A well-known figure lost a young beloved son in an absurd accident: drove off the road into a river—perhaps a few drinks, perhaps too fast, perhaps asleep.Whatever. A pious neighbor bringing food to the wake said to him by way of comfort: “I do not understand the Will of God.”  At which all the suppressed anger and resentment hidden so carefully broke out, and the son’s father tore into the hapless woman: “Indeed you do not understand the Will of God! You think God arranges accidents and tragedies!?  Absurd Horrors!?  You think He is the Agent behind so much misery!?”

Is He?  Easily Asserted.  Easily Denied.  Most of us assume that in the end God is in charge of this world, everything somehow is in His dominion. And since His dominion is one of love, we can assume that love is the answer, even when that answer emerges with great difficulty from the ashes of disaster.

Primitives I knew and loved were docile to the world’s laws in the death of the old, the infirm. But the death of the young shattered them. Since poisoning was an aspect of earlier life-ways, the answer to sudden death was always the same: poison.  "Someone poisoned him." Even when it was obvious that this was not the case, the answer remained. It was easy to live with. “He could have died of pneumonia, you know?  Malaria.  Hepatitis.”  “No. He was poisoned.” It was an answer, however inadequate. And it worked.

Humankind is good at faith in a savior. Someone to bear our burdens, suffer our pain, share our cross. We are always on the make for a savior, an answer to our riddles. If you are Boston Irish, the memory of Yankee contempt in a past generation is not yet laid to rest. The Irish were scum to the Yankee. And treated as such. A generation or so ago. When I was a seminarian, no black could get in a seminary. Or Catholic college, for that matter. The SVD built a seminary and trained excellent black priests: the bishops, the pastors, the people would not have them. The first of them became a monk here, perhaps with a broken heart. Years ago, the Polish were so shabbily treated that a group left the Church and formed the schismatic Polish Catholic Church. The Germans, at the hands of the Irish bishops, were perilously close to the same. Would you choose of purpose and with intent to be Hispanic today, Mexican, Latin? We need someone to pick on. To crucify. We need someone to hang from a tree, as was the custom just a few years ago. The custom has an Irish name. "Lynch."  Do you know what it is like to have the finger on you, guilty and cursed?  We go on making saviors of anyone who will bear it and of those who will not. It is my generation which will live forever with the Jewish holocaust. Not to mention Stalin and his kind. Have you ever lived in a small town and known the vicious human tongue?

Which is what the Mass is for. Why do we go to Mass and what do we do there but put to death again the Savior God sent us. Mystically yes, but mystically does not mean not really. Who put Jesus to death? His history is eternal, abiding, goes on.

We put Him to death here and ask His forgiveness for it. And receive it. And so are wounds healed, sores closed, hurts assuaged. And more important: lessons learned. For it is in forgiving that we are healed. When we do not forgive we are doomed to do again what was done to us. What was done before. What we did. That we learn at long last the lesson so hard to learn.

And in the process discover Christ. For the mystery is that when we do another to death one way or other, as we did Christ, the one we do to death becomes Christ. Christ dies in the black, the Hispanic, the poor, and the plague-ridden. This is the horror and the glory. You lay the whip on another’s back and then discover whose back you whip.

We are all together in a mystery of life and death, of suffering and pain. Of glory in an eternal resurrection. That is what this Mass, every Mass, is about. This death, every death. This laying into the earth of One who will rise. —Who will rise.

Every once in a while the Heavens open and we see the Glory to come. Usually such moments come only at the price of enormous pain and sorrow.  Amen.