Would I bet my life on it?

32nd Sunday C 2019 11/10/19 2Mac7, 2Thes2,Lk20:27-38 J Mayzik Sj

This week is the 15th anniversary of my father’s passing from this world into the next. As I looked at the date on the calendar, I remembered a conversation I had with him shortly before he died.  My father called me on the phone. I was sitting in my easy chair in my room, and the television was on, but muted. He was describing something he had seen—-his bedroom on a bus, the bus on a river, and my mother laying there beside him in bed, silent to his questions.

What kind of a dream was that, I asked.

I don't know, he said, and I'm not so sure it was a dream, he said. I kept talking to your mother, but she wouldn't answer, he said. Maybe that's what the dead do, he said.

I listened to my father, frail voice on the telephone, and wondered what veil had been pulled aside for him to see into his future, the bus ride down the river and the end of his time. His kidneys were failing, and we didn't know how much longer he would be with us. 

My father, who never much believed in anything, dreaming about a room beyond life.

I wasn’t with him when he died, but I have often wondered what was going through his mind in the moments before.  Did he believe he would see my mother? His parents, his sisters? Or did he just go gently into the hopeless darkness: the end, period.

I met up with an old friend the other day. I haven’t seen her in 30 years. It’s amazing how others age so poorly--compared to oneself, isn’t it? 

But as I talked with her, her eyes lit up and the years fell away. She was newly in love!

Tell me all about it, I urged her.  It was great to see, great to hear her go on and on about this new beau in her life. When you see something being born, come from no where into life, it is very beautiful, very cool.

It was a long listen for me—we took a walk all the way over to the Hudson River under the November moon, and she could talk about little else but him. But finally, even she was exhausted by the subject, and out of the blue came a question to me: she asked me why I became a priest.

It’s a question I've been asked many times before, and the answer is complicated and can be lengthy because the truth of the matter is that it was a struggle to choose the road I am on and remains so even now, and it has a lot to do with... well, just about everything, about life and death and everything in between and beyond. 

But when people ask me about why I became a priest, I don't tell them about everything, because first of all that would take a long time and most people ask when there's only a minute or two to answer; and secondly, they're usually asking me about it because they have their own questions to which they are seeking an answer.

And so my reply to my old friend the other night was brief, I don't even much remember what I said. And she responded that even though he didn't believe in God, she respected me and anyone who would make such a choice in his life.

"No God?", I said, as we walked beside a stretch of river that glistened in the moonlight.

"No, I don't believe so, and he doesn't believe in God either" she shrugged, referring to her new love. She smiled apologetically.

"What happens when you die?", I asked.

"Nothing, as far as I can see," she replied matter of factly.

"And that doesn't bother you?" I asked, and she shook her head no. But I didn't believe her— because for a moment, just a few seconds, I saw something else in her eyes, a glimmer of hope, perhaps, or a small desire held together with the tiniest of strings. And I knew about the tragedies she had endured but never revealed to me: both of her brothers had been killed: one in a car crash, one of an overdose. But she didn't crack with me, and so we went back to an easier conversation about men, and the ways to win them over. But her words and thoughts stayed with me.

Early the next morning, I walked alone out into the rising light of the autumn morning. The sky was golden and a kind of reddish purple, and fading blue.

I walked slowly down 1st Avenue, smelling the freshly-baked bagels from Tal’s, watching burly men unload boxes of vegetables at D’Agostino’s.

I tried to imagine a world without any hope of God. It was not the first time I had ever considered it.  It's always lurking back there, the dark side of faith, which makes faith possible at all. In the face of nothing—no direct evidence, no voices in the night, no message written across the sky, no angels heralding with trumpets—in the face of nothing but an intuition and a hunch and the testimony of so many who have gone before us, you take the leap of faith that someone, something, some force, some love has made it all happen and continues to do so, and will do so beyond this moment and this life.

Would I bet my life on it? Maybe, and at least in some ways I have bet my life on it, already. Although maybe not all that much.

That's the story of today's first reading, the edited version of Maccabees that we heard today. What we heard is actually much less dramatic than what's in the Bible. 175 years before Jesus' birth. King Antiochus IV was determined to get rid of the Jews—and he had them executed for any practice of their faith, including fasting from pork. So in this story he orders a mother and her seven sons to eat some pork chops, which they refuse to do. Antiochus commands that they be put to death, slowly, agonizingly, in ways that will amuse his buddies. Each one is made to suffer terribly. Tongues are cut out, hands and feet cut off, heads scalped, limbs mangled, bodies fried in pans and cauldrons. All seven sons die, each accepting his slaughter with the hope of life beyond death. And then the final sentence of the story, surprisingly simple, so moving in its simplicity: "Last of all, the mother died, after her sons."

That kind of faith, martyrdom for the sake of a pork chop—I don't think I believe that much. I'm not sure I'd bet that much of my life on it, on something so unbelievably hopeful, or ridiculously foolish, depending on your point of view. I'm not sure if my belief is nearly as strong as theirs—especially in my confidence about what is yet to come.

I don't know about you, but I've never yet personally met anyone who has come back from the dead. And the struggle for that kind of hope gets harder as you get older, gets tougher as you get more cynical, becomes nearly impossible if you suffer personal tragedy that seems to make no sense.

Like losing your brothers to crashing cars and crushing drugs.

How much harder it would be in those circumstances to believe in the existence of love in this world or in a world hereafter.

The gospel presents Jesus with a bunch of such cynics who are determined to take the hope out of Jesus' message. They don't believe in life after death, and so they pose a trick question to Jesus about the fate of multiple marriage partners in heaven. He shows them to be the children that they are, and ultimately answers them by putting his own life on the line, another mother's son put up for torture, while his mother watched him die.

Watch me, he said, just watch what happens to me, and then make your choice.

As I walked beneath a tree-lined path in Thompson’s Park, a sudden gust of wind game up and shook the boughs and branches above my head. A shower of golden and fiery-red leaves rained down, all around me, and I stopped.

It was beautiful, breathtaking, like someone shook the stars out of heaven to rain upon my life.

I picked one of the leaves up off the ground. It was orange and yellow and a little red, and all the green that had been hiding these beautiful shades was gone. And soon, these leaves would turn brown, all their glory vacated, and the husks of their bodies would rot and crumble and turn to dust.

And I thought to myself, what heaven takes this life, where goes the green of the maple and the silver gray of the olive leaf? For all the living blades of grass that die, and all the lower creatures who live and eat and reproduce and play amongst them, what place gives them home when death strikes them brown?

And what of us? It is in the autumn that death appears to gain the upper hand, and life seems to lose the earthly battle.

But brown and black is never permanent, and the wind blows and the sun warms and what was dead raises its little head up in defiance of the darkness. In the midst of unbelievable sadness and loss, a new love is born, and you can see it all afire in the eyes of the lover.

And the source of all love and all life, before, during and after— is in the bosom of God, in the heart of all things. How do I know this? I can't really tell you. I depend on it, I hope for it, I believe in it, and deep down, I know it.