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    Alvin f. Kimel: my son Aaron was brilliant. He loved a good argument. He says Aaron's death has been a traumatic--and clarifying--event for me. Aaron did not believe in God. He did not believe there was a life After death, he says. F.kimel: I am not a philosopher. There is no argument Aaron could not demolish in five seconds flat.

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    Alvin f. Kimel: my son Aaron was brilliant. He loved a good argument. He says Aaron's death has been a traumatic--and clarifying--event for me. Aaron did not believe in God. He did not believe there was a life After death, he says. F.kimel: I am not a philosopher. There is no argument Aaron could not demolish in five seconds flat.

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    29K views9 pages

    Aaron Kimel Homily

    Uploaded by

    akimel
    Alvin f. Kimel: my son Aaron was brilliant. He loved a good argument. He says Aaron's death has been a traumatic--and clarifying--event for me. Aaron did not believe in God. He did not believe there was a life After death, he says. F.kimel: I am not a philosopher. There is no argument Aaron could not demolish in five seconds flat.

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    Funeral Homily for Aaron Edward Kimel Delivered by Father Alvin F. Kimel, Jr.

    22 June 2012 In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Introduction Not once have I ever entertained the possibility that I would ever find myself in this moment, preaching at the funeral of one of my children. I stand here today not to offer a eulogy for my son Aaron. There will be other opportunities for such eulogies, as we each seek to find healing for our loss and to understand the tragic decision of Aaron to end his life. My purpose, rather, is to offer an argument. Aaron was brilliant. He loved a good argument, and he usually won. Aaron and I did not often speak about God. At some point in high school he moved into a scientific materialism from which he would not be moved. He was not a militant atheist, as he acknowledged that it was possible, however unlikely, that God might exist; but he simply could not, would not, embrace a Christian worldview. Yet for the sake of family, he always said grace with us at dinnertime.

    I am not a philosopher. There is no argument I can offer that Aaron could not demolish in five seconds flat. I stand before you as a priest of the Church for over thirty years. But most importantly I stand before you as a bereaved father, who has been utterly devastated by the death of his beloved son. Aarons death has been a traumaticand clarifyingevent for me. I see reality more sharply, more clearly than I have ever seen it before. I stand before you, therefore, either as a madman or a prophet of God Almighty. I cannot judge. You must be my judge. God will most certainly be my judge. Nihilism Aaron did not believe in God. He did not believe in transcendent reality. He did not believe in a life beyond the grave. Life has no ultimate meaning or significance. After death there is only nothing. In Aarons room I found my old copy of the short stories of Ernest Hemingway. I do not know when he borrowed it. Perhaps he read the story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. In this story we read the prayer of nihilism: Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but

    deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. It is a relentlessly bleak, hopeless view. Despair is its only conclusion. Aaron was a man who lived in profound interior pain. He had come to the conclusion that nothing in this world, neither medicine nor psychiatry nor career nor even the love of his family could deliver him from the despair and futility that had possessed and paralyzed him. And so he made what seemed, to him, to be the logical choice. A logical choice if, and only if, Aarons worldview is true. If Aaron is right, then he has indeed found relief from his suffering, relief in nothingness, relief in nada, nada, nada. We who have been left behind must now suffer the repercussions of Aarons decision; but he at least he is at peace if Aaron is right The Christian Alternative But there is an alternative. Consider the possibility that there really is a divine Creator, a transcendent deity of infinite love who has brought the world into being from out of nothing. Consider the possibility that this Creator has made human beings in his image in such a way that we can only find our supreme happiness in communion with him. Consider the possibility that this God has actually entered into his creation, taking upon himself the limitations of

    humanity, including even suffering and death, precisely to restore us to himself and incorporate us into his divine life. Consider the possibility that for us this God died a cruel and horrific death on Calvary and rose to indestructible life on Easter morning, destroying the power of death once and for all and opening history to the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, a future where there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. God is Love, for he is eternally the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The world springs from love and will be consummated in love. In the words of St Isaac the Syrian: In love did God bring the world into existence; in love does he guide it during its temporal existence; in love is he going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of him who has performed all these things. It may all sound too good to be true. It may all sound like a an old wives tale. But it meets Aarons objections head on. Life is not nothingness. Life is not absurd. God is good and wills only our good. God is love and his love will triumph. There is thus genuine hope for liberation, healing, transformation, rebirth, both in this world and in the coming kingdom.

