The Power and Significance of Condolence Messages

Often, everything that happens to you is an experience in itself.  In recent years, I’ve been becoming aware about the things that are happening within me and around me.  In other words, I have become sensitive to things, situations, actions, events and incidents.  Probably my own health crises must have added to my already existing nature of being quick to recognise or give words or expressions to such feelings, emotions and movements of the heart. 

A very recently, when my mom passed away I understood the significance of messages of condolence. To accept the passing away of my mom was extremely difficult because we were very intimately connected.  Every second day she would call me over the mobile in the last two years and we would speak for quite a few minutes.  In fact, I learnt the skill of killing the time over the phone through my mom. A great teacher, indeed!

Each condolence message brought a unique message and received with a particular feeling.  It also depended on my relationship with the person, my friendship, acquaintances, etc. 

One thing was common in all, that is, every message brought me consolation and a sense of belonging to a human family where pain is shared by all.  I also found that those who called me over the telephone were brief, cordial, and included a touch of spiritual warmth.  Most of the messages  by e-mail, WhatsApp consisted a sense of prayerful wishes of comfort and support. 

Fr George Griener, SJ, who was my academic guide, mentor and friend while I was pursuing my studies in Berkeley, CA, US  sent me something from Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner,  a part of prayer  which had helped in his own life.  This made me ponder and meditate over the mystery of life. 

"Prayer to the God of the Living" By Karl Rahner

I should like to remember my dead to you, O Lord, all those who once belonged to me and have now left me.  There are many of them, far too many to be taken in with one glance.  If I am to pay my sad greeting to them all, I must rather travel back in memory over the entire route of my life’s journey….

…The true procession of my life however consists only of those bound together by real love, and this column grows shorter and more quiet, until one day I myself will have to break off from the line of march and leave without a word or wave of farewell, never more to return.

That’s why my heart is now with them, with my loved ones who have taken their leave of me.  There is no substitute for them, there are no others who can fill the vacancy when one of those whom I have really loved suddenly and unexpectedly departs and is with me no more.  In true love, no one can replace another, for true love loves the other into that depth where is he uniquely and irreplaceably himself.

Therefore when death has trudged through my life, each of those who have departed has taken something of my heart with them, indeed often my whole heart.  Anyone who has really loved and still loves finds life changed, even before death, into a living with the dead.  For could the one who loves forget his or her dead?  And if someone has really loved, then his ‘forgetting’ and ‘having exhausted his tears’ is not the sign of being comforted again, but of the ultimacy of his mourning, the sign that a piece of his own heart has really died with the dead person and now is living dead, and therefore can no longer weep…..”

Karl Rahner, Prayers for a Lifetime¸ included from his earlier collection, Words Spoken into the Silence, composed when he was 34 years old.

- Olvin Veigas

31 March 2019

4th Sunday of Lent