It is not that death does not come too often in the average person’s life that we never get used to it.

Even people who frequently encounter death because of their profession, their ministry, their public service, do not get accustomed to it. Soldiers, for example.

Frequent contact with death may develop certain skills in dealing with it, but the skills do not hide the ultimate mystery of it.

For birth and death are perhaps, indeed undoubtedly, the most profound of human experiences. And there is no getting used to them.

We come and we go. Where did we come from? Where are we going? The sort of questions children ask. And everyone with children knows that they can be profound, deep, upsetting.

Hence, being a Christian, being a person of faith, enables us to answer the child, to respond to a sudden encounter, or an anticipated joy, the ultimate.

We come from God and we go to God.

It’s as simple as that. And as beautiful. As profound. It is not only the usual answer. It is the answer.

And to enter into that answer in faith is not to escape reality, but to enter into it, plunge into it.

It is the perfect instance in which the truth makes us free. The freedom of the children of God.

No one ever said that we have answers to all the questions. But the answer to the final question we do indeed have. So there need be no nod to familiar custom: to offer flowers, kind words, a moment of silence. We offer prayer. And the most significant of prayers: that of Jesus Himself on an altar of sacrifice, to accompany our brother, our kin, our friend, into the realms of eternity and God’s eternal love.

God grant Jack Beam Ritchie eternal life. May perpetual light shine upon him.  Amen.
 

1. Jack Beam Ritchie was the brother of Joe Ritchie, who is personnel manager and supervisor of the Abbey’s lay workers.