A Wake Without Tears: Viewing Francis
“If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.” Jn. 15:19 The crowds, feeling like hundreds of thousands of people, who "lined up" last night to pass by Jorge Bergoglio's open casket, were faces without tears. I checked. Was there one person in that ocean of people trying to get into Vatican City, who gave off even the slightest appearance of feeling sorrow in their hearts over the passing of the man whom the world knew as Pope Francis. Maybe mourning is something that has passed from our collective consciousness? But I don't think so. There is always tears, sometimes streams of them, when a person dies, especially when a person dies "before their time." There is also or there should be, a spirit of gravity as friends and family collectively confront the stern realities of life and death, absence and the hole that opens up in one's ...