Thank You My Dear Sisters and Brothers.

I want to thank you for the prayers, love and support you have sent my way in the week since Mama went home. 

I have read and re-read your loving comments. Each one of them touched my heart and comforted me. 

I have felt your prayers for me and found peace in the knowledge that you were praying for my precious mother. It has been such a blessing to hear from so many people I haven’t talked to in a while, including dear friends who have slipped away from me, and to feel your love. 

COVID-19 is keeping some of us apart for now. But when it passes, I want to see many of you again and resume our friendships. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter where we stand on issues. What matters is that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ and that our eternity will be together as one family standing before the Throne.

Things like Republican and Democrat are arbitrary and artificial differences that were created by other people for their own purposes and that we have bought into and allowed to separate us. The distinctions we take so seriously are temporary concerns that will all pass away in time. 

What lasts is our love, faith and hope. St Paul told us plainly that these alone abide. They are the only things we take with us into eternity. Everything else — everything else — passes away. 

Whatever we do, however we react to the challenges that lie ahead of us and our country in the dangerous passage in front of us, let’s all try to do these things as an expression of our love for God, for one another and for our country. If we do that, we will find our way through intact as children of the living God. 

I am going to try to return to blogging this week. But I am tired with a tired that I have not felt since I was going through cancer. 

My mother lived 94 years and 8 months. She had suffered the destruction of dementia for a number of years. I walked with her through all of this. I honestly thought I had grieved so many losses as the dementia took away her capacities that losing her in a final sense would be easier.

I was wrong. 

She lived a long, full life and she went straight home to God. She is in heaven now and, to be honest, I would not wish her back, not even for a second. But despite that, my grief at her passing is real and deep. 

At the same time, the Holy Spirit has rained down graces of love on me throughout this time. I’ve prayed and am praying and each time I pray, some new understanding comes to me. 

It is a strange feeling, to be so glad that Mama has finally gone to Jesus, that she is young and alive again, that she is living the bliss of our next life, and at the same time to mourn deeply that she is not here with me right now. It’s a kind of push-pull that has me glad one moment and in the pit of grief the next.

I do not believe that Purgatory is a terrible place. I think it is simply a place where we get a final cleaning, where we give up the last vestiges of sin that cling to us so that we are fit for heaven. If we went to heaven as we are, with our petty resentments and fixations, heaven would not be very heavenly. Purgatory is just the completion of being born again in the Spirit and washed squeaky clean of our fallenness in a way that is not possible while we are still in the muck and mire of this fallen world.

I’m praying for Mama. I pray for a long list of people, every day. I may tell you sometime how I came to do this. But suffice it for now to say that I pray for those who have gone on, and I offer up whatever merits I have for them. 

This is our destination, as well. One day before too long, we will all be where Mama is now. We are going to spend eternity together, my brothers and sisters in Christ. 

Our task now is to do everything we can to bring as many people as we can along with us. Do not allow anyone to perish because your Christian witness was so lacking in love that it made them think that Jesus and His love was a lie. 

People judge Jesus by us. Never forget that. 

My Mama is dead to this life and alive in the next life. She is home. I walked her home as best I could. Now is my time of grief and thanksgiving. I grieve because she is no longer in this world with me. I am thankful because she is free of the wreckage of dementia and is living the glorious joy of heaven. 

My Mama is not dead. She has just gone on ahead of me. I will see her again. 

In the meantime, I wish I could hug you close and tell you how much I love you and how much your prayers have meant to me. This upcoming election is going to be a mean, hard fight. We don’t have any good choices. And the anger in our society has reached toxic — insane — levels. 

Let’s try to remember as we struggle through it that we are all going to live out our eternity together before the Lord. We really are brothers and sisters in Christ. That is not a pretty fantasy. It’s not even a reality. It is reality itself, all of it, in one point of truth. 

Thank you again my friends. 

I love you.