Farewell Fr. Callam, God Bless You

Fr. Daniel Callam was my RCIA instructor, theology professor, and somewhere near four or five occassions, my confessor. He baptized me on the Easter Vigil of 2007, anointed me with the holy chrism, and was the first to give me the consecrated Lord in the Eucharist. He is an amazing homilist and he will be dearly missed by everyone at the University of St. Thomas. May God continually bless his faithful servant. He has always been in my eyes, in persona Christi.

"The Parting of Friends"
My Last Sermon at UST: 22 June 2008
Daniel Callam, C.S.B.

"No longer do I call you servants, . . .
but I have called you friends."[1]

The nineteenth century was an age of high rhetoric. In America Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to name only two, are virtually synonymous with eloquence in speech and in print. In England Prime Minister William Gladstone, e.g., could hold the attention of Parliament for hours with a power that few could equal but which many could approach. Among these great rhetoricians none was more gifted than the Reverend John Henry Newman, and among his sermons none is more touching than “The Parting of Friends,” which he delivered in Littlemore on 25 September 1843. The chapel had been built by Newman seven years before to accommodate the people of the village that, lying about three miles from Oxford, was part of Newman’s charge as vicar of the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin. On that autumn evening it was packed to the doors and beyond with parishioners who had assembled to listen to what was to be the last sermon preached by Newman as an Anglican minister. He was shortly to resign from his position and then, after a period of intense study and prayer, be received into the Catholic Church two years later, on 9 October 1845.

Newman resorted to Scripture to examine the various situations where friends separate, beginning and ending his remarks with Jesus’s tender farewell to his disciples at the Last Supper, but including also Jacob fleeing the wrath of his brother, Esau, David separating from Jonathan, Ishmael from the house of Abraham, Naomi from her other daughter-in-law, not Ruth but Orpah, Paul from his disciples, and later from Timothy. Newman’s message is thus a profound exploration of a certain theme of the sacred text: “Scripture,” he said, “is a refuge in any trouble.” He concluded with a melancholy description of himself leaving the congregation at Littlemore, which was by then universally in tears. He kept his distance from the emotion of the moment by describing himself in the third person. The sentence is long and highly rhetorical, but if the simple people of Littlemore could understand it 160 years ago, surely you can today. Here it is: And, O my brethren, O kind and affectionate hearts, O loving friends, should you know any one whose lot it has been, by writing or by word of mouth, in some degree to help you . . . ; if he has ever told you what you knew about yourselves, or what you did not know; has read to you your wants or feelings, and comforted you by the very reading; has made you feel that there was a higher life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that you see; or encouraged you, or sobered you, or opened a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed; if what he has said or done has ever made you take interest in him, and feel well inclined towards him; remember such a one in time to come, though you hear him not, and pray for him, that in all things he may know God's will, and at all times he may be ready to fulfil it.[2]

What is striking about this passage is Newman’s extensive use of the imagery of death, although the final sentence indicates the Newman is not dead but removed from them—as good as dead, in any case. I would ask you to recognize an implication of this feature of the sermon, viz., that every parting is a sort of dying. I cast my mind back over my own life and the various “partings of friends” that I have experienced. I left home to go to the seminary in 1954. How many people “died” to me then, in that I never saw them again or they me! I call to mind fellow students from my days at the University of Toronto or some of my high-school students that I have not seen since 1973, when I left Canada for graduate school in England. They may be dead, they may think that I am dead, they are as good as dead to me, so absolute has been our separation. Alas, is it not the case that many of you here, who have become dear to me, will never see me again?

