Fifth Sunday of Lent
(A-cycle)  March 9, 2008

This past Thursday I received a phone call asking me to go to Manchester Memorial Hospital where Kathy Ficara was dying. I was surprised because Kathy was still a young woman, and I wasn’t aware of any life-threatening health problems. Kathy’s maiden name was Mary Catherine Brown. She was the daughter of George and Mary Jane Brown. As most of you remember George Brown for several years was our beloved Deacon at St Timothy’s.

For a few hours I joined her husband Sal and George and her brother and sister in the intensive care unit from which Kathy would leave this world. We sat and stood around her bedside, each breath assuming a greater importance because it might be her last.

Kathy’s voyage through this world was not an easy one. She was born with cerebral palsy. George and Mary Jane had to lavish a lot of extra care on her. Her brother George and her sister Joan had to make a lot of sacrifices. I couldn’t help but think that their investment of love and time and attention, to use an understatement, was worth it. Kathy became a remarkable person. She was bright and energetic, an elite Paralympics athlete. Her track and field specialties were wheelchair racing, the shot put and the discus. I read over the words of St Paul to Timothy: “I have fought the good fight, I have run the race, I have finished the course. I have kept the faith.”

Kathy led a full life, a life full of love. People said she and Sal were joined at the hip. They were both people of faith. As he saw the love of his life slowly withdrawing from him physically, he affirmed that their separation would only be temporary, that in Jesus Christ they would be reunited. He recalled what a wonderful wife she had been and what a devoted mother to their son Christopher Joseph. In Kathy’s last years, Sal, despite his own handicap, had had to tend to her most basic needs. For someone as independent as Kathy, that was a real penance. She could have felt sorry for her self, but she saved her compassion for others. She was on her church’s mission board and asked that donations in her memory be made to the Hartford City Mission which` takes care of the hungry and the homeless and the lonely in the name of Christ. I looked at her and thought, “She’s a hero.”  And looking at her husband and family, I had a second thought: “She’s surrounded by heroes. How blessed she was to have them; how blessed they were to have her.”

George read over Kathy the words from today’s Gospel: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though she should die, will live. And everyone who lives and believes me will never die again.” Jesus had the power to resuscitate a whole cemetery, but it is this individual, personal miracle that moves us. Lazarus was his friend, St. John tells us, and then he doesn’t have to explain why Jesus wept. I think he wept for us all, knowing the pain and heartbreak death would cause us, and he was willing to take that pain and heartbreak on himself when he took up his cross to die for us. When I was an altar boy, they used to play an old Protestant hymn at funerals in my parish, a hymn called “What a Friend We Have in Jesus!” I remember a priest telling me, “If they play that at my funeral, I’m going to sit up in my coffin and say, “Stop the Music!” but that old warhorse of a hymn has something important to tell us. It’s not entitled, “What a Friend Lazarus Had in Jesus” but what a friend we have. All of us.