Maria Righetti lived for almost 90 years, but that quantity of time was easily matched, if not surpassed, by the quality of life she chose to live. The picture we get of her from the family eulogy is of a woman with a diligent and determined strength of character and of purpose, dedicated to marriage, family, community and honest hard work and, I might add, with a diamond core of faith in God. She knew her own mind and, once convinced her judgment was right, she used her considerable will power to achieve her goals. She was no shrinking violet but was schooled in the hard lessons and realities of life to get on with it and to excel at it, to summon the deep resources of heart and soul to face it and to win through. She faced the heart-breaking adversity of losing her cherished husband in the prime of life but responded to it with remarkable fortitude of soul, since she had their family to care for and, indeed, the rest of her own life to live.

As anyone can understand, though, when her son Michael lost his battle with Parkinson’s in late 2019, Maria suffered a deep emotional setback from which she struggled to recover. Rino’s sudden departure had been overwhelming enough but, as she said to me several times when I went to see her, the loss of Michael was simply unjust. A child should not pre-decease a parent. What I admired immensely in Maria throughout this trial was that she never once blamed God for that injustice. Her faith and trust in God ran too deep for that. She reminded me of the biblical woman who faces calamity and calls it by its name but who, at the same time, trusts God to rescue her from it. Maria lived very personally those words of the Psalm we have just heard: “even though I walk through the valley of darkness, no evil will I fear, for You are there with your crook and your staff. With these you give me comfort.” Maria herself has now passed through and beyond that valley with her faith and trust in God intact, and the two chaparones who will have met her at the other side to escort her to the throne of God will surely have been Rino and Michael. Standing in the face of God’s loving providence, Maria will now understand the why of it all, and with husband and son will be praising the Lord.

My friends, this life on earth is not self-contained. It’s not something we can truly understand in and of itself, as if all we are and have and do in the short years of our existence had no greater, no wider, no fuller, no higher purpose. The philosophy of life which says “let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die” is totally inadequate to understand our life or ourselves. We all have stardust, yes indeed; but we have something much more sublime than that. We all have the breath of God, the hallmark of God, the image of God within us. If you were to say to a child with a natural gift for something, “O, forget that. Don’t pay any attention to that. Do these other things which everyone else is doing and which are more fun, more fulfilling”, you could be arrested for psychological abuse. Well, every single human being has a deep-seated gift for God, longing for God. We can deny it or suppress it in ourselves or in others as much as we want, but it will not go away; it will never leave us, for it cannot leave us, because as the great St. Augustine says, “our hearts were made for you, O God, and they will be restless until they rest in You.” God is in our DNA.

Maria’s faith in God was quiet and undemonstrative, but it was rock-solid and it fed her remarkable drive to live a life based on lasting values which she imparted by word and example to her family. What she did in this way was to plant the seeds of love, of self-sacrifice, of duty, of decency and of respect, which will now begin to blossom in the real life, eternal life, for which she was created and redeemed by God. The birth of little Luciano, a matter of hours after Maria’s death, is like God writing in huge letters a message to her family and to us all: life and death are in my hands, because you are all in my heart. With Maria’s death, a light seemed to go out, while with Luciano’s birth (Luciano comes from the Italian word for light) a new light has begun to shine. But in reality, Maria’s light has not gone out at all. It has only been taken from our sight, while it now burns with ever increasing intensity like a great torch before the throne of God.

On this island, Maria touched many lives and many hearts, as this gathering of people eloquently demonstrates, but however many we are, we cannot compare with the number of those who now delight in having her in the halls of heaven. In the Father’s house, there are many rooms. As we know, Maria was in the business of holiday lets; well, now she is getting a taste of what true real estate really is! The tent she was living in on earth has been folded up and she will dwell for ever in the house built by God for her. There are no lets in heaven, there are only the mansions of eternal fulfilment freely given by the loving heart of God to all of his beloved sons and daughters. Maria spent years in hospitality, providing food and drink to guests, to family, to loved ones. Well now, she knows what a real banquet looks like, on the mountain of the God who is her Host, with rich foods and choice wines.

And, along with the Lord and all of his saints, Maria wants to see youthere, too. There is a mansion for you in heaven. There is a seat at the banquet of the love of the Lamb of God for you. There awaits you a fulfilment of your potential which God has dreamed of for you since before he even created the world. But it will only be yours if you want it. There is no glass ceiling on the world which, once we touch it, the peak of our lives is over and we can only return back downwards to the grave. No. The world is opened up and out to God. If we are not thus open, we are only frustrating our own destiny and eternal fulfilment. God gives us so many gifts of life, love, happiness and pleasure not for us to get enslaved by them, but to be able to thank Him and praise Him for them and to turn to Him in the sorrows and joys of life, as did Maria and as myriads of other human beings have done for millennia.

We celebrate the past life of Maria Righetti most of all by thanking God for giving her to us. But we celebrate the eternal life of Maria most of all by living our own lives before His Face, in the embrace of His love and in seeking to live and to love as He desires. Maria thought she was onto a winner when Rino kept saying his car was even bigger. She now knows, and we should too, that we will only truly win in the end with God. So, Maria Millport, we let you go to God and we cheer you on to victory in the lasting peace of His Kingdom. Eternal rest.