I will look on God

Here is the text of the homily I prepared for the celebration of the funeral which took place in our parish church this morning: a moment to give thanks for the life of a woman of faith who has now discovered the fulfilment of a promise that was made in the waters of Baptism.

Funeral homily for Isabel Davis

A little more than two years ago, we were gathered here in this church along with the children of William and Isabel Davis to give thanks to God for the life of your father.  Today, we are here once again, this time to commend our beloved sister Isabel into the loving arms of our merciful Father.

Saint Paul once wrote to the early Christian community on the Greek island of Philippi, reminding them that our homeland is in heaven, and from heaven comes the saviour we are waiting for, the Lord Jesus Christ (Phil 3:20).  From the day we are baptized, we all become citizens of this homeland in heaven, and the rest of our earthly life is spent preparing for the day when we will finally be home.  Today, we celebrate in faith because having completed her earthly journey, the Lord Jesus Christ has come to take Isabel home.

This is a day of great rejoicing for her, and so it should also be for us, but there is a part of us, a human part that grieves today because the woman we have known in this parish community, the woman we have loved as a mother, a grandmother, a great-grandmother and a friend will no longer walk among us.  Instead, we must remember the happy times, when she joyfully shared her faith with us.  With the heart of a mother, she brought her children to the church and asked that you be christened with the waters of Baptism; with a mother’s tenderness, her deepest desire was to care for your needs: to gently hold you when as a child you may have faltered (Mt 5:5), to cradle you when you were unsure or even disillusioned and to do all in her power to comfort you (Mt 5:4), to seek always to demonstrate mercy and closeness to each of you (Mt 5:7) and to all those who ever came to her in search of quenching their own need.

Throughout her life, each of these experiences, each of the moments of joy she lived and each of the trials she may have endured molded Isabel in some way, gently but constantly transforming her into the person God knew her to be.  Throughout our lives too, Jesus transfigures these bodies of ours, creating out of them copies of his own glorious body (cf Phil 3:21).  This is not so much a matter of sculpting our physical bodies, but rather of shaping our souls so that day by day, we become more merciful, more meek, more tender hearted, more gentle in our dealings with ourselves and with each other.

At an earlier time in her life, Isabel traveled wide and far, sharing the gift of her art, sewing and ceramics with others, but in the last ten years of her life, Isabel lived a much more tranquil existence.  Living at Casselhome, she met others who shared her love for life, and who also shared a part of her faith journey.  There, like here, she was able to receive the Body of Christ in the Sacrament of Communion, food for her journey of faith.  Now that that journey is complete, the words once uttered by Job lie also on Isabel’s own lips: I know that my redeemer lives, and he, the Last, will take his stand on earth … he will set me close to him, and from my flesh, I will look on God (Job 19:25-26).  Having been taught by her, it is now up to us to continue the work of telling others the secret to our faith, for we all know that that our redeemer lives, and we know that on the last day, he will take his stand on earth.  When he comes, he will take us all to live with him, to the place where we too will look on God forever.