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.
[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.
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