On Remembering A Loved One Who Passes Away

REMEMBERING MY BROTHER, OUR BROTHER ERNESTO!

It happened that one of the Twelve, Thomas was absent when Jesus came. The other disciples kept telling him: "We have seen the Lord!" His answer was, "Unless I probe the nail prints in his hands, unless I put my finger in the nail marks and my hand into his side, I will never believe."

Thomas’ skepticism in our resurrected Lord is all too human, and understandable. The idea and the reality of Christ’s risen life, and for that matter any life after death was simply strange and foreign to the thinking of Thomas. In the same manner, I figure, to all of us life after death, including the promised individual resurrection of our bodies during the End Times, is indeed a strange and foreign human thought. When our Mother passed away in Chicago, while I was still back in the Philippines, which is many miles away from Chicago I kind of had the feeling she simply had gone so far away like the far away Chicago. Then when our Father passed away in the Philippines, while I was already now in the US I again kind of had the feeling he simply also had gone so far away like the far away Philippine islands. And as an active lay minister in the Church I have attended many a wakes and funerals of people I did not really know, and who did not impress me to have really gone from us. Might be I should have stuck this mind-set inside me.

But it happened this time our brother Ernesto, my brother, died in very close proximity to me the last few days, and right around after I was just talking to him. And so, this time around, his death really and truly impacted me. Now I say he is really gone. And it is my reality check by world standard that the body we view here is lifeless.

Thus, like Thomas, and maybe like most of you here we could and might have the orientation what we are doing here is nothing more than a memorializing, albeit an emotional remembering of whatever we knew of Ernesto. And after tonight’s event, it could be, we would and might easily cast any memory and thought about him as an eventuality of the casualness of time and of human forgetfulness.

And yet, just like with our own Mother and Father, how we remember the good motherly and fatherly things our parents have done for us, or for me, the good things they have done for all their siblings and friends; likewise. we remember/I remember about Ernesto. Whereas, like everyone of us he had his many sins; but I testify, and the family and his siblings testify, by the grace of God, to a few of his deeds of love, expressions of love. Now, those instances, which demonstrated his acts of love – ie. his good deeds – can not and should not but equally impact on us, and particularly upon me, of the living soul that he was and will always be. Please mark two things here: number one, whereas indeed our body gets to stop, terminate its physical functioning ability, its dying fate; on the other hand our soul, which enabled him, (and enables us), to think, to like, and to love because it is not physical but is "spiritual" can not but continue to be, to exist. Consequently, and this is number two, we trust, we hope, we pray, and we believe that by the grace of God, his continued existence be in the appropriate realm where he also continues to express to love: ie. to love his God and us that he left behind. With this mind-set, let us avail ourselves of the assurance of such positive plight and destiny for him, and for all of us, when our own time shall have come, by the words of our Lord.

"I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, though he should die, will come to life; and whoever (... has this life) and believes in me WILL NEVER DIE. John 11:26

Then with respect to our persisting Thomasian skepticism or unbelief in the afterlife, and in the life after death, let us equally remember the other words of our Lord, "Blessed are those who have not seen, but have believed."

With our eyes, and with our finite minds we have no assurances about Ernesto’s fate, nor about our own when we die; but with faith, we believe and we pray Ernesto shall be with his ultimate union with God, like we believe we will be in our moment of death.