I think I may have met Janette back in February 2022 at the time of the passing of Gordon’s brother James. Having now read the family eulogy on her, I wish I had known her long before. What a splendid human being! Full of energy, wholesome fun and, from what the eulogy said about sugar in her tea, she must have had a diet very low in sugar! The word that kept coming into my mind as I read about her was selfless. She gave all her self and her love away in her dedicated commitment to Gordon and their family as well as in her vocation as a carer. That’s thing about love, the more you give it away, the more you elicit it in others and the more you get back. Love is the only thing which you have more of when you give it away. And, as the eulogy says, such selfless loving is just who Janette was.

We know that we have passed out of death into life because we love. These words of St. John tell us that love is stronger than death. The fact that our body dies does not mean that our love dies, not our true love. On the contrary, anyone who truly loves, even if they do die in the body, will live, not with mortal life, but with eternal life. And they won’t only live eternally only in their soul or in the memories and affections of those they leave behind, which must inevitably fade. If love has been true, then God Himself will raise up the one who has loved to eternal life in both body and soul.

And what is this true love which is the promise of the victory of both body and soul over death? St. John tells us: by this we know love, that he laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for others. True love is laying down your life for others. Sound familiar? It should, since there is no doubt that Janette sought with all her might to lay down her life in love be it in the vocation of marriage and family or be it in the vocation of caring. Anyone who does that has known the love of Christ, has known how to love as Christ. If you look at all the many and wonderful things Janette did in her life out of selfless love, you are looking at the presence, the face, the power of Christ.

Is this going too far, perhaps? To say that there is identity between the one who truly loves and the person of Christ? Well, what did we hear in the Gospel? We heard the King, the Judge of the world say that whatever you did to the least of my brethren, this you did unto me. If He identifies Himself with the one who receives love in all the practical ways He mentions, is He not also going to identify Himself with the one who gives that love?

This means, for all of you who have benefitted from Janette’s love, that she not only gave herself to you in all that she did and was, she also showed you the face of Christ. She brought the Word of God off the page and into real life, probably without realizing it in many instances. This is how God most desires to reveal Himself to us and to draw us to Himself: through the constant, seasoned and unremitting practice of love shown in little and big ways, in daily chores and fidelity and in great sacrifices for the good of others.

This means a number of things which we would do well to take to heart and remember. Our beautiful human love, when it is true and selfless, shows us the reality of God. This kind of love has already conquered death. Death, you see, can mean two things: the death of the body or the death of the soul. The death of the body is for everyone, saint and sinner, but Christ has conquered the death of the body by rising from the tomb. On Easter morning, His tomb was empty. In due course, He will share this victory over the death of the body with the human race. The real death, the one which matters most, is the death of the soul. When is a soul dead? When it is loveless, when it is self-centred, when it won’t or can’t be moved by the sufferings and sorrows of others because it is too busy with itself. There is no danger of that for someone like Janette. Her life breathes love. Her victory over the death of the soul – we pray and we hope – is a done deal, and so her victory over the death of the body will most certainly follow.

We simply can’t live, in any real sense of the term, unless we love. True love means true life. And true Life means Christ. We human beings sometimes think that we can live our own life and loves without Christ. We can’t. We can kid ourselves that we can. We can invent all sorts of excuses to put off facing the day when we must face Christ. If only we could understand, as Janette certainly did in the depth of her heart, that to live and love like Christ is not to lose out on God-knows-what thrilling alternatives we think our short years on this planet can provide. It’s the exact opposite. The more we open to Christ and come to Him, the more we will encounter in the depths of our hearts the meaning of true life, love and happiness. And the more we do that, the more confident we can be that we will be able to say what Job said in the first reading: “I know that my Redeemer lives and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my flesh has been destroyed in death, yet in my flesh I shall see God. I shall see him for myself. My own eyes shall behold Him.”

Janette lived in the frailty of our mortal condition and, like all of us, she will have had her struggles, her moments of weakness or failure. And we can sometimes think that because we are aware of our sins and darker side that somehow God doesn’t want to see us or lift us up and love us as a Father lifts his child to his cheek. Of course He does! He loves us beyond our sins, no matter how many or messy they may be. Did His Son not die for us? Does His Heart not long for us to approach Him like the prodigal son returning to the Father’s House? What sense does it make to resist so loving, so merciful, so faithful a divine Father?

I can tell you one thing. For all the sadness we experience today at the death of Janette, there will be great rejoicing in heaven that she is on her way home. And that’s our home, too. We are awaited, eagerly, expectantly, and Janette, we dare to hope, will stand among those forming the welcoming party for us. So, as we lift up Janette to the merciful arms of our Saviour, we will do well to lift up our hearts to Him, too, and ask Him to have mercy upon us and lift us up in those same arms into the room prepared for us in the Father’s house.