    This is the Christian faith in which Aaron was raised yet which he eventually found to be unpersuasive. The empiricist worldview which dominates our culture increasingly renders the Christian worldview implausible, and the whole world consequently suffers from the despair of nihilism. I cannot, will not acquiesce to Aarons agnosticism and its resignation to despair. I know something of the darkness that bound Aarons heart; but this tragedy has quickened my faith, and I pray that it will do so for you also. One of my favorite books is C. S. Lewiss Chronicles of Narnia is the Silver Chair. The children, along with the marsh-wiggle Puddleglum, are captured by the Green Lady and taken into her underworld domain. She casts a spell upon them and attempts to persuade them that this dreary underworld is the real world, that everything that they remember about Narnia, and the true world is but a dream. But Puddleglum stands fasts; he refuses to disbelieve. He refuses to disbelieve in Narnia, and he refuses to disbelieve in the rightful king of Narnia, the great lion Aslan: Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those thingstrees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a

    funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. The Christian vision of reality is so much more real, more beautiful, more enchanting, and profoundly more true than any vision of reality offered by modern culture and the scientific worldview. And so here is my first response to my son: Aaron, I do not know if you had retained your faith in Christ whether your pain would have been more bearable; but it might have given you grounds for hope, for a supernatural hope that the world cannot give. Aarons Hope But what hope does my son now have? He is dead. He died an unbeliever. He died a suicide. This is the hard, terrible truth. Aaron would not want us to minimize the harshness of any of this. He knew Christine and I would find this very, very hard. In the old days, some preachers would have declared him damned. He certainly would not have been granted a church burial. Today we know more about depression and mental illness. We know how

    depression constrains and limits our existential freedom. Aaron did not kill himself with blasphemies on his lips. His suicide was not the culmination of a wicked life. It was an escape from a world that could not heal the sickness of his mind and bring relief from intolerable suffering. Aaron jumped to his death because he had lost all hope, because despair had possessed his being. This I believe to be true. And so I know that God will be merciful. But even so, I wish to say something more. Not only will the eternal Father be merciful to my Aaron; but he will most assuredly heal his heart, deliver him from the bonds of darkness, and raise him into glorified life with Jesus Christ the eternal Son, with the Blessed Virgin Mary and with all the saints. Aaron will know the joy and bliss of the kingdom of God. Despite his suicidal disbelief, Aaron will not be permitted to have the last word. The risen Christ reserves that word to himself, and it is a word of the absolute triumph of love and grace. By the inner promptings of the Holy Spirit, Aaron will open his heart to the mercy and love of God. He will allow the Father to flood him with his holy light and liberate him from all despair. He will allow the Savior to bind his wounds and forgive his sins. He will allow the Spirit to fill his heart with joy and grace. Painful purification may be necessaryit is not easy thing to relinquish our self-will; it is not an easy thing to repent of ones sinsbut the grace of God will triumph in the heart

    of my son. This I declare in the name of Jesus. Amen. Amen. Brought face to face with his Savior, can we entertain, even for one moment, the possibility that Aaron would hold out eternally against that unconditional love and mercy that is God the Holy Trinity? How could he? Did he not love his mother? Did he not love his siblings Alvin, Bredon, and Taryn? Did he not love his best friends Brian, Jill, and Laura? Did he not love me, his broken father? Brothers and sisters, there is no time limit on the unbounded love of God. It does not expire at the moment of death. God has created us for himself. In love Christ searches and searches for that one lost sheep and does not rest until he has found it and restored it to the fold. Aarons ultimate salvation is revealed in the love I hold in my heart for my beloved son. In the words of the Scottish preacher George MacDonald: Shall a man be more merciful than God? Shall, of all his glories, his mercy alone not be infinite? Shall a brother love a brother more than The Father loves a son?more than The Brother Christ loves his brother? God forbid! Gods love infinitely surpasses our love for Aaron. God will find a way to awaken faith and repentance in his heart. Divine love will conquer both obstinacy and despair. Gods mercifulness, as St Isaac writes, is far more extensive than we can conceive.

    I will not be saved without my Aaron. There can be no heaven for me without my son. My love for him is too great. He is too much a part of my life, my identity. We will be saved together in Christ. God will make it so. And so, my brothers and sisters, I bid you to give thanks for the life that was, and is, Aaron Edward Kimel. I bid you to pray for my son. Pray that God will forgive his sins, heal his brokenness, and renew his heart and soul in the life and glory of the Holy Spirit. And I bid you to hope for Aarons eternal salvation with confident and indomitable hope. He will be restored to us in the kingdom of Jesus Christ, and we will be restored to him. Our love will not be broken; our love is not broken. The infinite, unfathomable grace of God will triumph. God is good. God is merciful. God is love. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I close with the words of the 13th century English mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Amen.

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