Remembering Sharon
Moran, Terrence J.
REMEMBERING SHARON A PEOPLE BORN IN THE GRAVE REPORT FROM SCRANTON I came across Kenneth A. Briggs's Holy Siege: The Year that Shook Catholic America (HarperSan Francisco) last year shortly...
...I want always to hear the response of a woman at Sharon's wake to someone who said, "Such a tragedy...
...TERRENCE J. MORAN Terrence J. Moran, C. 55...
...The church was full for the funeral with many priests and religious women and more of "the faithful"—what a true and lovely name...
...The parish church was huge and beautiful in a way that Catholics of the last generation would instantly recognize...
...We drove in miserable weather to a little town in coal country, north of Scranton, Pennsylvania...
...the martyrs welcome you and take you to the holy city, the new and eternal Jerusalem...
...For who else than the Messiah can be born in a grave...
...And I probably won't stop rolling my eyes at the latest inanity in the diocesan paper...
...cuz I'm on your side, I still care...
...I know that plenty of coal miners slapped their quarters down on the counter of a bar as well as into the collection plate...
...May the angels lead you into paradise...
...The death of a young person is such a tragedy to us because of its relative rarity...
...In a grave nearby a young woman had given birth to a boy...
...Briggs was religion editor of the New York Times for eleven years...
...They were utterly unself-preoccupied...
...Ten thousand doctors of what's possible could reason half the jungle out of being...
...the crisis surrounding the Vatican investigation of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen and the church of Seattle...
...There's something sad about that—and there's something spectacular about Sharon and the community that gave her birth and supported her to the end...
...Using a series of vignettes, Briggs focuses on events and issues that provoked passion, anguish, and endless discussion: Charles Curran's loss of the right to teach as a Catholic theologian...
...I barely knew her really, having only met her briefly several times at social gatherings...
...It all looked like outskirts to us...
...REMEMBERING SHARON A PEOPLE BORN IN THE GRAVE REPORT FROM SCRANTON I came across Kenneth A. Briggs's Holy Siege: The Year that Shook Catholic America (HarperSan Francisco) last year shortly after Christmas...
...We, the faithful, the people born in a grave, with food enough for everybody...
...We are swept deeper into life with the angels and Abraham and Sarah and Lazarus no longer poor, swept deeper into life with the coal miners who threw their quarters into the building fund, with the community of the faithful, born in a grave...
...1 made plans to attend the wake and funeral with another friend, a classmate of Ed's...
...You've probably been to a funeral much like it and that's just the point, isn't it...
...These arc ancient words written in a society in which 75 percent of those born died by age twenty-six—a society full of Sharons...
...He is a Protestant, but singularly well-informed about the Catholic church in the United States, a church that seems to him to be a "ballet without a choreographer" these days...
...He and some others had escaped from a concentration camp...
...Briggs and I and most of us much of the time are "doctors of the impossible," of ecclesial theories and blueprints...
...6: 25 March 1994...
...I speak of love, and something more, to say we are the thing that proves itself not against reason, but impossibly true, and therefore to teach reason reason...
...We may die, but we're not going anywhere...
...But through the eyes of her brother, Ed, I had followed the progress of a three-year struggle—of chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants, of lost hair and beleaguered hope...
...Our ancestors stood at a graveside like Sharon's far more often than we do and yet launched these words of hope into the void...
...Who could believe an ant in theory...
...At the end of the homily, Ed played a tape of a song that he had recently heard on the radio by a group called "Escape Club": Don't be afraid, o my love I'll be watching you from above And I'd give all the world tonight, To be with you...
...We are ourselves, invincibly the faithful, the people born in a grave, looking unflinchingly into the face of absurdity...
...And suddenly all those other issues seemed oddly remote...
...Sharon's parents presented the bread and wine, and their son and Sharon's brother swept them all into his embrace, juggling the cruets and ciborium in his hands...
...584 pages of these and related issues...
...After the funeral I got back to Briggs's book, but it had lost some of its appeal...
...And so when Sharon's family and friends remember, we, with her, are swept up in the circle of invincible life...
...letters, in fact, of one of the faithful...
...We need to renew our membership in the community born in the grave, "the thing that proves itself not against reason, but impossibly true...
...In one of his sermons Paul Tillich tells the story of a witness at the Nuremberg war crime trials...
...a friend asked...
...She still does," the faithful woman answered, "she still does...
...The composer of the Final Commendation never heard of "Escape Club," but his or her point isn't too different...
...At times like this we are invincibly the faithful...
...Ed spoke of the power of memory in our tradition...
...They were long letters, especially for a young woman who never knew a world before the telephone, and they were funny and full of concern for her parents and brothers and sisters...
...But just as I had settled down to read Holy Siege the phone rang...
...I may have died but I've gone no where...
...Simone de Bcauvoir, in her memoir of the last days of Jean-Paul Sartre, describes a man preoccupied with stashed bottles of liquor and nubile companions—the man who made a career of thumbing his nose at the existential void...
...How often we get it wrong but how beautiful we are when we get it right...
...During this time he wrote poetry, and one of his poems was the description of a birth...
...she had her whole life ahead of her...
...It's not that I don't often feel that my vision of the church is under siege from a number of quarters...
...We are most ourselves...
...Just think of me and I'll be there...
...When the community gathers to remember the story of the Deathless Christ, the story becomes food and the memory gives life...
...May the choirs of angels welcome you and lead you to the bosom of Abraham and where Lazarus is poor no longer may you find eternal rest...
...Sharon, the sister of a friend and fellow priest, was twentyfive-years old and had just succumbed to Hodgkin's disease...
...a giraffe in blueprint...
...When the newborn uttered his first cry the old man prayed, "Great God, has Thou finally sent the Messiah to us...
...The eighty-year-old grave digger assisted...
...Just think of me and I'll be there...
...Perhaps the defining moment came after the homily...
...Holy Siege chronicles the American Catholic church from the fall of 1986 to the fall of 1987, the time of the last papal visit before the World Youth Day gathering last summer in Denver...
...We were two jaded New Yorkers trying unsuccessfully to follow directions such as, "bear right at the anchor at the center of town...
...Standing beside the grave of a valiant young woman, we are at our best...
...R., teaches in the Theology and Religious Studies Department of Saint John's University and lives at Most Holy Redeemer Rectory, New York City...
...For a time the only place they could find to live was in a Jewish cemetery...
...Did you hear that Sharon died...
...But I also know that in that small town enough people came to the door of Sharon's family with covered dishes to feed everyone at the funeral and then some...
...It was a palpable image of the manifold ways our tradition al25 March 1994: 5 lows us to give and receive life...
...We are at our best...
...I have few illusions about small-town life...
...I found the reason for my uneasiness in a poem by John Ciardi titled "Credibility...
...Most of Ed's homily consisted of letters to him from Sharon...
...It was perfect brain candy for the clerical mind during the lazy days between Christmas and New Year's...
...But I want to think more about Sharon and her people and mine—the people born in a grave...
...The marble, the stained glass, the statues, and murals were tributes to the immigrants who had built it and their children and grandchildren who proudly maintain it...
...the struggles of women for full participation in the church's life and ministry...
...At the Final Commendation we sang the "/« Pamdisum...
Vol. 121 • March 1994 • No. 6
