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| Mathilde Roussel Giraudy "lifes of grass" |
The pastor’s Mothers’ Day homily was masterful…but in the end, he was just a guy, well-honed logic too dull to cut through the binding cord of loss.
The Opera Turandot was written by Giacomo Puccini – up to the first few lines of the final duet, when the composer died of a heart attack while being treated for throat cancer. The pastor, a lover of Italian Opera, waxed romantic, inspired by the idea that Puccini’s students completed the work he had begun, allowing it to become one of the world’s greatest and most often-performed operatic works. In the same way, he said, that God’s saving work is to be completed by the Church, a mother takes God’s miracle of conception and completes it by nurturing it with her own life.
Wow. I imagined myself shouting “Bravo!” at the end of his homily, as one might do at la Scala in Milan, where Turandot was debuted. How elegantly he had touched each mother’s heart, ennobling them with the holiness of their charge, to bring God’s work to fruition. I did not shout. This was, after all, not an opera hall, but a typically conservative church. But I did hold on to that glow of appreciation for the composition and delivery of his homily. Mother completes the unfinished work of God. Wow.
Then I saw Sarah at the other end of our pew, and tears came to my eyes. She had lost her son a year ago. God’s miracle of conception entrusted to her for completion…. I thought of the burden of maternity, of carrying out the work that God has begun in creating a life, and tears flowed
