Dinny O’Brien R.I.P.
Reception of his Mortal Remains to St. John Vianney Church
Ardlea
Tuesday the 6th of December 2016
The Gospel: Mark 10: 17-30
He was setting out on a journey when a man ran up, knelt before him and put this question to him, ‘Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: You must not kill; You must not commit adultery; You must not steal; You must not bring false witness; You must not defraud; Honour your father and mother.’ And he said to him, ‘Master, I have kept all these from my earliest days’. Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him, and he said, ‘There is one thing you lack. Go and sell everything you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ But his face fell at these words and he went away sad, for he was a man of great wealth.
We welcome the mortal remains of Dinny O’Brien to his local Church. He worshipped here very frequently and was known to many of you who attend the morning Mass here at this Church of St. John Vianney.
We meet here to support his wife Margaret, his children Mick, Tom, Andrew and John and their wives Fidelma, Bernadette, Laurie (USA) and Ciara. We cannot but fail to remember his son Denis who predeceased him in 1990.
We also remember a wonderful collection of grandchildren, Keith, lisa, Shane, Aoife, Cormac, Ciara, Aisling, Hannah, Andrew, Ruan and Conal and his two great grandchildren Phoebe and Isable. This is a time of great remembering and confused grief for you all.
We welcome also his siblings Kathleen, Angela, Tommy and remember those who have gone before him; May, Bernard and Peter.
And we welcome everyone from the wider world that Dinny inhabited, those of you from Wexford, Kilkenny and North County Dublin and all of you from his world of Dublin Football, Hurling and Music. I think it’d be fair to say there’ll be very few referees here this evening.
We bring Dinny’s remains here this evening to present him to the mercy of God and the tender mercy of this community who knew and loved him. He wasn’t what you call a shy man; he didn’t hide in the corner of a room. You knew he was about.
Many of us here have great memories of his antics be it in the world of football, music, the neighbourhood, his time with Premier Diaries and more importantly his home. There are many stories to be embellished. However as important and all as our picture of Dinny is the manner of his death raises the question of how he saw himself at this particular point in time.
Dinny bought his house with Margaret on Chanel Road in Coolock. Most of us in Coolock couldn’t understand why a road and a school were called after a ladies perfume (In those days there were no Men’s Toiletries just Old Spice for Dinner Dances and Carbolic Soap for the rest of the year! I later came to know the story because I attended Chanel College. St. Peter of Chanel was a Saint who was associated with the Marist Fathers, they ran the local secondary school. His feast was the 28th of April, a day I remember because it always meant a half day or at the minimum, no home work.
Peter lived on an island in the South Pacific as a missionary, thousands of miles away from his native France. His life was an abject failure. He made only one convert and the natives of the islands put him to death even though he was known to them for many a long year. After his death, many on the island were baptised because they began only then to see and acknowledge the source of his goodness and virtue.
Why I mention Peter of Chanel is that I am sure there were moments in his life when he saw himself as an abject failure and that life was facing him with every increasing challenges and difficulties. Whenever I myself face challenges where I feel isolated and unsure I think of him and his spirit. He inspires me and at times keeps me going, even getting me over the line.
Let’s be real, there are moments when we all face darkness and difficulty and these moments can frighten us all. For Dinny a dark moment came for a few brief earthly seconds that was impenetrable to light. Others can judge us harshly but there is no doubt that, given the wrong circumstances we can be out own harshest judge and critic.
For Peter of Chanel, the community on the island and the larger community of the Church gathered to acknowledge his goodness, not just the goodness that he did but the goodness that he was to the extent that they proclaimed him a saint. We gather today as family and friends to say Dinny you are more to this world that you believed you were in the last moments of your life. We want to shine light into that darkness to complete the picture of your human journey. We believe that we are only completely real in God’s presence when he shines his light of love, compassion and mercy on us but in the meantime we have both the right and the duty to complete the picture and give honour to the fullness of your life as we know it.
I remember once reading about the spiritual life and one wise person said ‘that no person is good enough to direct themselves’. How true are these words? We cannot judge what is right or wrong, good or bad in solitariness. Our lives have a context which is called ‘one another’. Yes our modern world makes us feel we are more and more on our own and so we have to work all the harder to create the context in which we survive, live and flourish. The author of those words was making the point that I made earlier that we can be our own harshest critics and we need the gentle compassionate eyes and hearts of others to help us undo the knots that are inevitable on our human journey.
