January 5, 2016 – Funeral homily for Janet Gihl
No one is more important than anyone else. Everyone is beloved.
Janet taught English, among the other things she did–she was a well-read, literate person– and though we never talked about it, I think she must have known George Eliot’s great nineteenth century novel, Middlemarch, and its famous last sentence, one of the great sentences in all of literature. It’s about the heroine of the novel:
“The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.“
Janet could give the appearance of meekness, and she was a quiet woman, with a quiet, halting voice, and like George Eliot and her heroine she was a woman in a man’s world—George Eliot was the pseudonym of a woman named Mary Evans. But like Mary Evans Janet was fiercely intelligent, and she had a generosity of spirit, and an open-mindedness. She was deeply grounded in theology and in Vatican II especially, and she brought the spirit and the mission of Vatican II to all of her teaching and her ministry over the years, and in her work as the director of religious education at St. Mary’s and in her work with RCIA and in all her relationships with people, she had this diffusive effect on those around her.
Because of her many people became Catholic. Because of her many people stayed Catholic. In her knowledge and her insight she was able to remove the obstacles for many of us and present the Church to us in its real depth and breadth and mercy and joy.
Most people in the parish won’t remember Janet, as in a few years most people won’t remember any one of us. But the parish is different because of her.
And in fact I think Janet wouldn’t have been completely satisfied with this famous sentence from Middlemarch. She would have seen it as too timid, too restrained, because she was a woman of faith and she believed deeply that through Christ the world is being transformed—it really is—and no tomb is unremembered and no life finally hidden. Death is not the end. The story is never over.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, Jesus says in the Beatitudes, blessed are the meek. In him and through him everything has been turned upside down, and the meek inherit the earth and the small is more important than the large and everything matters, the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and all the marginal and all the outcast. The mighty have been cast down from their thrones, the rich have been sent away empty.
No one is more important than anyone else. Everyone is beloved.
It’s a calculus the world doesn’t understand. It’s a calculus that doesn’t have to do with the number of page views or with profit margins or with public recognition but with this moment and the next, this particular moment, the person beside you, the person you happen to see, here and now. This is eternal life.
And nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. Jesus came, he tells us, to take everything up unto himself, to gather everything in, and that energy and that goodness do not end with death but continue always. In my father’s house there are many dwelling places, one for Janet and one for you and one for me. All we have to do is die. Because when we die, to our false selves, to our pride, to our arrogance, we live, and we live forever.
Janet and I never talked about Teilhard de Chardin either, the twentieth century French Jesuit who celebrated the glory of creation, but I think she would have liked this passage, too:
“A thought, a material improvement, a harmony, the enchanting complexity of a smile or a glance-the spiritual success of the universe is bound up with the release of every possible energy in it. Any increase that I can bring upon myself or upon things is translated into some increase in my power to love and some progress in God’s blessed hold on the universe. With every creative thought or action, a little more health is being spread in the human mass, and in consequence, a little more liberty to act, to think, and to love. We serve to complete the work of creation, even by the humblest work of our hands.“
We serve to complete the work of creation.
And so today Janet in her fierce and quiet way is teaching us still. In her death she is calling us to live, and in her love she is calling us to love, and through her example she is calling us to our own small tasks, our own small power to love and to serve. We serve to complete the work of creation, even by the humblest work of our hands, as Janet did and Janet does. With her and with us, through our Lord Jesus Christ, is bound up the spiritual success of the universe.