Requiem Mass

My eldest daughter, Katie, came home to stay a while which is normally a time for celebration and gravy dinners, of laughter and shopping, of shared secrets and girlie stuff but not this time. She came home for some TLC because she had just said goodbye to her friend at a requiem mass. Her friend had been diagnosed as having leukaemia and three weeks later, she had died. This was a great shock to Katie, who like many of her generation have been brought up with hospital drama's in which almost everyone gets better, and even if they don't, death is managed and beautiful and everyone gets to say goodbye and make up their differences...but this experience of death was not afforded to Katie who carried guilt about the usual things surrounding death...did I do enough...did I visit enough...if only I had done this, that, the other...and to compound the matter, of all my children, Katie is the one who finds the harder side of life difficult to cope with.

As Katie shared her feelings about the service, even though she was upset, she was clearly able to articulate the difference between this funeral service in which most of those attending were Christians from the Roman tradition, and funerals in which those attending did not have any faith. It left her with a sense of hope as well as a sense that death definitely was not the end.

Yet Katie, a child of the Manse, would not describe herself as a committed Christian...not that she has deliberately chosen to rebel against any form of faith commitment. Again like a great many of her generation, faith is something that has just past her by...become an irrelevance...something that Mum does as a job.
I was struck by the great sense of responsibility that I, you, the rest of Christendom, carry in making faith relevant to the 20-somethings of this world. That is a heavy charge to answer if we fail to do so.