On the occasions when I spoke with Mary, either casually or when I would bring her the sacraments, I was always touched and edified by her great gentleness of heart. Her devotion in receiving the sacraments reminded me of my own Scots Irish mother (also called Mary Bridget). It was the sort of devotion which marked the genuine piety towards God of her generation. After I gave her Holy Communion ten days or so before she left us, I asked Mary how she felt on receiving the sacrament. With great lucidity and candour, she simply replied, “much better.” It was a clear and gentle expression of how much the Eucharist meant to her when she was well aware of the fragility of her condition.

From what I understand of her background, Mary was far from fragile in throwing herself into the various tasks and challenges which life brought her. I have no doubt that the strong family culture in which she was immersed gave her the courage and confidence to do all that had to be done, without complaint and with great generosity. I also understand that wherever life took her both before and after she married her late husband Harry she was a practical and hands-on contributor to the local parish. Certainly, here at St. Mary’s, she did everything from clean the church to repair altar cloths, decorate the Crib and too many more things to mention besides. But it was when she spoke to me of her children that her eyes brightened the most. She always did so with immense love and pride. I’d say that, of all the things she treasured in this life, the greatest of them was without question her three fine sons and her two beautiful daughters.

When a mother dies, it has to be one of the sorest pains of the human heart. After all, a mother personifies life itself, all that is good and loving. Her self-sacrificing love for her family gives them foundation, a sense of total acceptance and so a deep confidence in themselves and in life. Motherhood could only have been invented by God. With fatherhood and marriage, motherhood ranks among the highest and most beautiful of God’s masterpieces. God is Life and God is Love and He demonstrates these divine truths in a uniquely powerful manner in the human realities of motherhood and fatherhood.

And that’s precisely the point, I suppose. When we act as mothers and fathers on this earth we are stepping in for God, we are His viceroys, His ambassadors and ambassadresses. The very meaning and purpose of these vital roles is to lead, to draw, to point the children God gives us back to God. For, in the end, we must withdraw from this life and return to God; we hand back to God, as it were, our credentials as mothers and fathers because, in eternity, we will experience directly the fatherhood and motherhood of God. The lives of Harry Askew, and now of Mary, have, we confidently pray, not so much ended as reached fulfilment. Their children are not so much deprived of their parents as now placed more directly under God’s protection, to lean on Him, to honour and love Him, as once they did these very things with regard to their parents.

And this is true of us all. Does not our first reading from Wisdom point to this when it says that the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God? As we are held in our parents’ arms as babies and hold their hands as we learn to walk; as we are fed from their hands and given all that we need for life; as we watch their hands work diligently to earn the bread we eat at table; and as we see their hands grow old and die: all of this is teaching us that, grateful as we must be for the immense gift of our parents, we can and must only depend, in the end, on the hands of God.

And we know from St. Paul in the second reading that, even if we are separated from the loving hands of our parents by death, there is nothing that can ever separate us from the loving hands of God. In Christ, the human hands of God were pierced so that we would not let go of them. Many a mother and father will have suffered pierced hands in a metaphorical sense: they will have preferred to suffer themselves rather than see their children suffer. But it is only the hands of Christ which can deliver us from the fatal suffering of sin and death. It is in those hands that we pray that Mary and all our loved ones who have died are now to be found.

For if we do not say at the hour of death with Jesus crucified, “Lord, into your hands I commend my spirit”, in whose or what’s hands do we end up? There are no other hands that will receive us in love but Christ’s. Before the death of Christ, death was in the hands of the Evil One and that gave death a meaning worse than death. But Christ’s sinless and humble death snatched death from the pride and power of the Evil One and from the awful fate that entailed. That is why, like Mary, we must prepare for death by living lives of generous self-sacrificing love. So many things, good, bad and indifferent, can occupy and preoccupy our hearts, minds and energies as we pilgrim through this life. The pride and arrogance of life can be so appealing even as they poison our hearts and souls with thoughts and actions unworthy of the Cross of Jesus and of our own true deepest selves. Whereas, the gentleness and humility of heart, which so characterised Mary and which revealed her closeness to the Christ of the Beatitudes, are both a sign of inner freedom from darkness and a readiness to embrace the Heart of Christ.

So, while we most certainly celebrate the life lived by Mary in this world and all the achievements, virtues and graces which adorned her throughout, we celebrate above all the victory of the life of Christ in her. It is that life alone which is true life. It is that life which we confidently pray she now enjoys in its fulness in the presence of the Lord whom she loved and served on this earth. The hearts of those who loved her in this life will now be all that little bit more focused on heaven. This life passes swiftly but our deeds, whether good or ill, will have an eternal outcome. So, we pray for the grace of wisdom to imitate Mary’s example and to live each day with our priorities set on the will of God and our eyes fixed on the pierced hands of our Saviour. As St. Paul once put it so admirably: I forget what lies behind and I reach out for what is to come. All I want is to know the power of Christ’s resurrection and be conformed to the pattern of his death, in this way hoping somehow to gain my place in the resurrection of the dead. Let this moment of sorrow and celebration spur us on to do the same.