In the earliest attempts at the reform of our Catholic liturgy, as directed by Vatican II, the text of the Mass of Requiem, known from the first word of its entrance song, was replaced by a text called “the Mass of the Resurrection.”
An important thing happened in the first blush of that liturgical change. People discovered that, with all the new emphasis on the hope for resurrection of the dead with Christ, mourners had no fitting ritual way to express their grief. The celebration of the joys of the last day, which no one but Jesus had experienced in their fullness, not even the blessed, was premature. The church’s prayer was calling on people to rejoice and be glad, when at the moment their greatest need was to grieve.
And so, quietly, almost imperceptibly, after a year or two, the triumphant “Mass of the Resurrection” yielded to the more realistic "Mass of Christian Burial.” Its prayers and readings are filled with faith, but they are less euphoric. The Lord will in the future wipe away the tears from every eye - but not now. The person who is dead has been totally freed from the power of sin-but we who live on have not! jesus knew something of the glory he was called to-we simply do not. We do not know where our loved ones have been taken to and we want them back. The pain of separation is intense, as it was for jesus' friends after they lost him. We may not forget that the eucharistic meal that we eat commemorates a departure: a wrenching, tearful separation.
Your grief is your own, all the days of your life. Let no-one deprive you of it, not even out of love. Pain is inseparable from love; that is a truth we must live with. It is a proof of our own inner reality, a judgment of ourselves, as to how and with what courage we face and accept that truth.
- Gerard S. Sloyan. From Virginia Sloyan, A Sourcebook about Christian Death. p.102-103.
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