Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 3, 2021 – Genesis 2:18-24; Hebrews 2:9-11; Mark 10:2-16

Jesus’ primary concern in this gospel reading was to point out an injustice being committed against women. In his religious tradition, a man could give his wife a gett, a bill of divorce, for the slightest reason, trivial reasons, really, but she could not do that to her husband. And if he did that, unless she had a son, a father, or a brother to run home to, she became a non-person in that society. And that is Jesus’ concern as he teaches this morning.

So, I asked you, when you listened to the first reading, to pick out what you thought was the most important sentence. There's only one place, in the passage that we read, where God actually speaks. He says one simple statement, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” Now, when we read our scripture in English, the word man is used throughout the story. “... and so the Lord brought to the man” and “The Lord placed the man into a deep sleep” and so on and so forth. But in the original languages in which our scriptures appeared, there are two different words being used for man. All the time that the writer is talking about the man, and when God says “It is not good for the man to be alone,” the word that’s being used, in Greek, is anthrōpos, from which we get the English word anthropology, which is the study of human beings. That word means “It is not good for the human being to be alone.” But, when the man sees his image in the woman, the language changes, and instead of being called an anthrōpos, he’s called an andros, which represents the male sex, as opposed to the female sex. It’s the same thing in Hebrew. In Hebrew, the man is called ha adam - recognize in there the word Adam. Ha adam is something taken from the earth. One of our scripture scholars jokingly said that, basically, we can translate that Jewish word as “earthling.” It is not good for the earthling to be alone. But when he wakes up from his sleep and is confronted with his mirror image in the woman, the words that are used are ish for man, and isha for woman. They’re the same word - masculine ending and feminine ending - ish and isha.

So, what does all of this mean? The basic teaching that arises out of this myth, the thing that’s the takeaway from revelation is that it is not good for human beings to be alone; they need a civil companion of some sort.

Those of you who are around my age, give or take five years, remember the big brouhaha when the Vatican announced, in the early 1960’s, that there was no longer a St. Philomena. Hundreds of women named Philomena were horrified; so was the rest of the church. What happened?

Well, we assumed that Philomena was a personal name because it was found on a tombstone along the martyrs’ way in Rome. But, further excavation during the first half of the century, discovered that there were lots of tombstones with the word ‘Philomena,’ and a lots of tombstones with the word “Philomenos.” In Greek, those things mean “my beloved.” So what was being said was that these were the beloved tombs of martyrs, but their actual given names were not put on the stones for fear of reprisal from the Romans if it was discovered that those bodies were buried. Reprisals against the still-living members of the families. So yes, there are lots of saints Philomena and lots of saints Philomenos. The interesting thing about it is that the words “my beloved,” or as the actual tombstones read, “Peace to you, my beloved.” “Eirene soy Philomena,” or “Pax tibi Philomena” – Greek or Latin. We still find those kinds of inscriptions on tombstones today.

I wandered through our cemetery yesterday for a little while. I just walked a couple of aisles in the oldest part of the cemetery, and what you see there, mostly, is the words “sacred to the memory of” and then the name of the dead person. Which means that this stone, this memorial, and the ground on which is stands, are sacred memory. As things got more modern, people replaced that, in English, with “Beloved husband of,” “Beloved wife of,” “Beloved son or daughter of,” or “In loving memory of” so and so.

One of the interesting things about those stones in the oldest part of our cemetery is that almost all of them are Irish last names and, in addition to putting the name on the stone, they put what county and what village in Ireland the people had come from, making a connection, here in the cemetery, with loved ones an ocean away who are not able to be there at the sad time of death, but who were beloved at a distance. And the oldest date I found for burial - I’m sure it’s not the oldest one in the cemetery – but the oldest one I found was 1867. To put that in context for you, we are talking two years after the end of the Civil War. And a lot of the burials in that part of the cemetery are from the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. It’s a very old cemetery. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about this morning.

Our cemetery is really in dire straits. When I first came here, Father Dardis had been running the cemetery every year on the interest from our savings account and our perpetual care account. Remember, back then, interest was around 4.5%, so he was getting a couple of hundred dollars out of each account. But as the first decade of our century rolled on, interest fell to nothing at all and, at the same time, the sale of graves fell to nothing at all. People stopped buying graves and burying their dead in a coffin, and started going to cremation, which is much simpler and much less expensive for many people who don't have life insurance. And so, we stopped having any income.

Nowadays, if we get six or seven hundred dollars a year in income it’s a lot, and we still spend close to $5,000 each year to maintain the cemetery. So I’ve had to dig into what they call the Perpetual Care Fund, and it’s dwindling rapidly. And we have to do something about that for two reasons. First of all, because our cemetery is a memorial to all of these people who died, and it’s a historical memorial. It’s part of the history of this town, and the people buried there were among the first people to come and settle and built a catholic community here.

The second reason is because the future of our parish is cloudy. Look at how many people we have here this morning. We’re doing about 60% of what we were doing before COVID struck. But if you look back even five years ago, we had an average of 350 people at Mass on Sunday. Five years before that it was 420. And five years before that it was 500. We can see that things are changing here in our community and here in our parish. And we have to make the cemetery secure for a time when we, ourselves, may not be here.

And so, the diocese had asked me to have an increased giving campaign this year, to increase the offertory. I said that we don’t have to increase our offertory, were already doing above the curve of most parishes in the archdiocese. What we need is to do something about our cemetery. So they gave me permission, and this is the plan. We are just going to take the weeks of October. You'll see there was an envelope on your chair when you came in this morning, it says “Cemetery Preservation Program.” We want you to make a donation. Just one donation, not every week, pick the week you like. Some people get paid every two weeks, some people wait for their social security check, or something else. Pick the week you like. And give a donation in increments of $50. Give $50, or $100, or $250, or $500, whatever you want to give for the cemetery. And we will place all of these envelopes on the altar for the month of November, the month of the holy souls.

If everybody that came to church on Sunday - we represent 105 households on an individual Sunday - if every household that came to Mass gave $50, we’d make $5,000. Our goal - the goal I gave the archdiocese as our target - is $10,000. We want to raise $10,000 dollars in one month for the cemetery, and that will put us on a surer footing. That will give us money to run the cemetery for the next couple of years, and will preserve the Perpetual Care Fund.

It is not good for human beings to be alone. Our love for one another extends beyond the grave, even when we've had hard times and difficulties in our families, the love endures. Our cemetery is historical. Our cemetery will go on without us. We need to take some action to preserve it.