Christine Vladimiroff, OSB

Isaiah 35:1-6,10;  John 15: 12-17

Thornton Wilder in his play Our Town has the stage manager address the audience saying:
“We all know that something is eternal—and it ain’t house or names or the earth or the stars. . . .Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal and that something has to do with human beings. . .There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

“Something eternal” It is a consoling conviction that I hold, as well, and one that is deepened each time I stand next to the bed of a sister who is dying. 

Today’s Gospel of John puts us in touch with that “something,” especially in this, the last speech of Jesus, when he talks about his relationship with his disciples, and with God, and our relationship with one another.  Jesus gets us to the bottom line when he commands his disciples:  “Love on another.”

There are different words for “love” in Greek.  There is eros which is the passionate love that seeks to possess the beloved; there philia the love of friendship, rooted in attraction to another.  But the special word in the New Testament is agape: love that is gift, it does not have anything to do with feeling or attraction.  This love is not so much affection as it is connection, a matter of being with and doing for another.  You don’t even have to like the other, but you do have to love.  This is the love that Jesus empowers in his disciples:  “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain.”  This love is a gift of God to us and through us to others. 

Jesus’ words today are intimate.  “I no longer call you slaves….I have called you friends.”  .  Jesus does not hesitate to offer friendship to all of us.  And he does what good friends always do—he shares his best gifts with us.  One of the most priceless human gifts is friendship.  It allows us to disclose ourselves to and receive from another in complete openness and trust.  Before a friend we can think aloud; with a friend we can participate in one another’s joy and sorrows, hopes and fears; through a friend we can survive loneliness, indifference, hostility.  Small wonder, then that in today’s gospel Jesus calls his disciples by this most precious of names: “my friends.”  Drawn into and abiding in the mutual love of the Father and the Son, disciples are no longer called servants but friends.  By his death Jesus “befriends” the whole world, and it is to such loyal befriending and fruit-bearing in steadfast love that Jesus commissions us as his disciples. 

It was in this love that Ellen lived.  Her celebration of nature and the world around her spoke of an abundance of love and a heart that expanded at the sight of beauty.  There was no need to grab, or hold, or possess this life, as if it were a scarce commodity.  God loves us in all kinds of mysterious ways, not only by making us feel loved, but also through a loving family, dear friends, a community of sisters, the beauty of nature, and in a thousand other ways.  As we are more and more affirmed by love, we become freer and more confident and more able to offer our love to others.  Ellen knew that in her life love was abundant and beyond measure.  Some people are sacramental carriers of divine love.  Their human ability to love is highly developed and it has tapped into a divine grounding and communicates more than just the care of one individual.  Ellen was such a person.

The service of memories stirred in each of us wonderful links to the past of life shared with Ellen that we will take into the future.  She loved each person freely, as a gift, and loved in a way that freed the other to be exactly who she needed to be in that circumstance.  Caryn, Valerie, and Gracie, you were cherished by Ellen.  Marlene, it is never expected by a person and always comes as a surprise to have a friend.  It is pure blessing.  Friendship allows us to wander into the soul of another.  That is the mystery and awe of friendship.  Marlene you received and gave that gift.

We heard Ellen’s poetry and of her creativity.  Parker Palmer writes: “An act cannot be creative if it is not born of freedom.  In creative action, our desire is not to “solve” or “succeed” or “survive” but to give birth to something new; we want, for a while, to be less creaturely and more like the creator.”  Through her creativity and poetry she transcended this life and began her walk into the next.

Today we both mourn and rejoice.  We mourn for a woman we love.  So our mourning is a sign of our love.  We have been privileged to have had what is most precious in human life.  Our mourning signifies our privilege.  Those who have never loved will never mourn.  Their hearts will never be broken.  Perhaps it is not really for ourselves that we should mourn but for those who never in life have had the chance of knowing Ellen.  And perhaps it is not only for Ellen that we rejoice.  We rejoice that through her we can glimpse something of the simple pattern of God’s plan for each of us—the story of the bread, taken, blessed, broken and given.  It is the story of Jesus rewritten in every life but clearer in some than in others. 

Christian faith does not pretend that the death of any human being is other than a mystery, and one that causes deep pain and loss.  The affirmation of faith which we are asked to make is too profound and important to be easy.  We are confident that Ellen is enjoying a fullness of life with God that is beyond our human comprehension:  a fulfillment that for her will last forever.  In the words of a great Indian poet and mystic, “Death is not extinguishing the light, but putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”

Sister Christine Vladimiroff has served as prioress of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie since 1998. She is a past president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), which represents more than 73,000 U.S. Catholic sisters. A voice for change in the Church and in society, Sister Christine's articles have appeared in National Catholic Reporter and SALT Publishing. She was CEO and president of Second Harvest from 1987 until 1998 and continues to be one of the nation's leading authorities on the issues of hunger and poverty.