drama queen turned dairy queen

the following are excerpts from the homily given by fr. aloysius cartagenas, the rector of the major seminary, who said mass yesterday, on the last day of the novena for lolo peping. it was such a beautiful sermon i wanted to share it with all of you.

the novena masses would end tonight, but your grief will not. your sadness and mourning as well as your " kamingaw" will continue.

and it should! when grief grows out of love, grief becomes an honorable emotion. it should be respected and savored, rather than feared, denied or rejected. it has often been said that the extent of the grief shows the extent of the loss.

the loss of a loved one in the person of a father and the loss of what had been a long and abiding fatherly presence leaves a void in the hearts of every member of your family, relatives, and friends.

Jesus had the same pain, the same grief, the same void when he learned about the death of lazarus, his dear friend. and he honored these deeply human feelings by shedding tears, and by comforting lazarus' sisters, martha and mary, with whom Jesus also had a beautiful friendship.

but this Jesus was not a friend only to lazarus, mary, and martha. he made us all his friends and offers himself to us as such. in today's gospel he calls himself the Good Shepherd. we are his sheep and he knows each one of us in our pain and in our grief. as a shepherd of a flock that feels deep loss, he is in our midst.

we therefore have to take comfort and consolation form the faith-convictions of the early christians, who believed that each time a chrisitan community loses a good and decent man, Jesus shares in their pain. we may ask why? st. paul gives the answer: "whether dead or alive, we belong to Christ... and nothing can ever separate us from His love."

i personally do not know manong peping, but given his age and having known that he had lived a long and fruitful life, i believe that he was already in the period of waiting or of expectation. he had been waiting to hear his name in the eternal rollcall. then one day he heard it. " you have lived a good life, you have finished the race and you have kept the faith, the hope and the love. come then."

i would like to believe that for manong peping, death was not a thief that took away his life against his will. death became an act of self-offering. "into your hands o Lord, i commend my spirit." unfortunately you did not hear him utter those words of freedom...but God did! God heard his self-offering and has received his spirit.

i think that in the final stages of our earthly life what would matter the most is to make our final leaving a free, loving and conscious act of self-surrender. death, whether by old age, accident or sickeness, is not meant to be a thief, but rather a divine invitation to eternity. death therefore is a friend who will accompany us into the loving embrace of the God we worship, serve and love.