The Passover was Near
I will make with them a covenant of peace; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them, and I will multiply them, and put my sanctuary among them forever. My dwelling shall be with them; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Ezekiel 37:26-27
Now the Passover of the Jews was near, and many went up from the country to Jerusalem before Passover to purify themselves. They looked for Jesus and said to one another as they were in the temple area, “What do you think? That he will not come to the feast?” John 11:56
Piety
Spring and Fall: to a young child[i]
Márgarét, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Complete Poems: With Selected Prose
Study
Life leads to death. For us, that is inevitable. However, Spring is not when we want to consider death.
Today’s Gospel takes place right after Jesus raised Lazarus from the tomb where he had laid for four days. The irony of this story is found in the fact in a few short days, Jesus’ gift of life to Lazarus and the community leads to the events which result in his own death. We only get to the new life of Spring and the Resurrection through Good Friday and the Passion.
Action
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” [ii]
Kathleen Downes came into the world in January 1955 like every baby dependent upon others for everything. Kathleen charged into the world. She ignited the grandeur of God in others. Until she could no longer.
“It will flame out, like shining from shook foil…”
In a matter of a few shocking hours from Friday afternoon into the evening, the heart-light of beautiful Kathleen went out and with it, we lost a bright, energetic and lively soul: a mother, grandmother, sister, cousin, special education teacher, and friend to extinguished.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
From her family and house on Richmond Avenue to Our Lady of Pity Catholic Church and St. Roch’s Catholic School on Staten Island. From Liverpool, NY and back down to the city and Columbia University to Cornell University and Ithaca, NY, Kathleen gathered others to greatness.
We may never know what happened on that upstate NY highway. Her Passover was not near. It was here. Why did her car collide with another while merging? Why did she wander across the grassy median into the oncoming traffic? Why did she hit two other vehicles head-on? Why was the Life Flight helicopter that rushed her from Ithaca to a trauma center in Syracuse misnamed? Sorrows springs are the same. Sorrows summers are the same. Sorrows autumns are the same. Sorrows winters are the same.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
Kathy literally knit lives together. She also knit. She could take a ball of yarn and a few needles and turn the unending string of color into a blanket, a sweater, mittens or a hat. Her projects were many. Yet sometimes her projects waited when her garden called or vice versa. Provided there was not more dreaded late Spring snow.
Today, Rebecca, Jesse (and Danielle), and Michaela, her grandchildren and siblings and nieces and nephews and cousins and colleagues and students are all asking this question. It is Spring. The time for new life. It is not the time for this.
Kathleen was a “special” education teacher. Her teaching did not end at the door of the classroom where she offered her students the Promised Land of learning. She also taught by the way she lived, the places she traveled, the books she read and the books she encouraged others to read. Special is too easy a way to describe Kathleen and the three score years she trod and trod and trod on this marble. Now, she’s gone and the cloud of witnesses is getting too crowded.
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
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