Holy Name of Mary, Hunters Hill NSW
Friday 6 March 2026
Homily Notes by Michael Whelan SM
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First Reading: Micah 6:6-8
Response: Psalm 22
Gospel: John 14:1-6
Our central task in life – and our most difficult task – is to become simply who and what we are. It is easier to be who and what we are not.
We are each created in the image and likeness of God, unique creatures of Infinite Love, expressions of Divine Wisdom. It is the destiny of each of us to be a unique place where God enters the world.
Becoming who and what I am is a matter of graced emergence rather than wilful conquest. In the end, who and what I am is pure gift. This is implied in the opening words of the Prophet Micah:
With what gift shall I come into Yahweh’s presence and bow down before God on high?
I think David had come to know this through challenging and at times very dark experience.
***
Some years ago, David shared with me his experience of being a missionary in the Solomon Islands. Without either language or cultural preparation, he was sent to the remote Weather Coast of Guadalcanal. It is beautiful but isolated. David felt abandoned. When he returned to Australia some eight years later, he said he was ready to leave the ministry. The Provincial, Fr John Jago, suggested he do an ongoing formation course. He did that and found it helpful. Soon after that course, he discovered a very fruitful ministry with the Asian community. There he received a hospitality and affirmation that he had not experienced before. I believe the great gift of the Asian community was to help David to recognise the meaning of the Prophet Micah’s words – words incidentally, that David himself chose for this Mass:
this is what Yahweh asks of you: only this, to act justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with your God.
Those words of the Prophet Micah go hand-in-hand with the words of the Psalmist:
The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.
We might hear in Thomas’ question to Jesus in the Gospel of John, something of the same struggle that David experienced:
Lord … how can we know the way?
We might also hear in Jesus’ reply to Thomas what I believe David would also have heard:
Jesus said: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one can come to the Father except through me.’
***
On an occasion such as this, when we gather around the coffin holding the mortal remains of our confrere David, it is useful – perhaps necessary – to wonder what we might learn from David’s life. That question prompted me to recall some reflections given by Fr Karl Rahner during Lent of 1946, in Munich. Fr Rahner uses a metaphor from that time and place. He speaks of the “rubble” which can prevent us from becoming who and what we are. He speaks specifically of “rubbled-over lives”:
In this occurrence of the heart, let despair take everything away from you, in truth you will only lose the finite and the futile, no matter how great and wonderful it was, even if it is you yourself …. you with your image of God which resembled you instead of the Incomprehensible himself. Whatever can be taken from you is never God. …. Let all your exits be blocked, only the exits to the finite will be rubbled-over, and the ways into the really futile. …. (Then you will find yourself) laid in the hands of this God, this Father whose … decree is love (Karl Rahner SJ, The Need and the Blessing for Prayer, trans Bruce W Gillette, Collegeville, MINN: Liturgical Press, 1997, 6 &12).
Thank you David. Rest in peace!