Hidden from Our Eyes (funeral homily)

 

Hidden from our Eyes

27 May 2015

Homily preached at 2 p.m. Sung Rite I Funeral with Eucharist

For Fredric Martin Latty

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)

Matthew 5:3-12

God, give us hearts to feel and love. Take away our hearts of stone,

and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

Fred and his family asked for most of the details of today’s service: sung Rite I, Holy Eucharist Prayer 1, incense, and bells.  He also asked for the beatitudes as the Gospel.

Jesus’ beatitudes suffer from our familiarity with them. We think the beatitudes are moral targets, the way Jesus wants us to be: be-attitudes.  Not so!  Beatus in Latin means “blessed.”  A beatitude is just a phrase that starts with the word “blessed.”

Jesus’ society, like ours, praised certain things, and called certain people happy or blessed.  But Jesus turns these on their head.  “It’s a good thing to be hungry, it’s a good thing to be poor, it’s a good thing to mourn, to be excluded.”  Really?

Obviously, whatever it was that the historical Jesus said, it troubled his followers.  Both Matthew and Luke interpret these sayings in very different ways, a sign that Christians then struggled with these sayings just as we do. 

Jesus turns conventional views on their head.  Some things, let’s admit it, are just bad:  starvation, hardship, sorrow at a loved one’s death, social exclusion.   Some things are just good: having enough food and money to provide for yourself and family, being well.  But Jesus is not so sure. 

It’s easy to think that God blesses good people with good things and punishes bad people with bad things.  But Jesus knows that bad things can happen to the good and that the evil can prosper.  He says, “You misunderstand what a blessing or a curse is. Things are not as they appear.” 

Announcing the coming of God’s reign, Jesus sees God at work exactly where we expect not to find him: hunger, yearning, dependence, and vulnerability are all signs of God’s active presence and saving work, not marks of God’s curse or punishment.

It is important, profound theology.  He is not making light of suffering, or saying, “it’s not all that bad.”   He knows that hunger, sickness, grinding poverty, misery, deprivation, grief, and deadly exclusion inflicted on marginalized people are all truly intolerable and not what God wants.   He is not trivializing suffering, but magnifying grace.   God is the answer to, not the source, of horror.

Isaiah 45:15 says “Truly you are a God who hides himself, the God and Savior of Israel.”   St. Thomas Aquinas draws from this to develop his doctrine of Deus Absconditus, the Hidden God.   God by definition is hidden, but if you have faith in God, it is God whom you must wholly trust.

Horror, Evil, Death in the world—these are not evidence that God does not exist.  Rather, the fact that we revolt against them and find them intolerable is one of the strongest evidences of God.  Our idea of justice and right cannot grow merely from this messed up world we live in.  Rather, it comes from God himself, imprinted in the creation of God bearing God’s image, written in our hearts.  Immanuel Kant expresses this when he says that he finds evidence for God not just in how the stars are moved above, but also in how our hearts and minds are moved.  

Buddhism teaches that all suffering comes from attachment; getting rid of all desire will end suffering.   Christianity teaches that while we must learn acceptance and patience, it is all right to feel the discomfort and pain caused by need and dissatisfaction with wrong.  In fact, it is essential because God is at work in such need and discomfort.  

Each of the beatitudes includes dissatisfaction: hunger, grief, need.  Mourning is unhappiness at the loss of a loved one, not a state of acceptance.  Neediness and hunger do not describe satisfaction, but desire for something different that what we now have. 

Reinhold Niebuhr's great "Serenity Prayer" is misnamed.  It is not a prayer only for serenity to accept the things we cannot change.  It also prays for courage to change the things we can.  It also asks for wisdom to know to distinguish between the two.  

God at work in the day-to-day things of life, even its horrors, is a key idea in Jesus’ preaching, his announcement that “God’s Reign is in your midst”. 

So how does this apply to us today? 