This evening then we meet and as a community of faith we bring our eyes and hearts of compassion and mercy to Dinny as we present him to God. We see the great love and goodness that is there and we complete the picture that for a few brief moments he couldn’t see. The Gospel that we listened to saw Jesus acknowledging the confusion of the young man yet through all this confusion he looked on him lovingly. Pope Francis proclaimed last year as a year of Mercy. One of the things he said was
“Wherever the church is present, the mercy of the Father must be evident. In our parishes, communities, associations, and movements, in a word, wherever there are Christians, everyone should find an oasis of mercy” (Pope Francis, Misericordiae Vultus, 12)
For us here this evening there is a great challenge ahead of us all. The challenge is ‘to be compassionate.’ Many of you have heard of the practise of mindfulness which is one of our buzz phrases and activities around today. The purpose of the practise of mindfulness is not just to take time out or to reduce stress; the prime purpose of mindfulness is to cultivate a methodology whereby we can look compassionately on ourselves; in doing that we can look compassionately on the world. In this oasis of Mercy in Ardlea Church we gather with one purpose which is to say Dinny may your darkness be dispelled by light; may your difficulties be melted with mercy and may your judgements be dissolved by love. Amen
Fr. Alan Hilliard
Dinny O’Brien
Funeral Mass
Wednesday the 7th of December 2016
Eighteen months ago I had to deal with the fallout from the tragedy in Berkeley with the students in the college where I work. It was a very difficult time. The tragedy was of horrific proportions when young people in the prime of life and with a golden future were taken from us. Many others were injured. Others are scared emotionally and physically. The only other tragedy that impacted on me deeply was one which is familiar to many of you here and that is the Stardust tragedy; but I was young then and without responsibility.
A few weeks after the tragedy I was in San Francisco helping the Pastoral Centre look at how their response affected them. I asked what do you remember most about the time you arrived at the scene and one person responded. ‘This may seem strange but in the midst of all the flashing lights and the drama, the one thing I remember is phone chargers’. He went on to explain that peoples phones were dead and they needed chargers just to ring home and say ‘I’m all right’ or to ease the fear of those who were phoning from Ireland only to receive a message that the phone was out of service which caused increasing anxiety and stress. They went to all the stores around the area and bought loads of phone chargers to allow people to ‘reconnect’ with people that mattered.
A strange story maybe, but not unlike the story of the characters in our Gospel today. Before the age of telecommunications or internet those affected by the tragedy of Jesus’ death simply met in a room described as ‘the upper’ room. A room away from it all that allowed people to connect with those that mattered. I suppose many would like to connect with Dinny for a few moments to find the right question to help us fumble around an award question that really just asks ‘why?’ but we can’t do that. But we are all connecting, men who might not normally shake hands are now unashamedly hugging. These hugs are a little longer especially with those who are part of our lives and who we no longer take for granted because in the light of what has happened we simply can’t. ‘Are you ok?’ is asked differently.
We all rue the crazy busy lives that are a barrier to our connecting and question it while knowing we can do little about it. And we realise that in the midst of all our technology there is nothing as good as looking into the eyes of some-one or feeling their touch. As an emigrant parent said to me, ‘Simply put…you can’t hug SKYPE’. These days for the family and close friends are days when everything is up in the air, nothing is normal, the predictability of life and its routines have melted away to make room for deep and meaningful connection to things and people that matter probably because something and not just somebody but something deep has been taken from us.
Today we gather for our Eucharist, a Mass, a ritual. Clumsy and awkward for some but necessary and healing for others. When we came to the Church we asked for mercy for ourselves. Mercy as I said last night is necessary because we can judge ourselves oh so harshly. One thing I have learnt from dealing with trauma is stay with the ‘what has happened’. If you go on a journey down the road of ‘what if’ you are on road to despair. It is a bottomless pit without real answers because the starting point is not real. Let’s ask for the grace and mercy to acknowledge that Dinny is gone from us and we miss him and live with the hope that we’ll meet him again one day.
Then we read the scriptures. A story of Abram who became Abraham. He left a lot behind and set out on a journey not knowing where this journey would lead. To be honest most of our important journeys are like this. We step out into unknowns; when people marry, have children they really are shaken to their roots because in reality they don’t know what is ahead. We also hear in these scriptures that our goodness goes before us. This means that in the presence of God what is first heard is not what other people think of us or what we think of ourselves but our goodness is the first thing that God’s sees. How comforting.
Then we break open the word just as we break open Dinny’s life in stories. People vie for the best story not because it is the funniest or most outrageous but because they want to claim the one that shows who this man who has died really is. They want to capture what lies beyond biology and science and reveal all that lies deeply etched on each soul, and indeed every soul, but which at the same time was unique to Dinny. Then we make prayers…we take time to think of one another because at a time like this we dispel as best we can the selfishness and narcissism that is more and more common today.
