ELLA THERESA CARAPIET
Anniversary Mass
5th.
April 1993
Penitential Rite: It’s been a year, less a day, since our dear
mother, Ella Theresa, left us for her Heavenly Home. We shall always remember
how beautifully she died, with the holy Name of Jesus on her lips and the Body
of the Lord in her heart, the Church providing all that the law requires for
the benefit of a departing Christian.
Better than any spiritual exhortation about modelling our
dying on that of Jesus’ on the Cross was our own mother’s death.
We have come together, family and friends, to tank our
Heavenly Father for the gift of the life, love and death of Ella Theresa
Carapiet. As we pray for her deepening joy in the wonderment of the Holy
Trinity, we also beg the merciful Lord to cleanse and purify us for that final
hour when we hope to enter into the Death-Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus
Christ.
THE HOMILY: Like most parents, our mother, Ella Theresa, saw
her children grow up, leave the ancestral home and make their own lives. She
saw us leave one by one, until only Mary was left, and even though we visited
her regularly, she knew that life would not be the same again.
Her return from hospital, many years ago was marked by an
acute debility of her legs that would keep her home-bound foe the rest of her
earthly life. Yet home-bound was heaven-bound. The little house in Bow Bazar
she loved so much was her last station for heaven that she will love forever.
For the time being she waited, waited in a solitude not
unwelcome and, in turn, made fruitful by her faith which bore the message that
all would be well.
What must not have gone through her mind: memories of sorrow,
images of delight, childhood and marriage, the meetings with people, the quiet
chats with friends, the splendid liturgies in her church, and, the best of all,
the deep communings with her Eternal Father in heaven. Heaven came down to a
little room lived in by a tiny woman!
To what went on between them only faith can testify, even
though the details will remain a secret. The cleansing of divine love, the
healing of memories, the perception that this world is but a passing show, and
the ultimate truth that she had always known, that, at the end, only God
matters. And through it all she must surely have heard one golden note of
angelic music to which no human voice or instrument can compare itself: that it
was getting time to leave, for the Father was calling his daughter back to
where she belonged, with Him forever. And the manner of her death, still so
fresh in our minds, bore the stamp of a simple and placid response to His
summons.
Nothing is lost, since God is faithful and will not expose our
lives to futility. All the accumulated excellence of our human endeavours, the
heavy crosses that we bore, the battles that we fought, the losses sustained,
the victories secured, have all been taken up into God to be illuminated in His
glory. For the human, to be truly human, must consent to enter the divine,
otherwise is not human.
I said that Ella Theresa saw her children leave their
ancestral home and make their own lives. But Christian hope assures us that she
will see them return and take their places with her in the Father’s house, this
time forever.
And if she has a prayer, it must surely be that high priestly
prayer of Jesus himself before His passion and death, recorded by St. John, the
Evangelist:
“Heavenly Father, I pray that where I am they also may be.”
Amen.
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