HOMILY FOR THE WAKE OF MARGUERITE MORONEY
WEDNESDAY NIGHT
In the past five years there's been something just not quite right. Peggy and Jimmy. It was a single word for sixty-six years. Call Peggy and Jimmy. I saw Peggy and Jimmy. Neither name seemed right without the other. It was like Lucy and Desi or Fred and Ethel or Nora and George.
There was no one he loved more than her, and no one she loved more than him, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health until death did they part. And so there was something unnatural about Peggy without Jimmy, something unfinished and something terribly uncertain.
Such is often the case with old married couples after the first one dies. Especially those who take seriously the promises they swore before the altar so many decades ago.
But today Peggy is gone, she's dead, she has returned to the God who gave her to Jimmy and to us.
Life was not free from suffering, or fear for Peggy, beginning with the turbulence which so often afflicts new immigrants like those who transformed Watch Hill into the North End in the decades after the potato famine and through a great depression and an even greater war. Those fears, those traumas defined a good portion of her life and characterized the way she lived it and interacted with others. But despite the frightened child who lived deep within, she loved faithfully and completely the boy from Upton, and loved and nurtured two children as best she could.
There were so many good times. Like with Nora and George and Mary and Patty at Hampton Beach and Purgatory Chasm or the devotion she showed to her beloved Jimmy in his final days, or the two rosaries (one his and one hers) she prayed each night in those months right after he was gone. There were even good days toward end, when despite the hallucinations and gathering dementia, she knew a certain calm and even renewed faith through the goodness of Vo and the sisters and their colleagues of Notre Dame du Namur.
There were dark times too. When old and not quite buried rages and fears reinforced the walls of a paranoia. But God, who writes straight with crooked lines, can weave the fabric our lives even from the threads of a childhood stained with brokenness and fear.
For the great good news of this night is not that Peggy was perfect, but that God loves each one of us in our imperfection, and created us to love him as best we are able, to try to do his will as best we can, with all the weaknesses in our bones…just to offer it all to him. And in the end that’s what she did.
On behalf of my sister Debbie and I, thank you for being here tonight, for praying for our mother through the intercession of the Mother of God.
Peggy always loved the design for the gravestone which will now mark the Moroney plot in the Saint Timothy section of Saint John’s Cemetery. She insisted on its design for her last two Christmas cards, because it portrays the Mother of God, into whose arms we consign little Peggy tonight.
As she used to pray in all those rosaries, may Holy Mary pray for her and for all of us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
HOMILY FOR THE FUNERAL OF MARGUERITE MORONEY
THURSDAY MORNING
In the face of death, before the dark grave of his friend Lazarus, Jesus wept. And so they said, see how much he loved him.
We weep, because we loved Marguerite Mary O’Leary Moroney, Peg, Peggy, as a mother, an aunt or a friend. She is the one who taught Debbie and me to first make the sign of the cross, and who, at the age of sixteen stitched a cloth from which we first learned to pray, which still hangs beside my bed, and whose prayer I now pray with her:
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray thee Lord my soul to keep
if I should die before I wake
I pray thee Lord my soul to take.
She stitched that prayer with the faith she had received from her mother Nora and, in the few year she knew him, her father James…the faith brought by her great grandparents from places far away, like Cork and Kerry, where the prayer was first prayed among the Loughlins and the O’Learys, where the roots of our Catholic faith first flourished.
But this day is not about them or even about Peggy, the last of the O’Learys from the North end. Rather, it is about the God who loved her. Loved her so much that he joined her to himself in the waters of Baptism, anointed her with the oil of salvation, and nourished her with the bread of those who will never really die.
The God who day by day and year by year, revealed himself to her, taught her to love, to confess and to seek to live in the model of her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
The God who led Jimmy and Peggy down the aisle of Saint Stephen’s Church and who heard them promise before his altar to remain faithful to one another and to God: a promise they lived together for sixty-six years. And from that faithfulness, God brought forth Debbie and me, as a concrete sign of the willingness of Peggy and Jimmy to cling to faithful love in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, until death.
In fact, on the day they were married, Peggy and Jimmy knelt before the altar as Father Ahern, extending his hands over them, blessed them with a quotation from Psalm 128: videas filios filiorum tuorum: May you live to see your children’s children. And so faithful was God’s love for then that they lived to know and to love Daniel and Meghan.
God so loved Peggy that he surrounded her with the love of a husband and children and grandchildren. He so loved her that he has now taken her to himself, to the place he has prepared for each one of us.
And so it is into the hands of God, this day, that we commend her immortal soul. We ask angels to lead her into paradise. We ask martyrs to come to welcome her. And most of all, we ask God to look upon her with mercy, to forgive whatever sins she may have committed, to lead her home to a place of refreshment, light, and peace.
That same heaven for which our aching hearts long...that paradise, where we pray that one day she and her beloved Jimmy and Nora and James will run out to meet us and we will be together in Christ, in perfect love, forever singing the praise of God in the presence of the angels.
Lord, Jesus who was born as man that we might know that hope, make that day to come without delay!
HOMILY FOR THE ANOINTING OF THE SICK
THURSDAY AFTERNOON
First, I want to thank each of you for your love and support of my mother these past few years. This is truly a holy house, where people of faith live together by the inspiration of the Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, each day proclaiming by their lives the words first spoken by Sister Julie: How good is the good God!
Your day, like our lives, revolves around the Mass, so that the great Sacrifice offered by Christ upon the Cross might give us strength to love as he did, to accept the Crosses he sends us, and to believe the promise he gave us of life with him forever in the joy of paradise.
Thank you for the example you have given me of a joy that is born from the love of Jesus and his Cross. And I look forward to continuing to learn from your example for years to come.
Just as I learn from the example of Jesus healing the Centurion’s servant in today's Gospel. There’s a strange word used by Saint Matthew in describing Jesus’ reaction to the Centurion, when he tells us that Jesus was amazed by the Centurion’s faith.
Why was he amazed? Because the the occupation of this soldier seems antithetical to everything Jesus is and stands for. He is a centurion, a soldier in charge of a hundred other soldiers whose main job was persecuting folks like Jesus and his brethren.
And so Jesus is amazed of the faith of this Centurion who knows that is unworthy to so much as touch the hem of the Jesus’ garment, utterly unworthy to even gaze on his face.
Which is why the Centurion’s prayer is ours at every Mass: “I am not worthy that you should come under my roof, but only say the word and my soul will be healed.”
So let us confess our unworthiness to God, our inability to be able to save ourselves in body or soul. And, as Saint James tells us, he will hear our prayer and raise us up in this his holy house.
