I just watched the funeral mass for Father David Ayotte, a parish priest at St. Monica’s here in Santa Monica who we recently lost to pancreatic cancer. It was incredibly moving, especially the remarks made by his sister, Maureen.
Part of the Mass included a quote by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that strongly resonated with me.
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
I thought, also, of the Albert Einstein quote:
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”
As I age, I can feel my light becoming separated from itself in two directions at once. To the left of time, like the rocky planets, it is precipitating out of solution. To the right of time, like the gas giants, it is burning up.
What is the difference between me and the 20-year-old in the pew beside me? I believe my brain interprets time’s axis as longer than hers does. To achieve the speed of light, I am having to dip lower and soar higher.
To dip below the baseline (equator) is to spin in one direction; to rise above it is to spin in reverse.
My favorite part of Father Dave’s funeral was a story told by Father Brendan McGuire in which he compared death to a ship as it sails out of sight. As its sails fill with wind and it picks up speed, we watch from the shore as it disappears at the horizon. “There she goes!” we say. But at the same moment, there is another horizon where the ship is just coming into view. “Here she comes!” they say, on that more distant shore.