We love Fred, but no longer see him.  This does not mean he no longer exists.  Fred lost his kidney function three years ago through a medical accident, and this is eventually what killed him, after years of suffering through dialysis.  But this does not mean that he was abandoned, or punished, or left to random chance.   It does not mean that we are abandoned to random chance.  It does not mean that God is not here present in these shocking reminders of our own mortality. 

God is there, where we least expect to find him, says Jesus.  Blessed are the poor.  Blessed are the sick.  Blessed are the dead. 

Fred was an honest man, one who recognized his own doubts, fears, and failings.  But his faith was that God was made human in the little baby Jesus, and somehow God acted to save us by submitting to unjust torture and death by the Roman Empire.  Fred knew that faith was having hope and trust exactly in the places where we doubt the most. 

This very traditional funeral is a Mass of the Resurrection, a celebration of hope in the face of death, of confidence in the face of sickness, and of grateful joy in the face of all it means to be human, good and bad. 

Thank God for such hope, confidence, and joy.  And thank God for our brother Fred.

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Three-ness (Mid-week)

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Three-ness

May 27, 2015

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, the patronal feast of Trinity churches all over the world.  The doctrine of the Trinity is an invitation into the deeper and deeper mystery and beauty of God.  Richard of St. Victor, a canon priest under the rule of St. Augustine who died in Paris in 1173, taught in his book on the Trinity that for God to be truth, God had to be one; for God to be love, God had to be two; and for God to be joy, God had to be three! 

We often miss the point, being seduced by the categorical definition of the doctrine that became common in the Western Latin-speaking Church (seen, for instance, the Quicunque Vult or so-called creed of Saint Athanasius, BCP pp. 864-865).   The Western view emphasizes the names “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” and what each represents and does not represent. 

The earlier Eastern view, the teaching of the 4^th Century Cappadocian Fathers who developed the doctrine in the first place, was less static, and more dynamic:  the roles and interactions, the relationships were the emphasis.  In this view, it mattered only somewhat whether you used the terms “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” or other terms emphasizing the timeless relationships: Speaker, Word, and Medium of Sound, Parent, Child, Uniting Bond; Mother, Daughter, Shared Love; Light, Reflection, and Brightness; Spring, Reservoir, and Stream.    The Orthodox image for this is perichoresis, the divine dance of the three roles (personae in Latin, or prosopoi in Greek).   The shape of the doctrine is that God is social, God is love:  the transcendent, the personal, and the immanent. 

As we prepare to celebrate the feast day for our church sharing the name Trinity, this little part of Christ’s Church, I invite us to reflect on relationships we have in our lives, and especially those at Church.  How do we participate in the divine dance? 

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+  

First Fruits (Pentecost B)

“First Fruits”

Pentecost B
24 May 2015; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 

at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

RCL: Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104: 25-35, 37; Romans 8:22-27; John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

The Pew Research Center in the last couple of weeks put out the results of a new poll detailing shifts in the American religious landscape: the trend toward irreligion and non-affiliation seen in the last 25 years continues to advance.   Some commentators remarked, “Doom!  The end of American Christianity!”  Others said, “New ways of experiencing God are clearly here!  Some remain very much Christian, though different from what has gone before. At least people come to Church now for the right reasons! Christianity is at its best when its counter-cultural!”  This week, the people of Ireland voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to amend their constitution and allow marriage equality for both same sex and opposite sex couples.  Again, some cried “Doom!  The end of morality and marriage!”  Most said, “Thank God for fair-minded and unbigoted people!”   Many in our church see the hand of God in both trend lines.  

Seeing the loving hand of God in the world about us is what Pentecost is about.  Seeing God’s prodigal and overwhelming abundance in this sparse and stingy world about us, is what today is all about.  Breaking through old boundaries and life-denying rules is what this day is all about. 
 

The Feast of Pentecost marks the end of the great 50 days of Easter, and the resumption of what the Church calls, prosaically, ordinary time.  Most Christians, harking back to Sunday School explanations as children, know Pentecost as the “Church’s birthday.”   And Sunday School prodigies know that we wear red for the spirit, but call this day Whitsunday because in the old days all those being baptized on this special day wore white.
 

