Richard Bollman, S.J.

GARY BRANDSTETTER

Mass of Christian Burial

February 13, 2010

How good to be here, isn’t it?

I have to say right off, from my own vantage point as pastor here,

that you Karen, and Will and Marisa,

you have brought Gary’s life to us these past several years

as a gift and a blessing.

I see that now in the completion of his story,

how we learn from it, and grow in our own courage really.

His courage has been catching, the same way his joy in life was catching.

You couldn’t miss it.

That’s why the room is crowded today: to honor him,

to support you who have loved him best,

and to come and give thanks for what we have all received.

That’s why people are here with fresh stories and gratitude and amazement.

He has had this kind of gathering spirit among people:

it was his way. Come in, come all.

And were you here last night? The room was alive with talk and reunion, tears and joy, and music. Dulcimer, piano, voice, guitar.

It’s like a lot of people just came with songs inside them,

songs of thanks and memory and consolation.

Were it not for the cold outside,

you’d have thought it was the Easter Vigil.

It had that kind of spirit.

It’s as if the next life were starting to show up.

All the length and breadth and depth of it.

We call them funeral celebrations, like you want to lift something up,

to turn it in the light, to take it home with you.

To say just how good it is. You want to taste the essence of a life.

In Gary’s case, I could only call that central gift

his inner delight in living. His exuberance for living.

His sense of work and play, his craft, skills, sense of humor.

Karen told me she was learning about it all through the evening,

events and stories given her from landscapers, and former seminary friends and parishioners, all the fellow travelers.

I suspect that this love of living feels close to everybody even today.

That’s the heart of what we believe,

that our funerals shall be moments of completion and life at its fulness.

So, to speak from the heart of faith, we are in the presence of a mystery.

You can’t explain it or get over it, you can’t ignore it,

Gary’s presence. That’s the way it comes across,

an exhuberence for life that is here and now present to us,

and it shows something of the presence of God that will not go away.

I caught something of this just barely a week ago visiting at hospice.

The room was crowded with people, cousins, in-laws, Gary’s sister Jeannie.

And nobody was awkward or worried over Gary,

they were all fully in comfortable to just be there in their own lives and grace.

By that time Gary’s needs were fewer and fewer,

but he was the center of how people felt and how they loved each other.

And it was that love flowing around the room

that was so tangible. I’m an outsider to the family,

but I found it easy to sit within it, and join the exchange

of pictures, memories, welcoming the therapy dog,

and though Gary couldn’t maybe see much of this, his eyes mostly closed,

he was involved and, I could only believe, happy to be so full of life

even as he was close to the last hours of it.

This is a sacred story I tell you: it is Christ at the heart of things,

the fulness of God, beyond what we can ask or imagine.

These are early glimpses for Karen and her family

of this new world where neither sun nor moon give light

but rather the power of our Maker shines and holds you directly.

These gifts have been forming in Gary, and his death reveals that life.

Everything is as it should be. It has all been gift.

Of course you’d want such a man to be around all the time,

who couldn’t understand his willingness

to do all that he could to choose life, very bravely,

and yet who wouldn’t want him also to be freed to go, finally liberated.

Freed to go where such an exuberance for living

could be finally and fully realized.

Stories circulate of his last conversations

about the sense of peace and completion he was finding,

and that he would talk about with a few close friends.

The loose ends, the questions and wonderings, were starting to close up

and get settled. There was little left to do by take a new step.

You don’t want to hang around when you have a sense

of the kind of glory that is waiting for you.

Seldom has any man’s death so assisted to me to trust my own

that shall some day come. We have to listen to this passing,

how it speaks to who we all are, together in the human story.

And this is only a part, a preliminary part, of who we all are.

This next life, what can it be but energy and love, abundant, timeless,

the many rooms of a new and powerful household,

different from the former places with their limitations.

Like a fresh breeze or a full blown wind across water,

something that brings you home to your true soul,

and your relationship with the God

whom you’ve loved and looked for all along.

I hope Gary’s feel for life will grow in you who were closest to him.

I hope that you will be lifted up by the big gift that a man’s death reveals.

You were closest in to the love he lived with you.

That kind of strength and presence has not gone away,

it has simply changed, become bigger and more lasting.

He will be alive now wherever you are alive, always in that treasure

of memory and inspiration, that dance and work and touch

that was uniquely his for each of you.

Thank you again for sharing him so widely and deeply.

And thanks to Gary for accepting life with such faithfulness.

And leave it to him to time his death in the last days before Lent.

It’s like some final refinement of his spirit and humor,

that we do this ceremony on the brink of Valentines’ Day,

and that the leftover food and wine

will last into Mardi Gras.

And in this next week we start a Lenten season

which can do what it was designed to do,

to call our own souls into the story of Jesus who shows up

in losses, in suffering, in friendship, in communion,

who never leaves his friends behind.

Our story, and Gary’s, are all a part of the big story

that is our shared and sacred history.

You will hear it more deeply, I think,

because of what we come to celebrate and appreciate today.

It is the paschal mystery itself,

being worked out in our own lives and bodies,

and in the Body of Christ present among us.