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Sr Joel Christoph OP |
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Funeral Reflection ~ March 2, 2009 ~ By Sr Gemma Doll OP We have just been fed with selections from the Word of God chosen for us by Joel with great attention – as she did everything. What is the Word of God telling us? The first reading from Ecclesiastes places us firmly on Earth – amidst the cycles of sunsets and dawns, howling wind pushing tumble weeds north only to change and push them back south.
For Joel every season was cherished and celebrated for its unique revelation of God. For us, too, the Word of God is calling us beyond being merely a fair-weather disciple, but to BELIEVE we are all part of a bigger story. The story of our lives in NOT about us – but is one small, but ever so important paragraph in the BIG STORY of building the Reign of God. Our stream flows into the sea, the sea is not fuller. We build from the shoulders of the giants who have gone before us and prepare the ground for those coming after us. Round and round the mystery surpasses our awareness of God's GREAT WORK when all the time we think we are in control, achieving untold results, or doubting any good and that our lives have been useless.
Along the sides of the house in Lenexa was a picket fence with a gate. I imagined Joel swinging on the gate – outside was the excitement of neighborhood children and games, but inside was the haven of a mother’s heart and hearth with comfortable smells and rich conversation.
Throughout her life Joel swung on a spiritual gate – passing through the chaos of ministry anxieties and cancer treatments and swinging back to the comfort of friends and family and the life-giving solitude she found in nature. As she swung on the gate, her body seemed more and more bent over, weak and in pain. Yet the real Joel was standing up straight, praising God with full joy. Just days before she died she wrote to her spiritual companions "I will lose myself in the great sea that is God .... I am dancing.... I will be present in spirit and oh so happy" I imagine Joel just beyond that gate – a gate that is not a real boundary – but thin boards and find her spirit readily passing to this side. Just yesterday as the crocuses displayed their full-blossom assurance of new life, Joel was there delighting in the Beauty, in the GREAT STORY of the Risen Christ.
As we partake of the Eucharist, the gate becomes even more transparent as we become one with all our Beloved Dead in the Body of the Living Christ.
In the second reading, the prayer of St. Paul begs God to ground us, root us in the love of Christ – to look with God’s eyes lovingly on ourselves, humbly admitting our inner tensions, the paradoxes, the ambiguities, our sin. And to breathe in the love of Christ into our innermost being, and to breathe out the love of Christ for all that is. This kind of love causes us to become friends of Jesus, to live like Jesus, to toss away any hankering for self-preservation and give our lives away at the service of LIFE. We are drawn into God and impelled out – both inspiration and expiration. As Don Goergen is fond of saying- to have only one is sure death. Just try only breathing in and never expiring!
This kind of love – to be filled with the utter fullness of God – is to be like our Holy Father St. Dominic – he laughed, sang and told stories all day (known as the Joyful Friar). But he wept and groaned loudly all night – feeling the terror and tragedy of sinners. Like Dominic and like Joel, we too pray to be touched, to know God’s joy which bears all the sorrows of the world. God’s joy is bigger than this present moment. Truly living in the fullness of God, we find the freedom to give our lives away, to be sent, to die – believing in NEW LIFE. |
