Homily for the Funeral Mass for Mary Elizabeth Reckers

The Funeral Mass for Mary Elizabeth Reckers

Dear brothers and sisters,

For many years I told people that all of my personality could be traced to the morning I found my father dead on the couch. However, with my Aunt Mary’s death, I have now realized that claim is - in fact - not entirely true. My father’s death, if you like, built the skeleton of my personality, but it was my Aunt Mary who gave flesh to these bones.

It was she, for instance, who first introduced me to The Hobbit and to the Lord of the Rings. These two books would come to share much of my own thinking because the author was able to express in his own words many of the thoughts my heart could not find the words to express.

In a letter he wrote in June of 1941 to his son, Michael, J.R.R. Tolkien said,

The link between father and son is not only of the perishable flesh; it must have something of aeternitas about it. There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet…”[1]

If this is true of fatherhood, it must also be true of motherhood, for the two are part of a whole. Whether that link between mother and son or daughter is of the natural flesh, or of choice and care, it must still have something of aeternitas to it. 

It is with these sentiments and desires that we bring Mary’s earthly remains here to the altar of God. Indeed, this desire is part of our reason to hope (cf. Lamentations 3:21). We entrust her remains to Almighty God trusting that Mary, who was baptized into the death and Resurrection of Christ Jesus, may be raised to life again on the Last Day, asking that she receive a place in the Father’s house in the kingdom of heaven (cf. Romans 6:3-4; John 14:2).

But when we speak of the Father’s House, when we speak of heaven, what is it that we mean? To what do we refer? How do we look at death and yet hope for life unending?

While the Christian certainly looks to the completion of the good we have begun in this life and to the conclusion of our as-yet unwritten stories, the fulfillment of our hopes is not to be found in “an unending succession of days in the calendar;” this is not what the Christian means by heaven or by eternity.[2]

Rather, by the term “heaven,” the Christian means something quite different than this life we now live and to which Mary has died. Rather, by the term heaven, the Christian means

…something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality… It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time — the before and after — no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy.[3]

It is this overwhelming joy that completes the good we have begun and finishes our unwritten stories and fulfills all of our hopes, for these were but a yearning and stretching for that joy for which we know we have been made.

When confronted with the mystery of death, the Christian can only respond

…with faith in God, with a gaze of firm hope founded on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. So, death opens to life, to eternal life, which is not an infinite duplicate of the present time, but something completely new. Faith tells us that the true immortality for which we hope is not an idea, a concept, but a relationship of full communion with the living God: it is resting in his hands, in his love, and becoming in him one with all the brothers and sisters that he has created and redeemed, with all Creation. Our hope, then, lies in the love of God that shines resplendent from the Cross of Christ who lets Jesus’ words to the good thief: “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43) resound in our heart. This is life in its fullness: life in God; a life of which we now have only a glimpse as one sees blue sky through fog.[4]

So it is that the mystery of death and of life are bound together in Christ. Heaven is the fulfillment of the promise that “the favors of the Lord are not exhausted, his mercies are not spent” (Lamentations 3:22).

The Christian need not fear death; rather, because “we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son,” the Christian can instead raise her eyes to Christ to see in them a look of tender love because she has already died and risen with him in the saving waters of Baptism (Romans 5:10; cf. Romans 6:3; I Peter 3:21). Let us, then, entrust our beloved Mary to the mercy of God, that he who prepared a place for her will receive her into his overwhelming joy unending. Amen.

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[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 45 to Michael Tolkien, 9 June 1941. In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Revised and Expanded Edition. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien, eds. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2023), 76.

[2] Pope Benedict XVI, Spe salvi, 12.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, 3 November 2012.

Homily - 3 August 2025 - The Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

 The Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)

Dear brothers and sisters,

Every Eucharistic celebration invites us to reflect on that which is most important: “the encounter with the risen Christ who transforms our lives and enlightens our affections, desires and thoughts.”[1] The readings from the Sacred Scriptures today invite us to continue this reflection in a particular way by remembering that God turns humanity “back to dust” (Psalm 90:3).

We have recently seen two people each go to Jesus and demand he intervene in a personal quarrel and each time Jesus redirects the complainer’s focus to what is essential (cf. Luke 10:40 and Luke12:13). Two Sundays ago, he redirected Martha to what he called “the better part”; today, he redirects the man away from greed and idolatry (cf. Luke 10:42; Luke 12:21).

Jesus responds today with a parable particularly apt for our own age, one about a rich man who demonstrates neither gratitude nor generosity and who focuses only on this life. “He talks about himself only, or rather about what he owns, about his things: his harvest, his provisions, his possessions, his soul. He talks about his plans and about how he can preserve what is his” (cf. Luke 12:19).[2] 

He is an ego-centrist. Each in their own way, the sacred readings today call us away from this mindset by directing our thoughts to death, something we especially do not like to think about today but from which none of us can escape.