This day was a festival day even before we Christians got to it with our story of tongues of fire.  As we read, they are all gathered together on the great Jewish festival day Shavuot, or Weeks, 50 days after Passover.  There were only three great pilgrim feasts:  days when Jews were required to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem to offer sacrifice in the Temple:  Passover, in the late winter and early spring, a sign of liberty and deliverance from slavery.  Shavuot, 50 days later, was the festival of the earliest wheat harvest.  Then in the fall, Succoth, or booths, celebrated the full harvest, something like our Thanksgiving Day. 

Shavuot was a festival of the first fruits, where the very earliest produce of the agricultural year was becoming available.  In those days, you stored food by drying it, salting it, perhaps smoking it, and saving roots in cool cellars.  By late winter, your larder was pretty low, and the memory of fresh fruits and vegetables very vague at best, but tantalizing.   The earliest produce of the new year, the grain from wheat or barley sown midwinter from last year’s seed stock was an important sign that the hardship was over, that more and better was on its way. 

When I was in Galilee two weeks ago, the hills were covered with wildflowers in bloom; a few were green with tall young wheat shoots starting to bend with heavy seed heads full of grain.  

On Shavuot, this first produce was given back to God in thanks as a sacrifice, and then you held a big party with food still stored from last year, a prodigal sign that you had confidence that plenty of fresh food was on its way.    

It is this very image—first fruits—that Paul uses in today’s epistle reading to describe the Spirit.  Paul describes the world in which we live as an early spring on the verge of new produce.  He says the spirit in our lives is like this new wheat harvest, the first fruits, the earliest of agricultural produce in the spare and barren early spring, after larders have run bare:  it is a sign of better things to come, and more and more life and abundance.  Changing metaphors, he describes us as a woman in labor, suffering great pain in hope of a new life being delivered.  The spirit is a sign that the baby will be born, and the pain will end.

Pain and shortage, and the doubt and confusion that comes with them, is what the spirit counteracts.  It makes us, despite our inability sometimes to even know or express what we desire or feel, available to God.  “The spirit intercedes for us in groaning too deep for words” he says.  (Romans 8:22-27)

Paul elsewhere says this: “God … establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us, by putting his seal on us and giving us his Spirit in our hearts as a first installment” (2 Cor 1: 20-22). 

Paul says that God’s Spirit in us is a seal, that is, a symbol and authenticating sign of the genuineness of our faith and the reliability of God’s promises.   He says it is “anointing,” like God pouring rich olive oil over us, also a sign of prodigal blessing, the one that made a person a king or a priest in ancient Israel.  He says the spirit is the “First installment,” of good things to come, an image from finances and loans: the first, partial, payment of a much greater sum to come. 

Elsewhere, Paul says that the presence of the Spirit in our lives is a guarantee of greater things to come.  Again reflecting on the uncertainty and confusion of claims that we meet in daily life, he writes, 

“For in this tent [our body] we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling--if indeed, when we have taken it off we will not be found naked.   For while we are still in this tent, we groan under our burden, because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.  So we are always confident; even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord--for we walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Cor 5:4-7)."

If God’s spirit in us is all these things—a seal, a sign of genuineness, a promise of better things on their way—then how do we know God’s Spirit is with us?   Paul once again tells us:

“Live by the Spirit… the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  (Gal 5: 16, 22) 

So “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” are fruits of the Spirit, and the spirit is a seal of the sureness of God’s promises.  The spirit is a down payment on the whole of God’s promises, as well as first fruits of an abundant and rich summer-long harvest. 

Sisters and brothers at Trinity:  Our hearts need hope for the future, and grounds for full and unreserved trust in God.  The Holy Spirit, poured out upon the Church on the Feast of First Fruits, is our greatest builder of hope and trust.  It warms our hearts, and makes Jesus present for us.  It is God active and working in our hearts, our lives, and our community the Church. 

