I was moved to tears by your beautiful post. How well I remember those sad days. But I remember the profound effect that funeral had upon me. Strange as it is to say this, I have never been to a more “uplifting” funeral, if you know what I mean. The sadness of the passing of a dear friend, the sorrow for her husband and her family - all of that was balanced against the overwhelming certainty and joy of the resurrection. For weeks afterward, I found myself singing “Christ is risen from the dead…” and thinking of her and her husband.

God bless you for your ministry, Father! Ut unum sint!

May her Memory be Eternal.

I cannot celebrate Pascha, nor enter into Bright Week, without remembering my friend’s own entrance into a Bright Week that transcends every darkness. What is liturgical reflects the fullness of what is true. “Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave,” St. Chrysostom proclaims. Such brightness that breaks the heart - not with sadness - but with a brilliance that says this near-death experience of daily life cannot continue forever. It must either pass on to a deeper and sadder death - or be swallowed up by Life - by the brightness of the never-ending Day.

Christ is risen and not one dead remains in the grave. O Bright joy of Pascha!”

Thank you for these words. I greatly yearn for the never-ending Day. I also encountered a death, not during Bright week, but the Saturday the week before Pascha-and it was a disturbing death at that. I encountered the fear of sin, darkness, and death that was lurking in my own heart, in places I was not aware of until I heard the story of this particular death. That all tombs are contained in the Tomb where Christ laid brings me the only hope that is possible. That Christ plundered all the darkness of hades is all I can hang onto right now. May Christ make the never-ending Day dawn in our hearts even as we await the coming of the Kingdom.

I do so hold tight this…my dearly loved grandfather died several years ago during Brigth Week. A man who was a Mormon and spent many years as a missionary for the LDS church in South America, as a high school teaching teaching Spanish and as a FBI agent sending Nazis back to Germany to be prosecuted. Like one of the early church fathers says, We know where the church is…we do not know where it is not…I hope that in some manner he held the faith in his heart and that I will see him again.

Grief is such an ugly thing…thanks be to God that there a blessing at the end of it.