What are we as Christians to make of this sobering fact? It is this: we must regard these separations—which have something of the nature of dying—as a sort of foretaste of that radical rupture that will take place at the end of our lives. Our attitude towards them should therefore partake of our attitude towards death itself. And what should that be? Listen to Saint Paul: O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.[3]

Each of us will die, but for us Christians death is viewed as the portal to eternal life, and therefore not as making an end to friendship or to any of those good things that have given us joy and pleasure. Something similar must be true of these miniature deaths that occur in the course of every life. I think Shakespeare’s Juliet knew that when she call parting a “sweet sorrow.” Romeo’s departure is a sorrow, but it is only a sorrow because his company has been sweet, and she knows that it will be sweet again. In the drama, that promise of renewed sweetness is ultimately lost in death. But in Christ Jesus, nothing good will be permanently lost. Juliet’s “sweet sorrow” may be complemented by Saint Thomas More’s words to his executioner on the scaffold: Pray for me, as I will for thee, that we may meet merrily in heaven.

In the light of these remarks, Our Lord’s words taken on additional meaning: whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.[4] Do you see what I’m getting at? Life requires us to move on; nothing is static. Only by embracing the changes, including the separations demanded by circumstances, can we maintain the relationships that sustain us. Let me give you an ordinary example, one that everyone here knows at first hand: a child grows up and leaves home, as he must. No sensible parent resents the maturing of his child; to keep him in the home is really to lose him. Let us therefore give ourselves totally to the experiences that continually confront us, with the assurance that in Christ nothing worthwhile will ever be lost. And, like Newman, let us turn for comfort to the sublime words Jesus addressed to his disciples at the Last Supper as recorded in chapters 14-17 of Saint John’s Gospel.

The first thing that we learn is that he cares for us: When Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.[5] The disciples, like us, grieved at the threat of separation: the hour had come to depart. But Jesus speaks to us today as he spoke to them: Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me.[6] Then he informed of them of the coming Comforter, the Holy Spirit: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the [Comforter] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.[7] The role of the Comforter is to unveil the mystery of God’s action in Jesus Christ, and as a consequence the mystery of our own lives, which insofar as they are Christian mirror the life of Jesus. Specifically, we note that the life of Jesus remained mysterious until it was complete, until he had died and risen from the dead. It may be compared to the beauty of a melody that cannot be fully grasped until every note has been played. Similarly, the statement we are making by our lives will not be complete until we die. In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “it’s not over till it’s over.” What I wish to suggest here is the same holds true for episodes in our life. We cannot understand our adolescence until we are adults, or even the full significance of a friendship until the parting has taken place. And here I recall Our Lord’s promise about the work of the Holy Spirit: When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.[8] “All truth” includes the truth about ourselves as well as the truth about Jesus, in detail as well as overall. Thus, in the light of these solemn statements of our Redeemer we can begin to appreciate the consoling words that come in the closing pages of the Bible, in the Apocalypse, “And he who sat upon the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’”[9] Let me paraphrase this sentence to convey something of the range of its meaning: Behold, I shall restore to their full and vivid reality all the goodness and joy of every experience that the redeemed bring with them into eternal life.

Newman concluded his sermon by referring to himself in the third person. In doing so he echoed Saint Paul who used the same device in describing his mystical experiences: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven.[10] I too know a man, who came to Houston eleven years ago from a distant land. In the course of his stay he discovered new meaning in Jesus’s words, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”[11] It was for him as if the Bible had come to life. He virtually lived the parable of the Good Samaritan, but as if told from the point of view of the victim. At the end of the parable, Our Lord asked his interlocutor, “Who proved to be a neighbour to the man who fell among thieves?”[12] The answer to the question in this case is not merely one good Samaritan, but many who in a steady stream came to the inn where the stranger had been placed. And they gave him, not physical sustenance but spiritual nourishment in the witness of a vital faith, of genuine charity, of intelligent discourse, and of an inextinguishable hope for the eternal vision of God. To him, one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, be all might and majesty, all worship and adoration, now and for evermore. Amen.

[1] Jn 15.15
[2] J.H. Newman, “The Parting of Friends,” Sermons on Subjects of the Day. Preached at Littlemore on 25 September 1843.
[3] 1 Cor 15.55-57.
[4] Matt 16.25.
[5] Jn 13.1.
[6] Jn 14.1.
[7] Jn 16.7.
[8] Jn 16.13.
[9] Rev. 21.5
[10] 2 Cor 12.2.
[11] Matt 25.35.
[12] Lk 10.36-37.