We make an offering of bread and wine and on this day we offer more. We offer the good deeds of Dinny’s life, that fact that he was generous to everyone particularly with his time deserved acknowledgement. That he brought people who may have felt left out into a room through his mirth and chat and he made people feel at home in themselves. And then we offer sacrifice and at this point where do we end when it comes to Dinny’s life. He gave up so much of himself for others. He at times, worked three jobs. In an Ireland that wasn’t very diverse, sleep was the only foreigner in his life. He worked for unselfishly for Margaret and the family. He drove buses to festivals and children to Feis, Fleadh and music lessons and if a judge wasted his journey he’d let them know. He packed Gaelic teams into his car without thought of cost or expense to himself and put simply – he loved. We can talk about it till the cows come home but real love comes at a cost to self and is contextualised by a greater good. Real love is not a benefit to oneself at the expense of another.
Then we give thanks at the Preface…and boy do we want to give thanks for all the offerings and sacrifices that this man made for many here today. As the older liturgy said ‘it is right to give thanks and praise’. Why do we name what we have to offer, the sacrifices and that for which we have to give thanks? Patrick Kavanagh put it best when so wisely he stated in his poem The Hospital:
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge.
We remember the words of Jesus at the last supper in the deep belief that remembering makes him present and here we wander into a territory that lies outside what many can understand but which is practised and professed by many peoples. It is not just Catholics who belief that the practise of ritual brings us into deep connection with those gone before us. Uncle Bill Nedijie whose tribe live in the Kakadu area of the Northern Territories tells his people that:
Man will come back
Like I come back each time.
This story is for all people
Everybody should be listening
Same story for everyone, just different language
My meaning might be a little hard,
So I speak English
You just listen careful and slow.
We got to hang on,
Not to lose our story.
Don’t think much about money
You can get a million dollar..
But not worth it
Million dollar..
He just go ‘poof’
Couple of weeks ..
You got nothing
Our Eucharist, our mass is our story. It is a story that connects us deeply to a place beyond us and with those we love and have left us in body. It is our fervent hope and prayer that Dinny is now part of greater story. That deep innate respect that we have for those gone before us, even before Christianity came to these shores, is an important part of who we are and becomes all the more important at time like this. As Bill says… ‘same story for everyone…just a different language’. It is our hope that we become immersed in that story where pain and suffering is no more and somehow – in the wonder of it all – we can connect with those who were the love of God to us in our earthly lives.
Then we break the bread. Important for us today. Let us not be afraid to present Dinny’s brokenness God. Those bits that were out of shape and caused him pain. We know from the Gospels that Jesus dealt with brokenness well. He often transformed it. That in some strange way we can offer Dinny’s last minutes to God. That when his mind was tormented and confused that we can offer this to God as well and not try to hide it.
And then we are invited to share in the Communion. It is a challenge today to step into mystery and live comfortably with it. The pressure to know and understand everything is killing our spirits and slaying our souls. To lie before a tune, a golden sunset, the love of another is worth immeasurably more than being right a thousand times. Maybe people bring things to and end not because they haven’t got the answers but that the mystery of life is stolen and gone from them, mystery which is the nectar of the soul is stolen for a few moments. If there is any way we can counteract the forces of today’s world that are upsetting us and stealing our wellbeing it is to be a good friend of mystery. It is the spot where the true artist, composer and writer seek and it is there for us. Seamus Heaney wrote:
I went to the altar rails and received the mystery
on my tongue, returned to my place, shut my eyes fast, made
an act of thanksgiving, opened my eyes and felt
time starting up again.
Heaney didn’t have a myriad of phone chargers but he was deeply connected.
Yes Dinny is gone from us. His life ended in a way we never countenanced. If our prayers would speed his journey we’d pray for ever but we are confident that his goodness will be seen by God and that God will help him see the goodness he lost sight of in his last moments. We deal with what has happened with the support and prayers of all here, we tell stories, we remember the offerings he placed before us, we name his sacrifices which were made for many here, we immerse ourselves in a great remembering which reaches deep into the heart of things and invites us to stand on our tip toes to ponder mystery. And in this context we find a place to situate the brokenness that seemed to take over for a few moments. We realise that the only place that brokenness can be understood and welcomed is at the heart of love which is in God and in at this point we express our Communion and solidarity with one another.
These days of torment and loss are contextualised in our rituals. They don’t take the pain away but they help us bear it better. We perish when our story loses a connection with the greater stories that have stood the test of time. We highlighted this last night that for our sakes and for Dinny’s sake we need to put bits together so his perceptions are not the entire story. His sense of self when he faced his end is not all that there is. What a refreshing thought from Heaney the feeling that time can start over again; that pain and suffering and anguish is not the end…that time can start over again. This is our prayer for one another and for Dinny.
Fr Alan Hilliard
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