do I want closure?

 Homily

Funeral Mass for Julia Scott

Corpus Christi Parish in Lawrence, Kansas

29 December 2020

AMDG +JMJ +m

Closure.  It's a buzzword for the grieving process.  That a life has been received, celebrated, grieved and let go of.  It's a good goal.  I'm not sure it can always be achieved, or should be, on this side of heaven.

Seeking closure is a bit like seeking a complete healing from an illness.  Sometimes you get it, sometimes it's not God's holy and gracious will, no matter how hard you pray, how hard you fight.  So it is with closure.  Sometimes you get it.  Sometimes you are not supposed to.

The thing is with Julia, I'm not so sure I even want closure.  I wonder if you do.  I hope I'm not barking up the wrong tree here.  I pray this homily doesn't go terribly wrong.  Yet I don't think I'm ready for closure with Julia.  I want her life to remain an open question, and an unfinished mandate for us all.  I want to live differently not just today but always because I know her.  Such is also your mission in response to the gift of Julia's life, should you choose to accept it..

Julia certainly deserves for this instead to be her canonization Mass.  What a beautiful gift from God Julia Wagle Scott is.  Praise God for her!  You all know something about her that you love and that touched and changed you.  Hold onto that please!   Don't ever let it go.

For me, I loved the special combination of toughness and care that I saw played out.  A few times, I gave up on her living.  I admit it.  It was so hard to see her suffer.  I just wanted it to be over for her.  I didn't see a way. She outlived all my doubts by a long shot.   She is a fighter!

I was blessed to see her at several of her weakest moments.  I went in scared and helpless, not knowing what to say.  I'd leave 90 minutes later exhausted from the conversation, with her ready to talk more, with no idea how she was doing but feeling that I had been cared for by her.  I'm not built that way.  I will never care or love like that.  She fought so hard. She cared so much.  In the ends, saints are measured by heroic love, and she had that in abundance.  

Yet with all this goodness and blessing to celebrate, I'm still not ready for closure.

Julia wouldn't want us to pity her, or try to hold on to her.  I'm sure of that.  She would not want us to be stuck in our grief, or wallow in the feelings of despair and helplessness that surrounded her death.  She would want us to live our lives courageously with great faith, the faith she shared, and to fill any darkness, discouragement, fear or doubt that linger with hope and love!

Yet again for me there seems to be a mandate from her life that remains open not closed.  I like things being open, not closed.  It doesn't seem right to me to try to tie a bow on Julia's life today and ship her soul off to a safe place where no more evil or suffering can touch her.  It's a beautiful thought, and shame on me if I wish her any less than all that, which she richly deserves.

Yet I wonder if someone as tough and caring as Julia wouldn't mind keeping her heart dangerously wide open, out of love for us.  Simeon prophesied that in her vocation and mission, which is ongoing, Mary's heart would be ripped open, so that the thoughts of many hearts would be revealed.  Just so, we celebrate Julia's funeral Mass not in a safe bubble, but under the heartbreaking sign of the cross.

This for me is Julia's legacy, to not be afraid of a reality where heaven and earth are not sanitized and separated, but where the two are mixed in wonderful and terrible ways.  Julia's story, especially the latest chapters, is an invitation to fill our helplessness and lack of understanding with the sign of the cross, where love is made perfect precisely in suffering, and death is embraced, conquered and transformed into new life.  

This mandate from Jesus, to love as He has first loved us, is the invitation also from Julia not to meet one last time here at her funeral Mass, but to keep meeting here, for the rest of our lives, at the Eucharist, where we are like Christ ground into heavenly bread, and by drinking the cup of suffering that comes to each and all sooner rather than later, to be pruned and pressed into the choicest wine at this altar, where the marriage of heaven and earth is consummated.

This is the closure I want.  At the end of my life, and not before, can I say that I loved more and lived differently because I know Julia Wagle Scott?  Can I say that her suffering was not wasted on me?  I want to honor her not by closing out this question today at one final Mass, but by leaving it open.  I invite you to the same. Amen.