Funeral: Fr. Dan Shanahan, OP
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
OLW, NOLA
While
we live, death has a job to do – an unpleasant but necessary task:
to keep front and center in our minds the hard truth that the when
and where of our living has a limit. We come into the world –
body and soul – at a particular time and a particular place. We
live for a number of years, moving toward our end: the natural limit
of our time. At the appointed moment, the soul separates from the
body and goes on to its judgment. For those of us left behind – the
still living – death calls us together then to remember. And if
those left behind are followers of Christ, death demands that we do
more than merely remember the dead. We are to pray for them; more
specifically, we are pray for them in the hope of the resurrection.
Jesus answers his opponents, “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever
hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life
and will not come to condemnation, but has passed from death to
life.” On December 21, 2019, here at OLW, Fr. Dan Shanahan, 85yo,
and 56yrs a Dominican friar, passed from life to death. We are here
to pray that he will come to rest in the Lord. As followers of
Christ, we pray in the hope of the resurrection that he will find his
end: life eternal.
Well,
death has done its job. Here we all are. Gathered together to
remember a brother, to pray for him, and to set firmly in our hearts
and minds the witness he bore to Christ's mercy while he lived. Dan
has taken on a new ministry, the strange ministry of the dead to the
living. Though he is absent from our daily lives, he is always
present in our lives of prayer. We won't see Dan at table ever again.
Nor hear him sing the Cream of Wheat commercial jingle. Nor listen to
him recite one of his favorite soliloquies from Shakespeare. We will,
however, know that he is with us when we pray. He heard the Word of
God and he believed in the One who sent the Christ into the world.
Knowing this, each time we pray, Dan bears witness, reminding us that
there is a limit to the when and where of our living. Reminding us to
look beyond the “witchery of paltry things that obscure what is
right” and find our purpose, our telos, in the doing of
God's will, in the doing of all that we vowed to do at baptism.
Paul
asks the Romans the question every Christian should be asked at every
funeral: “Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ
Jesus were baptized into his death?” When we speak of the dead we
often say, “He has passed” or “She passed peacefully.” We
mean “passed from life to death.” But the Christian has already
died in baptism. So, in one sense, a Christian cannot die. What is
dead cannot die again. In another, a Christian cannot die b/c he has
has been reborn to eternal life, rising from the waters of baptism a
new creation, a creature who shares in the Divine Life of Christ.
Just as we rose from baptism as new men and women, so we hope to rise
again from our passing from this world, placing our faith and love in
the hands of the Just Judge to see us brought to the wedding feast.
We lift our brother Dan before the throne of God and pray that on the
last day he comes fully into the light. And we earnestly pray that we
will be standing next to him, looking into the face of the God he
served, and say along with him, “Marvelous!”*
*This is the only word Fr. Dan would say in the last two years of his life.
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