1 November 2020
Almost every time I went back to Hatley, I’d try to make a trip to the cemetery.
The cemetery is right next to the church–St. Florians.
The church where I was baptized and where I made my first communion,
where I was confirmed and where I was ordained.
Every time you enter the church, you look past it to the cemetery.
Theoretically, you can’t enter the church without thinking about ultimate things.
I go there to visit my own grave.
It’s there, by the side of the access road.
My tombstone is there–it’s the same as my mother’s and father’s.
It’s big and black and it has our family name on it.
I have pictures of me standing there in front of my tombstone.
Is this just a Polish predilection for looking on the sad side of life? Maybe.
I often stand in the middle of that cemetery though and think all these people wanted
just about the same things out of life I do.
They wanted to love and be loved.
They wanted to be happy, to leave something behind.
They wanted to have a little fun.
And most of them, maybe all of them in their own way,
wanted to be faithful to the Lord.
One of the great sins or occasions of sin, I think,
is that we begin to think of ourselves as special, really unique.
It’s harder for us to realize that in fact, we’re not so different,
We have no greater power to love than anyone else.
We have no greater power to be grateful to God for our lives, than anyone else
We really are no different from any of the Saints we honor today.
Where they have gone, don’t we all hope to go?
What is so touching about the beatitudes,
is that Jesus covers the human emotions and experience that is common to us all.
What he claims is that it is our very ordinary, daily lives, that we come to holiness.
The saints had no greater power to love or to praise God, than anyone of us here.
They all knew and experienced the same emotions we all experience.
Where they have gone, we all hope to go.