May we learn to hear its whispers, and recognize its thunderings, be warmed at its gently burning hearth, and also be purified in its raging fire.   If we let our lives be marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, this fire will burn through all the world.  

In the name of God, Amen.

 

Fury and Silence (mid-week message)

Fury and silence

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

May 20, 2015

This coming Sunday is Pentecost, the commemoration of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Church ten days after Jesus’ Ascension.  The story we read from Acts 2 is all about fury, sound, and power:  the rushing of great winds, a rain of tongues of fire, and the multitude speaking in other people’s languages.  At both 8 and 10, we will be having a windchime procession and chorus to accompany the reading, as well as ribbon flags (mainly red and yellow) to wave from the pews whenever the spirit is mentioned.  We invite everyone to wear red to help celebrate this birthday of the Church. 

The Pentecost epistle reading from Romans 8 tells a different story, where the spirit is present in our hearts to silently help us pray when we can’t find the right words or even thoughts:    “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” 

While the flashy noise of rushing winds and jabbering foreign languages, all dolled up in red, makes a pretty picture of the power of God, I think that for most of us, the spirit is present in the silence of expression that cannot find words.   The contrast is shown in the story of Elijah (1 Kings 18-19). 

On Mount Carmel, Elijah challenged the priests of Baal to the great “Who hears our Prayers?” contest:  Their noisy, self-flagilating prayers led to mere silence.  “Is your God sleeping?”  taunts Elijah, “or perhaps in the loo?” Then his prayers are answered by a flash of lightning and fire from heaven that consumes his sacrifice.  Flash, fury, and noise is the sign of the true God in this contest, and Elijah’s God wins.  But then Elijah must flee for his life, and he hides in a cave in Mt. Horeb.  “A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing the rocks, before the Lord, but the Lord was no longer in the whirlwind.  Then an earthquake, but the Lord was no longer in the earthquake.  And then a fire, but God was not in the fire.  Finally, there was a still breeze, and the sound of sheer silence.  And when Elijah heard this, he hid his face in his cloak” because he knew God was there. 

Listening to silence, contemplating quietness, waiting for subtlety—these are the hallmarks of a life devoted to pursuit of the spirit.  The flash, fury, and noise might on occasion happen, but usually God speaks to us in the silence of our stumbling hearts, seeking coherent expression and understanding. 

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+   

  

As We Are One (Easter 7B)

 

“As We Are One”

Easter 7B 
17 May 2015; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass 
Homily Delivered by the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 
at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon 
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; Psalm 1; 1 John 5:9-13; John 17:6-19

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

It’s good to be back here at Trinity, after my pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Elena’s pilgrimage as grandmother and mother to Seattle.  The children took good care of her, and my brother and sister members of the Society of Catholic Priests took good care of me.  Here at Trinity, retired clergy and the baptized rallied around Jane Norris as she died, visiting her, following her instructions and emptying her apartment after she died, and giving her a wonderful sendoff in the Thursday Bible Study group this week.   And we have rallied behind the Latty family with Fred’s death on Wednesday.   We are all so blessed, even amid painful things. 

In Jerusalem, several of my fellow pilgrims came back one evening with a frightening tale:  while walking through the Old City in Christian clerical collars, they were surrounded by teenage boys, shouting in Arabic “Allahu Akhbar!” (God is Great!) and pointing at them with imaginary AK-47s and shooting.  “Typical adolescent schoolboy nonsense!” was the stolid comment of one the male priests, definitely CoE and used to the insolence of 15-year old male students.  But a sister priest expressed her heart, “It was scary.  And I pray to Jesus for those boys.”  

This week, there was another huge earthquake in Nepal.  The niece of Anne McCollum, a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small rural village 2 hours outside of Katmandu, was brought back home to Redding CA because the Peace Corps announced a mandatory draw down, for a minimum of 90 days, of volunteers in that beautiful, but now tormented, country.   

