service not only for family but also for community
(2) her Mormon father with whom she learned hard work and for whom
she always prayed as he became her broken, sobbing dad
(3) her Catholic husband who knew she was the perfect wife and mother
and who was the alpha male for and with his alpha female
(4) her son, David, who still prays with and for her every day and
Father Dougherty who taught her of the sacred heart of Jesus
(5) her daughter, Bette Jo, who still identifies with her in all
of her mothering and Father Heeren, her spiritual director
(6) her son, Robert Brian, who has her gentle heart and
Father O’Connor, her Irish priest with his sense of humor
(7) her son, Clifford Scott, who like her daughter is like her
husband and Father Waldman, that true Idaho priest
(8) her son, Tommy Joe, who like his two namesakes is
wise and strong and Father DeNardis, that saintly priest
(9) her grandchildren and great grandchildren for whom she
still prays everyday and the new priests of Post Vatican Two.
And so mother is there now with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
and with the Blessed Mother of God and with all of the Angels
and with all of the Saints and she is praying for and interceding
for all of us here now just as she did when she was here.
Since she lived in these five dimensions in her prayer
for her last fifty years she must still be living as she lived.
Kierkegaard
The greatest good, after all, which can be done
for a being . . . is to make it free.
In order to do just that Omnipotence is required.
This seems strange, since it is precisely Omnipotence
that supposedly would make (a being) dependent.
But if one will reflect on Omnipotence, he will see
that it also must contain the unique qualification
of being able to withdraw itself again
in a manifestation of Omnipotence in such a way
that precisely for this reason that which has been
originated through Omnipotence can be independent.
That is why one human being cannot
make another person wholly free . . .
only Omnipotence can withdraw itself
at the same time it gives itself away, and
his relationship is the very independence of the receiver.
(Journals and Papers 2.1252)
The entirety of Kierkegaard’s existential thinking could
be interpreted as reflecting on this Omnipotence that
stands back in order to let the other be free.
In the last three chapters of his Works of Love Kierkegaard
explains the agapeic strategy for accomplishing reconciliation.[NL1-3]
(1) We need to love the other as more important than ourselves
that he or she might be graced to love others as more important.
(2) We need to recollect the dead in praying for them and in asking
them to pray for us that we might see a context that is big
enough in time and space to let this impossible task happen.
(3) We need to praise Love which is God that we might
praise all others as members of his Incarnate Body.
In humility Jesus taught us how God stands back to free others
and thus sacrifices his omnipotence for the potency of others.
In part two, chapter eight, of Works of Love: The Victory of
the Conciliatory Spirit in Love, Which Wins the One Overcome,
Kierkegaard poses the problem clearly when he writes:
Let us suppose that the prodigal son’s brother
had been willing to do everything for his brother-yet
one thing he could never have gotten into his head
that the prodigal should be more important. (338)
If the prodigal goes to the altar to thank God he will be
commanded by the Gospel to go to his elder brother and
to seek reconciliation in accord with Matt 5:23–24.
When the prodigal came home after squandering his money
his brother took offense at him and was resentful because his father
threw a party to welcome home the prodigal and did not seem
in the elder brother’s eyes to see him as important as the prodigal.
It was as if the father thought the prodigal to be more important.
So for the prodigal to properly love the elder brother he has to
not only forgive him but to go and be reconciled with him.
That might be no easy task for the prodigal would have to treat
the elder brother as more important and the elder brother would
have to think of the prodigal as more important if there is
to be true reconciliation according to the model of agape.
The point of Kierkegaard’s authorship is to show how the brother
can be brought to love the prodigal as more important than himself.
How
