KEVIN FRANCIS O'SHEA, CSsR HOMILY

Transcription

1 KEVIN FRANCIS O'SHEA, CSsR June 3, April 18, 2018 Mass of Christian Burial, Rookwood Cemetery, April 23, 2018 HOMILY Isaiah 25:6-9 John 14:1-6 Among the Oceania Redemptorists there was none who more often preached at the funeral liturgies of his brothers than did Fr. Kevin O'Shea. So, this morning I am moved and honoured in accepting the invitation of Kevin's Kogarah community to preach at this Mass. When a new-born cries, and new-borns do cry, there are no tears. It is not until an infant is about five or six months old that tears accompany the crying. It is also about that time that an infant first experiences loss. With established relationships holding by that age loss is possible. A missed feed can feel like unimaginable abandonment and the tears flow. Parents notice that the cry changes and carries in it a pain that was previously not there. Loss is part of the human experience. Sometimes it is explicit and easily named. At other times it creeps up on us slowly and reveals that someone or something has gone. Kevin O'Shea was such an integral member of the Redemptorist Province of Oceania that his passing in a sense changes us. Since Kevin died last Wednesday morning, so many confreres and so many of his friends and colleagues, feeling the loss, have volunteered to say, "I didn't know his passing would affect me so much". Yes, someone who had truly touched us has gone. A colleague and confrere said: 'Kevin was my first and greatest teacher.' A diocesan priest from Maitland-Newcastle said: 'Kevin's contribution to theology will long be remembered, as will his writings on spirituality. But what moved me most was his humility and willingness to share his insights with whomever asked his help. And I was one of those, and say unashamedly that my life and preaching are the better because of Kevin s influence and friendship.' Dear friends, it doesn't feel the same. The province is experiencing a loss. At moments like this people sometimes say "a light has gone out". If Kevin ever heard us say anything like that about his passing he would have smiled. If he had heard us say it a second time we would have witnessed that little flash of anger that he could never hide when something unreal came passed him. No, Kevin knows now what he always preached: in death a new and immeasurably loving light shines; and it never goes out. In his Hymn of the Universe, Teilhard de Chardin puts it another way: "Far from light emerging gradually out of the womb of our darkness, it is the Light, existing before all else was made which, patiently, surely, eliminates our darkness."

2 Dear friends, as we take these moments to walk along the road together we remember much that Kevin showed us and some things that he told us. In his passing a light has not gone out. In our midst Kevin switched the light on. He was fully aware from the perspective of this life of death's finality. But when you are contemplating the depths of existence as he did, he saw death as part of the mystery of creation and creation's ongoing existence in God. He had no time for the cult of death - and you can read that in the Fourteenth Station of his way of the Cross. Kevin was a witness to the resurrection. He was forever marked by reading in 1960 in the original French the work of his confrere, Francis Xavier Durwell: 'The Resurrection.' Durwell's ideas were a light that never went out for Kevin. And over the years, Kevin endlessly developed his own understanding of resurrection and he did his best to shed a light on both the mystery of it in contemplation and the significance of it as action for building up humanity. He knew so well that through baptism (and profession) all of us are invited to put on Christ's death-state of complete openness and go down into the grave with him so as to rise with him into a new life of complete openness. I remember back in the Summer of 1994, some 24 years ago, Kevin was in the United States doing his much loved Summer run turning on lights by his courses at various universities. Part of that Summer I was able to join Kevin, who always loved to have a confrere with him, and we headed out from New York for the Mid West. That year he presented at St Norbert's University, Green Bay, Michigan, and later at Notre Dame, Indiana. At the latter, on the evening before the Summer courses were to begin the leaders of the those courses were presented to the Summer students. Each was asked to tell a few things about themselves including their hobbies and interests. Well, if you knew Kevin, you know that this introduction night was not his scene. I was in the audience and I could see his discomfort on stage. He was squirming in his seat. And watching him, so was I. When his turn came he went to the microphone gave his name and a few other details and to fulfil the brief given by the compère, Kevin went on to say that nothing gave him as much joy as a new idea. For Kevin a new idea was a light coming on. It was not a novelty. It was not a plaything. It was not something to possess and keep to himself. It was never a weapon of one-upmanship. It was not something on which to gloat. No, for Kevin, the new idea was but a window into something deeper. It was the 'something deeper' that brought him the joy, not the idea in itself. For Kevin, those new ideas were a means to experience existence and the participant realities emerging from it. It was not unusual to knock on his door and enter his room to find him sitting in his chair. He would have been thinking, thinking contemplatively. He would have been playing with ideas, and by playing with them he was also praying, plumbing the depths of the way the universe works, both in the macro and the micro but only as a way to a deeper metaphysics. His 2