This week an Amtrak passenger train in Pennsylvania derailed, injuring hundreds and killing eight.  And we were reminded of public horror and the enduring power of the death penalty in the U.S. in the Boston Marathon bomber verdict. 

It is a scary world.  That is the constant background noise we must hear behind the Gospel reading today, part of the last supper story told by the Gospel of John.    Here, the night on which Jesus is betrayed, he prays.  And what does he pray for?  For us.  He prays for his disciples and for those who will come to believe because they hear their words.  He prays for us: “I am asking on their behalf; … on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.   … Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”   

He doesn’t ask that we escape the scary world.  He doesn’t ask that everything go easily for us.  Facing his last trial and torment, he sends us on the road ahead, knowing that we will end up facing the same kind of trial and torment. 

And he prays:  Protect them, father.  Make them holy.  Make them one.  May they be comfort and support for each other just as you are my comfort and support.  May they love each other as we love each other.  May they be one as we are one. 

I think that is why this Maundy Thursday reading is chosen for today’s lectionary, the Sunday after the Ascension and before Pentecost: it is about us getting on in the world after Jesus has left us, facing the scary world that he faced.  It is about how we get by, how we find faith, how we don’t lose hope.  How we overcome our petty differences and power struggles and actually help each other, love each other, and comfort, comfort, comfort. 

In Luke’s telling in his Gospel and Acts, this is because of the Spirit that Jesus sends us on Pentecost ten days after he finally leaves us at Ascension, flying up on a cloud to a heaven we cannot see.  In John’s telling, Jesus breathes this spirit on us the evening of Easter when he first appears to us.   How we find faith and comfort and strength, how we find God present is told differently in these different stories.

But in today’s story, it is because Jesus prays for us.  Prays for our safety, for our good, that we not be twisted and distorted by the ugly things we see or do.  That we be one with each other and one with him and his Father. 

Church unity is a nice slogan and a beautiful ideal.  But how it often has played out in our history has been like this: one group or faction uses force to make the others conform to their ideals of the good and orthodox.  It might be brutal and ugly, like the inquisition or the religious wars between various sects, or it might be tarted up and prettified, like when Methodists, Mennonites, or Mormons talk about “laboring with” a disaffected brother or sister, “counseling in love,” that is, browbeating them until they submit.  But it is the same:  force and bullying to achieve the appearance of unity, a simulacrum of consent.   In the Episcopal Church, with our democratic forms of governance and decision-making, we pass resolutions in General Convention, winners take all and losers be damned.  We might not browbeat, but the invitation to walk out the door if you can’t get along with us is implicit in our ever polite, procedure-bound seeking of the same ersatz imitation of union and one-heartedness.  Sometimes I think we might be better off by drawing lots, like the eleven in today’s reading form Acts. 

I believe that one of the great ways to avoid such imitations is to wipe away in our minds the division between us and them, between the righteous and what John’s Jesus calls the ‘world.’  Curiously, unity is possible when we stop insisting on having things our way. 

False unity is not what Jesus is praying for.  This is not what he hopes for us:  “May they be one as you and I, father, are one.”    Unconstrained sharing.  Heartfelt agreement.  Common ground, common life.  A great harmony of song, not a unison monotone.  A perichoresis, or delicate dance of submitting and asserting, cooperating, and loving every minute of it.  “One as we are one.” 

We live in a scary world, one where charity has limits, compassion gets fatigued, and everybody at one time or another is on the make.  One where living the truth of God’s gentle love can get you hurt, and speaking truth to power can get you killed.    And so Jesus prays for us.  As we must pray for each other, and for all. 

In the name of God, Amen.

  

A Pilgrim's Preferences (Mid-week)

The High Altar at the Heptapegon Church, Tabgha, 

traditional site of the feeding of the 5,000.  Note fourth century 

loves and fishes mosaic before altar.   

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

May 13, 2015

A Pilgrim’s Preferences

I got back from my pilgrimage to the Holy Land yesterday, full of memories, reflections, and wonder. 

