In Memoriam-Father Fabian SSCC How happy are the gentle, they shall inherit the land. The other day I heard somebody say: “I have never been able to think of Father Fabian as typically Dutch. You and Fr. Renckens are typically Dutch. You have something rough. But Fr. Fabian, no, he looks to me much more like a British gentleman. And that is what he was and what attracted the hearts of many people. He was indeed a gentleman, a kind and a very, very gentle man. Sometimes his whole conversation was interspersed with words of thanks and appreciation: Oh good, Oh thank you, Oh magnificent, oh excellent. Even his relation with God was full of praise and thanksgiving, praising Him for the beauty of nature and of the stars, which he liked to contemplate for hours in a stretch. This is not to say that he was a dreamer; like all Dutch - and he was Dutch after all -- he had a streak of plain realism that made him also attentive for the darker aspects of life, but all in all it was the beauty of life that kept in his experience the upper hand. Can you imagine he used to say “that with so much beauty in life there are still people who do not believe in God? Fr. Fabian was also a man of community. He could be very well alone, praying and meditating and reading his books, but he liked to be with people as well: his family in Holland, his parishioners, the members of his congregation. When you came to pay him a visit, he received you as the guest for whom he had been waiting all the days of his life. In the time that he was still living with us, he was the home-maker. Every evening at 10 pm he was in our TV room waiting for us to come for the hour we had fixed for our recreation and he was thoroughly upset if occasionally nobody turned up. He was not a man though who liked to talk very much about himself. He was basically a listener. He has been my regular confessor for many, many years and he certainly did not belong to those priests who use to overload you with streams of advice; most of the time he just listened. And I have experienced more than once that his ability to truly listen was for me a tremendous, life-giving power. It made it so much easier to come out with my real self, enabling me to say, what perhaps I had never dared to say or to think before. Now, people ask me sometimes, are you not sad that Fr. Fabian has died? Well, after all I have said so far, there seems very little need to explain to you, that I am going to miss him. But sad in the deep sense of the word, no. Why should I feel sad, if I believe that he has reached his final goal? I have always felt very much edified by the way Queen Wilhelmina, one of our Dutch queens, who was by the way a Protestant, wanted to be buried. She and her husband had decided that they wanted to be buried in white, because black they said is the colour of mourning, but death should be for us Christians a moment of joy, because we are going to meet our heavenly bridegroom Jesus. Isnt that very true, dear friends? Is it not St. Paul who says that we, who believe in the resurrection, should not mourn as the pagans do? Death where is your power, death where is your sting. And this is the final thing I would like to say about Fr. Fabian. He was a priest through and through, a man of prayer and therefore a man of eternity, waiting for the bridegroom to come. And that is what all christians --and in particular we priests -- should do in the first place. We should be standing in wait for eternity. I am not saying for a moment, that we should not be concerned about the matters of this world, social justice, marriage and family life, economy, education and finance, whatever. But all that should be placed in the ultimate perspective of the heavenly bridegroom we are going to meet. Death, where is your power, death where is your sting? This is our Good News, this is the core-message or -- as they say it nowadays -- the kerugmawe are supposed to preach and embark on. As St. Paul puts it somewhere, If God is for us, who can be against us? Can trouble or hardship or persecution or hunger or poverty or danger or death...No, I am sure that neither death nor life, neither angels nor other heavenly rulers or powers, neither the present nor the future, neither the world above nor the world below, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God which is ours through Jesus Christ, our Lord. (Rom 8, 31-39). Our final union with the love of God which is ours through Jesus Christ, our Lord, that is our witness; that is our final destiny; that is our ultimate hope. May God give Fr. Fabian a well deserved place in His heavenly glory. (Homily during the Funeral mass)
Posted on: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 16:11:50 +0000
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