I attended a requiem mass this evening. Frankly, I do not know the person and I didn’t find out more eventhough his death was mentioned in The Herald. But I went because I want to feel connected to death. Bizarre of me. Anyway, funeral mass or in this case, the mass to celebrate the life of the person whom had passed away sometimes can provide a lot of enlightenment on this thing call life. One needs to know death in order to live.
During the homily by the bishop, he mentioned something like ’some of you may know him when he was the Penang bishop, some of you may have been married off by him and etc etc etc” I was like, oh oh, I belong to none of that. So what am I doing here?
Oh well, I went because I know there will be other priests from other parishes and I want to catch hold of two of them. I believe if I am going to embark on something like what I am doing now, I need a lot of support, guidance, research, discernment, pondering, soul searching and etc. So, unless I take the steps to find out and seek out the people who can help me, I won’t be going anywhere with it.
I am glad I caught hold of Fr. Mark because he has attended the CPE and he is doing pastoral care too. And I feel so normal when I related to him the initial fears I had. I told him how I paced up and down the corridors in order to find the courage to knock on a door, go in, introduce myself and get down to talk. He said initially, it was hellish for him too because it is not easy to break into the territory of the patient. Thank God for little encouragement like that. Fr. Mark gave me some encouraging pointers and yeah, my next ‘target’ is to find another priest to chat with.
Phew….the wicked me had such a hard time trying to control a smile or holding back laughter during the long homily because one of the senior priest was about to fall off the tiny chair (normally used by the altar boys) because he was doing a ‘Pak Lah’. It was so, so funny because he kept nodding off while one mat salleh priest, sitting next to him was looking so worried that the other priest will really drop down on the altar as he was sitting on the edge. Meanwhile, the more ‘rebellious’ priests were doing stuffs like shifting in their chairs, shaking legs and yawning away while the more serious ones ‘appeared’ to be very interested, listening. If my sons were with me, I think they would have activated my laugh button and I will be dead, laughing in somber mass.
I guess if the late Archbishop is here or maybe he is actually looking down from heaven, he will be laughing too at the different kind of actions. God bless him and all the priests for dedicating their lives to serve the Lord and be our shepherds . And thank God for my parish priests ‘cos no altar servers have ended up doing what the group of priests did tonight. Hahaha.
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