The untenable and highly contentious political situation in the State of Israel and the Occupied Territories made me acutely aware of the power of narrative.  The Palestinians tell one set of stories about the land, their place in it, and the Israelis’ role.  The Israelis tell another set of stories.  Jews, Muslims, and Christians all tell different stories as well.  The stories have the power to make us a community, and set boundaries between us and outsiders, between friend and foe.    The stories of the holy sites were also as divisive as they were uniting:  nasty fighting over control of the sites and the income they represent means that a site as sacred as the Holy Selpulcher is constantly divided in its administration and unable to make proper repairs and upkeep; the Eastern Orthodox had a different site for the Annuciation to the Blessed Virgin from that of the Roman Catholics.  And we are not even talking about Jewish or Muslim sites here…

Talking to the Palestinian Dean of St. George’s Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem, I heard a powerful plea:  do not pray for Palestinians or Israelis, for Arabs (Muslim or Christian) or Jews.  Rather pray for all the people of this area, children of Abraham, as a single community: “May God help us to listen to each other’s stories and find a common life.”  

People have asked me since I came back what I found most important: the places we visited, the people on the trip with us, or the practices we shared (daily Morning and Evening Prayer, Compline, and daily Mass, as well as readings and prayers at all the sites).  Clearly, meeting and getting to know the other pilgrims was the best thing, hearing their stories and anecdotes, and listening to the cadences of their prayer books (English, Australian, and American).   The prayer practices and the scripture readings were next:  the stories told us by the ancient writers, and the stories and prayers we read to God.   Only then did the sites acquire significance and meaning, even with the nagging historical and theological problems often presented by their “traditional” explanations.   

When Diana Butler Bass was here in March, she talked about faith and religion being about belonging, behaving, and believing.    In my pilgrimage experience, this reads as people, practice or prayer, and the stories about the places. 

In Bethlehem, I saw a beautiful large Jerusalem Cross of dark and light olive wood.  It reminded me of the wood inside Trinity.  I brought it back, and it is now over the Narthex entrance.    The image of a single Greek Cross in the midst of a field of four others is a symbol of gathered Christian community from the four corners of the world.   It is a symbol of expanding community. 

I hope we can continue to expand the circle of those whose stories we listen to, and the practices which we are willing to taste and experience. 

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+

Holy Sepulcher (Midweek)

Fr. Tony's Midweek Message
May 7, 2015
Holy Sepulcher
(Posted from near the New Gate, Jerusalem Old City)

My traveling brother and sister priests said Morning Prayer a few minutes ago in the Chapel of the Finding of the True Cross in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher, traditional site of the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Christ.  Seeing the sights, visiting the shrines, kissing the relics--all have left me with mixed feelings.  I was warmed and overcome by a sense of gratitude for the people and events thus commemorated.  I was also struck by the centuries of hucksterism profiting from the gullibility and simple faith of countless pilgrims--as well as the nasty partisanship for control over the holy sites and the promotion of competing claimed "true sites."  Martin Luther had a similar reaction when he went as an Augustinian monk on pilgrimage to Rome: his rejection of relics and indulgences was sparked in reaction to his horror of abuses he saw in his  pilgrimage to Rome.   

There is a Zen story about a master who points to the moon and asks his disciple, "What is that?"  "The moon," is the answer.  "No.  It is my pointing hand" replies the master.    For me, the sites and relics are hands pointing toward Jesus, not the holy one himself.    And the petty infighting about control of the sites might be the fingers of the closed pointing hand that actually are pointing away from the moon. 

I got news this morning about the death of parishioner Jane Norris, for whom I have been praying  all week, together with prayers for Fred Latty.  I read the news on my phone email as I was waiting in line to enter the Shrine of the Holy Sepulcher-itself, to kiss the stone bed traditionally said to be where the body of Jesus was lain and from which he was raised.  I prayed for Jane and for us all. 

With hope for the resurrection  I send grace and peace,

Fr. Tony+