Easter 2020
Blessed are your eyes because they see,
and your ears because they hear.
Matthew 13:16
The Resurrection of Christ was God’s supreme and wholly marvelous work.
St. Augustine
Paul tells the Romans, “None of us lives to himself alone, and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.” (Romans 14:8) And, he reminded his listeners that theirs was “’the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.’ He is not the God of the dead but of the living, for to Him we are all alive.’”
Like priests for the past two-thousand years, I have been tasked with preparing the Rites of Christian Burial for my parents – to express Faith in the most difficult moments of a family’s life. Years before my father became ill, I knew how I would open the homily at his Mass of the Resurrection:
“I don’t remember when. I don’t remember where. I don’t remember to whom. But at some time, someplace I heard my father say to a friend ‘I will never be a friend to my children. I will always be their father.’ And, indeed, he was always our father.”
I remember our father’s reactions to my preaching at Masses of the Resurrection for his friends: “I don’t know where he gets all this Nature stuff. He sure doesn’t get it from his mother or me” and “I don’t know where he gets all this hugging. He didn’t get it from us.”
I still remember the first homily I ever gave at a funeral Mass. Dad’s sister died during my deacon year and, just minutes before I was scheduled to preach the mid-morning Sunday Mass, he called me with the news and requested I preside. It was mid-February and there had been a heavy snowstorm the night before. Walking past the West New York, New Jersey parish courtyard I noticed a single Easter lily plant surrounded by three or four inches of snow and in perfect full-bloom. Resurrection in the dead of winter.
Orchid plants are ubiquitous in South Florida - growing wild on old oak trees and royal and coconut palms; sold from vans or under tents along major roadways. There have been blooming orchid plants in my parents’ home for more than thirty years. Mrs. Flynn has often reflected that observing their beauty confirmed her faith in our Creator God and his love for us.
In the back yard at 7740 we have three magnificent testimonies on which to anchor our Faith in the Resurrection.
At Christmas 1976, my brother Michael presented Mom with a spindly little white flowering euphorbia – a cousin to the poinsettia - that she determined should be planted directly in front of the kitchen window – so that she would be reminded to pray for Michael whenever she saw it. As luck would have it, weeks later it snowed in Miami and that little would-be tree seemed to wither and die. But Mrs. Flynn would not allow it to be uprooted. By Christmas 1977 its seeds had given life to “The Michael Tree.” Each February we cut the bushes to knee-height and each Christmas they are more than six-feet tall and a magnificent white ball of tens of thousands of minuscule flowers that fill almost twenty square feet - testimony to our Faith in God’s goodness and the Resurrection.
The oak trees outside Mrs. Flynn’s bedroom testify to the Resurrection in two ways. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago, a tiny orchid plant attached to one of those stately giants. For most of each year it clings to a branch – appearing to all the world leafless and dead. Until Spring. When its dangling tendrils blossom with hundreds and hundreds of flowers. And we witness Resurrection.
Those same wizened oaks are also covered with tiny, finger-length ferns that appear to all the world to have died long ago. But let it rain just a little and suddenly those seemingly lifeless ferns burst into a magnificent emerald green. Not without reason we call them Resurrection Ferns.
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God” Gerard Manley Hopkins tells us. And, for those who dare to gaze on that grandeur with an open heart, the Resurrection makes its quiet appearance in the smallest of things.
I believe that those who are “with God… with the living God… with the immortal God… in God’s hands” are truly alive with us because I have experienced their presence in my life.
Outside of my family, Maryknoll Sister Carla Piette remains one of the most significant people of my life. Her death – attempting to help a former political prisoner in El Salvador – devastated me. Unless they truly deserved it, Carla famously had little regard for most priests, whom she often referred to as “Daddy Os.” Some months after her death and almost simultaneously, my television blew out and someone gave me an unexpected gift of several hundred dollars with the demand “You have to spend this on yourself. You can’t use it to help others.”
I spent a Sunday afternoon shopping for a new TV – one that I could afford with this surprise gift and one that fit within my sense of the Spirit of Poverty. I found a great deal – bigger than any TV I had ever had and eating up all but some small change of the gift from my benefactor. I remember standing in front of the cashier and counting out those twenty-dollar bills when, from behind me and to my right, Carla whispered in my ear “Now you’re not really going to spend all that money on yourself are you, Daddy O?”
I reclaimed the small pile of bills, begged the pardon of the cashier and went back to select a smaller, less expensive set that left me with change to buy food for one of the addicts I had been working with.
And YES! I did hear Carla calling me to be faithful to my values and reaffirming, as only she could, my Faith In The Resurrection.