a parishioner, when it will be again be screened live on the internet. Editor
By Canon Gerry Conroy, parish priest of St Patrick’s
If anyone should ever ask you what is certain in life and death, so certain that it can provide for us a firm rock on which to build while everything else around us fades and passes, the answer is ‘The love of Christ’. Science nature, all fall short, even a faith in God, is uncertain before the righteous anger of God at sin. Only Christ on the cross reveals to us the merciful love of God and gives us hope in the face of death and life.
‘Teilhard de Chardin, a theologian-scientist from the last century, said that he first became aware of his own mortality when, as a boy of three, he saw a lock of his newly cut hair fall into fire and burn up in a split second.’ At some point in our life we all come before something similar, something that makes us realise our own mortality, that life is not forever. We can find no reason for life’s existence, no reason for it to continue to exist, and yet we cry out for it not to come to an end because it is so sweet and we cannot bear the thought of it ending.
Is this why we believe in God? Is it because we need to make sense of what can seem senseless, we need to find a cause for all of life? We search for a meaning in everything, a purpose not only for why things exist, but for why things happen. We look to blame someone for the bad things and to bless someone for the good things. We can even understand some deaths; the death of an elderly person after a long happy life, the death of someone engaged in nefarious activities, but so much in life does not make sense, for so many deaths we can find no meaning no purpose. In the end life itself seems full of contradictions and confusions.
Why shouldn’t this insight into life simply lead us to despair of life, to see death as annihilation and its ending as a disaster; why shouldn’t we agree with the judgment on life of those who have summed it up in this way? We need life to make sense and yet all around us all we see is the contingency of life, the incompleteness and senselessness of life. There is something missing from life and without it we are reduced to simply living and settling unsatisfyingly for what we find on the surface. To seek for a soul in life only confirms that there is nothing there, nothing to give hope of anything that will satisfy our own souls.
And yet St Paul told us that we are a people of hope. He told us not to grieve like those who have no hope. We have faith that gives us hope and yet even as people of faith we experience the same things in life that others do. We experience the uncertainties and meaningless changes in life, its ups and downs, the inconveniences and annoyances, its joys and misfortunes, its bitterest sorrows. It is in all of this that St Paul reminds us we have a hope others do not have. But ours is not a hope we find in life, in its meaning or purpose, it is a hope that transcends these because it is not born here, it is not a hope that is proper to what is imperfect. Ours is an eternal hope that comes into this imperfect transient world to give it life, to give us life and we see it on the cross, with Christ dying there for us so that we might have life.
We need the presence of God, or we cease to exist. God walks with us continually, and our faith is simply coming to a greater awareness of this. Our brother walked with Christ in life and with Christ, life is eternal. That is our hope, that is the promise only Christ can give us. That is why he said to Thomas, ‘I am the way, the Truth and the Life’. There is no meaning to sense to life apart from Christ because apart from him all life fades into nothing, all life passes. Without him there is no soul to life because without him it cannot find its meaning; it can only find annihilation and disaster and frustration.
But we have hope. As long as we have Christ, we have hope that despite all the vagaries and disappointments and sorrows in life, all that we have known and loved and suffered is not empty of meaning or purpose, but will find a meaning and a purpose in Christ. This is our faith, this is our hope, this is what has been promised us.
As we commend our brother to Almighty God it is to that faith and that hope we cling. Before the cross of life there is nothing else, before the cross of Christ all is transformed into hope. So we pray with faith and hope that he will be at peace in the joy of the home that Christ had prepared for him. We pray too that as we continue standing before the cross of Christ, he will bring to our grief and emptiness, the hope of the resurrection and a comforting balm for our sorrow.