Jesus speaks not of an earthly wealth, but of a heavenly one that will not pass away (cf. Luke 12:22). “Jesus does not say what this wealth is, just as he did not tell Martha what the good thing is that will not be taken away” from her (Lk 10:42).[3] What can we say, then, about this wealth?

The great Saint Augustine of Hippo reminds us that the New Testament cannot be understood without the Old, and that the Old Testament cannot be understood without the New. So it is that we can get a hint, maybe, of what this heavenly wealth, this better part, is.

Qoheloth – the preacher who in Latin is called Ecclesiastes - tells us in English that “all things are vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2)! The English word vanity was once more useful here, but – as often happens – the way we use the word today is different from how it was used in the past. It is used here to translate the Hebrew word hevel. It is tempting to translate hevel as “nothing,” but this does not quite get at the meaning of the phrase that all things are vanity.

Literally, hevel means “breath” or “vapor,” neither of which means nothing but both of which are ultimately ungraspable, which more closely approximates what Qoheleth is trying to say; he seems to be saying that all things are ultimately meaningless because nothing remains and all our efforts are futile and fleeting, but this was said by a man who did not know the Messiah Jesus Christ.

Because of this, some readers today accuse Qoheloth of being overly pessimistic because he focuses on the sadder reality of this life. In point of fact, he is not pessimistic, but directly realistic.

For twelve chapters, the preacher argues his [seemingly] pessimistic point. The passage we read today is only one of many arguments for it – that all our work dies with us, that “you can’t take it with you,” that whatever profit you make on earth does not follow you after death. He has even stronger arguments: the problem of evil and injustice, for instance, which infects every life and every age. All the preacher’s points are taken from simple observation of the world, observation of life “under the sun.” And despite progress in cleverness and information and science and technology and economics, “nothing is new under the sun” morally (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Science makes us smart and powerful but not happy or good. People are just as unhappy and wicked as they were in simpler and poorer ages, perhaps even more so. That data that the preacher assembles to make his case is massive, the argument is inescapable, and the conclusion is deeply depressing: the settled happiness and goodness we all desire is simply not attainable in this life.[4]

His insistence on the ungraspability of the meaning of life causes most moderns to avoid reading Qoheleth altogether. Instead, we should each ponder with him the meaning of life; we should struggle with the questions connected with it and search out the mind and heart of God.

If we strive after the answers to these questions with Qoheleth and wrestle with the seemingly contradictory answers we find, we will quickly learn that

Ecclesiastes is not an atheist. He speaks of God, but he tells us only what our observation of this world tells us: that God is a great mystery, that no one knows what he is up to or what will happen to us after death or even if there really is a life after death… Without divine revelation, without the divine initiative, without God coming down from his heaven into our earth, how can we know and how can we possibly climb the mountain to get there? We can’t. That’s the true pessismism that this book teaches us, and it’s a crucially necessary lesson. Religion is not a happy face; it’s realism, it’s the truth, the whole truth, including the bad news. Only then do we appreciate the good news.[5]

His searching and wrestling and pondering, his deep dives into what is most important, taught him that “prayer, life, is nothing other than a constant search for what is essential, what we really need, what enriches us before God.”[6] The true meaning of life is not to be found in the things of this world, however pleasing they may be, but in the one who created these pleasing things and who alone gives meaning to these passing realities.

Ultimately, Qoheleth knows this life has both meaning and purpose, but he cannot quite discover it. The Christian, too, knows this life has both meaning and purpose, but he knows it can only be found in Jesus Christ; the Christian knows the meaning and purpose of this life is to encounter Jesus Christ – risen from the dead – and to allow him to change our affections, desires, and thoughts until they become united to his own.

Here, though, we meet another important and unavoidable question:

What did Jesus leave the world that it didn’t have before? The world that the preacher describes – that is, the world full of evil and injustice and suffering and death and ignorance and failures, the world that in the end is just “vanity” – is the same today as it was before Jesus came. What did Jesus give us that we didn’t have before?

 

The answer is very, very simple. He gave us God. He put God, and union with God, into our hands. And when he did, what did our hands do with God? We killed him. We crucified him. And what did he do about that? He used that sin to save us from sin, and he used that death to save us from final death. Jesus’ Resurrection is the guarantee of our hope and our resurrection. That’s the incredible Good News of Easter, the Gospel; but we appreciate it only if we are honest enough to accept the bad news first: that without that, without God-for-us, without God coming to us, life is indeed vanity of vanities. Ecclesiastes is the truth and nothing but the truth – but not the whole truth, thank God.[7]

Amen.

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[1] Pope Leo XIV, Homily, 3 August 2025.

[2] Pierbattista Cardinal Pizzaballa, O.F.M., Meditation for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, 3 August 2025.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul: Reflections on the Mass Readings, Cycle C (Park Ridge, Illinois: Word on Fire, 2021), 517.

[5] Ibid., 518.

[6] Pierbattista Cardinal Pizzaballa, O.F.M., Ibid.

[7] Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul, ibid., 518-519.