PAROQUIA – Nossa Senhora do ROSÁRIO
Residência Nssa. Sra. de Fátima 27 February, 2015 XLV:1
Trav. Carlos Portes, 171
62.900-000 Russas, Ceará e-mail: [email protected]
Dear Friends, Colleagues, Benefactors, Collaborators & Family:
Jesus Christ had the right idea: Never stay in a grave more than three days. That teaching holds true to this day especially if the grave is not yours. In reality few if any individuals actually go into a grave, but their remains do, while the essential being, the soul, is born into eternity, a transcendental shift that many if not most people accept.
Occasionally an entire being (body and soul) finds himself interred or almost interred. My personal experience is limited in the matter but quite memorable. In novitiate I was “third string” grave digger behind John, the hired man, and Brother Jim, both being most accomplished excavators. I had personally dug graves, always with a shovel, spade or other such implement. However with two such accomplished professionals at my fore, possibilities of my actual function in the job seemed remote.
Yet the Grace of God knows no limits. Both gentlemen were absent (in reserved military maneuvers and annual retreat respectively). Notice arrived of the “departure” of a brother in Christ. Yours-truly was on call with the blessing of the superior and little else. That call seemed simple enough as it could easily be resolved with a pick and shovel. I soon learned that the “shovel” to be used was a backhoe; quick, powerful and accurate, but in my case slow, sloppy and perilous …, since I had never previously operated one.
I quickly learned that it was a functional extension of one’s arm, and like one’s arm at a delicately set dinner table, one could shatter the greater part of an attractive setting (carefully aligned tomb stones in this case) with one awkward move. Slowly I proceeded as time progressed to the hour of burial. Excavation was easy enough as I quickly removed about a ton of earth forming a hole of disproportional dimensions in a “Y” shape some 3 meters deep at one end and perhaps 1 meter at the other; anything but acceptable as a grave. I resorted to the shovel. I began digging at one end and filling the other. In surprisingly little time I had the standard oblong-shaped grave of desired dimensions.
Immediately another problem became most apparent. At almost 2 meters depth, I was personally near or over my head in the grave and, the now-loosened soil of the Mississippi delta, in no way supported my efforts to remove myself. From there (as best as I remember) I used the shovel as a foot support whose elevation was just enough for me to leap and land flat on the external ground surface thus extricating myself from the grave. Quickly I removed the backhoe from sight, stashed the hand tools and exited the scene in time for the funeral to tranquilly proceed with no sign of the preceding dilemmas.
Thus I return to the original point of this message: NEVER DALLY WITHIN A GRAVE. Fortunately Jesus Christ is always one, not only to invite, but also to demonstrate how to resolve a question. He founded and established the Transcendental Universal Christian Faith replete with specifics for immortality and, in fact, personally discharged those specifics TO Immortality up to and including…. exit from a grave.
We celebrate that Transcendence during the Quaresmal-Pascal season in a witness to Him and with Him to the world and to creation. Join us in these celebrations and witness for a:
HAPPY and BLESSED LENT and EASTER!
With blessings in the Risen Christ
Pe. Ed Benya, S.J.