Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends,

Today is a sad day for us in the middle of what is a joyous season — or what is supposed to be. It’s Easter so our hearts and minds should be fixed on the promise of eternal life and the resurrection. That’s our call and duty as Christians. Of course it’s also a time when we’re all wrestling with the effects of this pandemic.

In our own house we have the sadness of saying goodbye to our cat, Marshmallow. He’s 13 and has been healthy and hearty most of those years — so healthy he once weighed 22 pounds in his prime! He’s mostly lazy. He has the loudest purr you’ve ever heard — you can hear it across the house. He had these huge canine teeth that made him look like a saber-tooth cat. He eats non-stop. He loves to be held and to lay in the sun and to be brushed.

He bites your legs when he’s hungry. As soon as you sit in a chair he makes a beeline for your lap. He quietly lays down behind you when you’re cooking so you will nearly trip over him again and again. He can’t get enough of the boys and they can’t get enough of him. He has cancer now and is down to 7 pounds. He still purrs. He still eats. He still loves to be loved. But we’ve come to the end of his journey.

So on Monday we will take him to the vet to pet and hold him till the end. Then the boys want to go and buy balloons to let go into the sky so he has them to play with in Heaven, as they did with our last kitty.

I write all that as a way of saying life goes on — in the midst of the Church’s proclamation of triumph or the nation grappling with a pandemic, life goes on. We live and love and pray and gain and lose and celebrate and mourn in the midst of so many things great and small happening all around us. Our stories are interwoven with the tapestry that is humanity — and the wonder of the Church is that our stories are also interwoven with the tapestry that is divinity too. 

All of the silliness that makes up our lives is part of Christ’s own story. Our loves and losses are blessed by his becoming one man in one place for a time to dwell, celebrate, and mourn with us. Even as life goes on, it goes on as it ever has, in the heart of God. The God in whom we live and move and have our being is the God who gives us friends furry and not so furry with whom to take delight. The God who is first adored by creatures in a barn is the God who breaks open the gates of death.

He is the God who triumphs over death and weeps and the grave of his friend.  The same God gives us hearts to love and to mourn. The same God gives us the gifts we need to both recognize the great cosmic victory of this Easter season and the tender compassion to say goodbye to one good cat. 

Yours in Christ,

Robert