The Last Supper, El Greco, c.1568
Readings (New American Bible: Philippines, USA)
Readings (Jerusalem Bible: Australia, England & Wales, India [optional], Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Scotland, South Africa)
Gospel John 15:9-17 (Revised Standard Version – Catholic Edition)
Jesus said to his disciples:
‘As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you;
abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just
as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I
have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be
complete.
‘This is my commandment, that you love one another
as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his
life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No
longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is
doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father
I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed
you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that
whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. This I command
you, to love one another.’
From 1997 to 2000, during a six-year stint as
vocation director of the Columbans in the Philippines, I lived in the Columban
house in Negros Occidental, about an hour and a half south of Bacolod city
where I now live. . One of my companions in the Columban house was the late Fr
Edward Allen, born in the heart of Dublin in September 1906. He died on 3 March
2001. Father Eddie was severely incapacitated by a stroke in December 1998 but
his mind and his sense of humour remained clear, even though his speech was difficult
to understand at times.
In the late 1980s, when I was in charge of the
Columban seminarians in their first year of study in Cebu City, when they were
in the 16-17 age bracket, I invited Father Eddie over to spend some time with
us and to talk about the early days of the Society of St Columban, formally
established on the 29 June 1918. As it happened, Fr Aedan McGrath, born in
Dublin in January 1906 and ordained in 1929, one year ahead of Father Eddie,
happened to arrive. One morning at breakfast they were sitting at two different
tables with groups of students and were eating brown bread, or what Americans
call ‘Irish soda bread’. Virgie, our cook, had been taught by Irish Columban
Sisters how to bake it and she did a good job if it. To my utter astonishment
and delight Father Eddie and Father Aedan, already in their 80s, began to sing
an old music hall song from Dublin that I wasn’t familiar with, Brown Bread. None of us had expected
such early morning entertainment.
Maybe ten years or so later, after Father Eddie has
his stroke, Father Aedan came to visit him in our house in Negros. Father Eddie
didn’t know his old friend was coming. It was evening when he arrived and when
Father Aedan walked into his room Father Eddie’s smile was like a particularly
stunning sunrise. His senior by eight months solved the communication problem
by talking about things he knew Father Eddie was interested in.
About a year after his stroke the nurse called me to
Father Eddie’s room one night around 12 to give him last rites. He said very
clearly, ‘I’m dying’. I anointed him. Those who were present said the prayers
for the dying, sang a couple of hymns and we then said our goodbyes to him. But
after a while it became apparent that he had come through the crisis and would
be with us for a while yet. I went back to bed.
The following morning the nurses were joking with
him, ‘Father, you were only practicing last night!’ There was a palpable sense
of joy around the house, even though we expected him to go within a matter of
days. He lived on for more than a year, outlasting Father Aedan by more than a
year! Father Aedan, whom I thought might be the first Columban to reach 100,
died suddenly at a family gathering in Dublin on Christmas morning 2000.
Both of these priests were full of the joy that
Jesus wants to share with each of us, a joy that is not something on the
surface but rather in the depths of our being. This is the gift that he spoke
about at the Last Supper the night before he died. Father Aedan spent almost
three years in solitary confinement in China from 1950 to 1953 because of his
work there with the Legion of Mary but he didn’t have the slightest touch of
bitterness towards the Chinese people, rather the opposite. [See video below]. Father Eddie in his
55 years in the Philippines, after spending the War years in our seminary in
the USA, never held any position of authority in the Columbans or in a parish.
He was quite happy to be an assistant to younger men. He had an extraordinary
influence on the lives of many young women who found their vocation to the
religious life under his guidance and encouragement.
Despite his physical helplessness in his last
illness he was a source of strength to the nurses taking care of him. Their
joking with him about ‘practising’ for death was to me a profound expression of
their respect and affection for him and indeed of their faith in the
Resurrection, a faith strengthened by the joyful faith of Father Eddie. How
many of us would have that kind of freedom with a much older and sick person?
Those taking care of Father Eddie found this freedom
because of the way he shared with them the joy that Jesus shared with him, a
joy that he wants each of us to have.
The video below includes the one above and tells of an extraordinary event at Father Aedan's funeral.
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