3 thinking could be an interflow of physics and philosophy, an interflow of faith and its absence, an interflow of the God-ed-ness in everything and everyone. Kevin was the most original thinker I have met. He enjoyed his own originality as a person and as a philosopher, theologian, scientist and missionary. He had deep, deep convictions about originality and would defend it and promote it wherever he found it, especially in other persons. That is one among the losses we already feel - that one who understood, respected and promoted our originality has gone. As provincial his dream was to nurture a province of persons, fully alive, blessing the world and giving glory to God. He always saw each of us in the light of the resurrection. He therefore had hopes for each one and encouraged each one. He breathed in the mystery of existence and flourished in opening up paths so that others too might more consciously experience it That was the way that Kevin prayed. The Divine was always there looking back at him in all of existence, and it called him to adoration and contemplation. And to his great credit and to our benefit he made his faithful response. As lights turned on for him, so he turned them on for others. Were there ever many his equal in the way he gave away everything he had seen, everything he had known, everything he had discovered, everything on which the light had shone? He was detached from things and from ideas, including his own.. His room was witness to that. On a messy day there were two books on his shelf and one on his desk - but so much going on in heart and mind. This was the same man who in his seventies, while stationed at Broadmeadow (Newcastle), would board the 6.20 am train to Sydney every Tuesday without fail. On each occasion he alighted at Strathfield, got himself a coffee at the Square and walked the couple of kilometres to the Veech Library on Albert Street to spend the next five hours reading voraciously all that was freshly available. Then he would walk back to the Square, grab a late light lunch and train it back to Newcastle all the while thinking on and meditating on everything that he had read. The rest of the week he would be thinking and writing. He would be sharing with the community what was happening for him. In the world of things Kevin was quite impractical, and each of us has stories to tell. In the world of humans he had many foibles, some of them exasperating. But in the world of persons he was our brother. His smile was as welcoming as his accompaniment was real. He was confidant to so many because so many felt safe with him. Yet, like all of us he had to leave his brokenness at the feet of the Redeemer, and like us seek there the healing. Though a very private person, occasionally he would speak of that journey Kevin had a special affection for the Redemptorist Brothers and was among them one who encouraged their freedom, their education and their worth. He was proud of them and remained friend to them and they to him. Kevin transcended any hint of clericalism and 3

4 remained all his life a simple human being. He was a man who in his own life blurred the distinctions between Brothers and priests for he understood the depth of the mission all share. He was able to be like that because of the accompaniment of many friends and colleagues, including Ursuline Sister Pat Kennedy, his loyal friend from childhood, and Mercy Sister Mary Johnson another loyal friend. He depended on many people, and many people generously gave to him. Kevin carried in himself the freshness of St. Alphonsus Liguori and saw life as a Blessed Sacrament. In all things and in everyone he knew the Real Presence. He was conscious that the followers of Jesus were those who did it all in memory of the Redeemer: "This is me given for you, this me poured out for you." Though devoted to his daily Mass, Kevin understood Eucharist to be 24/7, and he knew it in the way today's first reading proclaims it: 'The Lord has prepared for all people a banquet of fine food.' Kevin was, as a result, the one who inspired when on the ground inspiration was thin, the one who looked ahead when others were staring down. He was the one who gently proclaimed that the kingdom of heaven was close at hand and that nothing was left out of God's story. He was the one who saw the unity of everything and communion among all. If you knew Kevin you might understand that these words of Teilhard de Chardin could easily have been his: "I thank You, my God, for having in a thousand different ways led my eyes to discover the immense simplicity of things. Little by little, through the irresistible development of those yearnings you implanted in me as a child, through the influence of gifted friends who entered my life at certain moments to bring light and strength to my mind, and through the awakenings of spirit I owe to successive initiations, gentle and terrible, which you caused me to undergo; through all these, I have been brought to the point where I can no longer see anything, nor any longer breathe, outside that milieu in which all is made One." You could say that Kevin was a prophet. Of course he would not have seen it that way. He would have seen himself as wanting to be, and choosing to be a witness - a witness to the prophetic Redeemer: " On this mountain the Lord will remove The mourning veil covering all peoples, And the shroud enwrapping all nations, He will destroy Death forever." 4

5 All Kevin wanted was that people should know in one way or another - that their hearts ought not be troubled; that there are many rooms in the father's house that Jesus has gone ahead to prepare a place for all because he is "The Way, the truth and the Life". This morning we thank God for our brother. We thank God that through him he has included us all and lifted our hearts. We remember Kevin's words "We cannot summon the risen Christ. We don't have to. We cannot even think that he will come to us. He has already come." I finish with these lines from George Herbert's 1633 poem, 'The Temple.', They are lines for resurrection morning. "I got me flowers to straw thy way; I got me boughs off many a tree: But thou wast up by break of day, And brought'st thy sweets along with thee." ' Edmond Nixon, CSsR 5