Like It’s Your Last

In the 1994 film, “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” the humor present in the first three weddings is absent when death comes to one of the characters in the fourth — a man who loved life. At the funeral service, W.H. Auden’s sad poem, “Funeral Blues,” is read. And the scene is filled with an overwhelming sense of heartbreak. Here follows a portion of the reading from “Funeral Blues”:

He was my North, my South, my East, and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought love would last forever, but I was wrong.

Overwhelmingly sad though those lines may be, they too are wrong. By the Resurrection Power of God, love does last forever. And isn’t that what we come together to celebrate over and over again? Isn’t that the Good News we’ve just heard in today’s Gospel Lesson, which Jesus describes as a “wisdom” no one can “resist or contradict”? (Lk. 21:14,15).

In…