Joel's Homily

Here's the text of the homily that our friend Joel delivered at Isaiah's funeral last month:

Joel Matthew Anderle
St. Francis De Sales Parish Church, Holland, MI
Memorial Mass for Isaiah Thomas Armstrong Voss
1 June 2007

In his poem titled simply “10”, written one Sunday in 1998, the agronomist theologian Wendell Berry writes words about covenant. He considers what it means to love and lose, in a poem written for his bride of five decades. He considers what it means for all of us to have actually chosen this—since we all did and we all will. And he muses that even in death, he imagines with all he knows, that he would wish he could return, to do it all again, to relive all the joys with his beloved and to re-summit the mountaintops. But not just that, he writes, “I will see that it is imperfect. (To whom would love appear but to those in most desperate need?) Yes, we would err again. Yes we would suffer again. Yes, provided you would have it, I would do it all again.” Wendell Berry points the way to Christian love, covenant, and redemption. A way familiar to Jen and Joe and Joey and Isaiah who lived it for five and a half years.

In fact, Berry reminds us that while our mountaintops make us tingle, our valleys are the most remarkable substance of our life. Or maybe it’s the journey in between. Or maybe it’s the journey. Daily life, lived through the lens of love, proves transcendent. The practice of love, then, proves to be the doorway to abundant life. Real life. Not easy life, nor painless life, but Life with a capital “L.” A life of love.

Someone once asked Jesus what it was all about, this life of ours. And he said “two things. First love the Lord your God with all you’ve got (you know, the Shema), and second, love your neighbor as yourself.” Learn to love, and love the learning. That’s our call.

To grow not just accustomed, but to become friends with the complexities of medical fragility, to fall into abiding and wondrous love with a boy whose lifespan was to be unquestionably brief, to love with a laughter that names and owns the darkness and then denies it its power by kicking it back: this is the pathway that Jen and Joe and Joey Michael have worn into a graceful, loved grove.

To love we must choose to love, we must choose a heavy load, we must embrace the sorrow that comes for us and for all creation, and we must not buckle. Not because we are strong. No, because we are weak and because we know where to find hope and strength in our place: we fall back into the Love Divine and there, in our place, for us, on our account, love is strong.

We gather in this mass to recollect these thoughts. To remember not just the amazing human being that was love incarnate in Isaiah Thomas Armstrong Voss, but to remember the God of all life who came in love in Jesus Christ. We recollect the story, we recall our place in it, and we remember the end: not death, but love; not loss, but union; not pain, but joy. We recollect the story to own it, to be enfolded by it, to share it with one another as love calls us to serve and calls us to one another. For this is our path now.

In addition to her role in the creation of two beautiful boys, Jen creates beautiful clothes. Carefully imagining, designing and crafting them—from pieces into wholes, united in theme and design and purpose: love’s work flows from her heart and hands in delicate and responsible stewardship. This is the vocational call of all of us gathered, to be weavers of a fabric of our faithfulness, as Steve Garber has put it, to weave together our belief and our behavior into a unified, integrative whole in the service of God’s love that fills us and sends us.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.