A MOMENTOUS WEEK
As I prepare these few thoughts on a beautiful warm Friday morning, a calm pervades Bishop Eton after all the activity surrounding the events of the past week, culminating in Fr James Casey’s funeral yesterday. In my recorded message yesterday evening I felt moved to follow in Fr Provincial’s footsteps at the funeral and use a remarkable article that Fr Jim wrote for our former parish magazine, BE Alive, in the wake of his operation for oesophageal cancer in July 2016.
If you would like to read the full article, we are putting it on the website as a special item this weekend.
Towards the end he expressed his gratitude for all the support and concluded: “We were a power to be reckoned with. As we lived through this experience, grace, normally thought of as a theological truth, became a lived reality – became words of encouragement, a warm embrace, little acts of service, a willingness to wait and watch and listen and love. We were a grace-fuelled community and we were the winners.” Firstly, I could not help but reflect that often we don’t know what is really going on inside another person’s mind and heart. Fr Jim could often be taciturn: like many men of his generation, he did not readily share at the emotional level. Yet in this article you receive an insight into someone whose life was shaped by the Gospel of hope and love and ultimate redemption.
It says everything I want to share with you as we continue to strive to build up what I would call Team BE: a community of people of faith seeking to enable each one to share his and her gifts for the good of all. This was illustrated as last Saturday’s event to honour the memory of St Gerard Majella unfolded. It was an extraordinarily grace-filled day and the feed-back has been wholly positive. What fascinated me was the way that all the different elements of the day merged to make the whole such a rewarding experience.
There was something similar about yesterday’s funeral: the Requiem Mass and the reception required a lot of careful planning and so many people worked tirelessly to ensure it would be a blessed memory for Fr Jim’s family and friends. This I believe is the call to synodality in action. That said, ‘synodality’ was not a word that captured Fr Jim’s imagination and he constantly questioned others’ ways of pronouncing it, so let him have the final say to you on how we should celebrate the past week: “As they say daftly on television these days: ‘Why don’t we all give ourselves a big round of applause?’”
