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Funeral Mass for Perry Lorenzo
Will it surprise you if I tell you that Perry had some very definite ideas about how his funeral was to be celebrated? Well, he did! With the practiced skill of a stage manager he set the scene and gave directions. He was especially clear about the music he wanted and he was equally clear about the matter of a eulogy. He didn’t want one, he told me: not from me, not from anyone! And since it is my great hope someday to meet Perry again on another shore and would rather not have to do a lot of explaining when I do, I am going to honor his wishes the best I can. In the same conversation when he made his funeral wishes known and nixed the eulogy, I asked Perry if he would choose the scriptures for this Mass. Who better than he, after all? He agreed to, and I’m sure he meant to, but he never got around to telling me. I do wish he had. I’d have to say, however, that the reading from the Book of Daniel almost selected itself. It spoke of an apocalyptic time of great tribulation when God’s elect, whose names are “found written in the book of life” will be saved. In those days, says Daniel, “the wise shall shine brightly like the splendor of the firmament, and those who instruct the many to justice shall be like the stars forever.” Perry spent a good part of his life “instructing the many to justice” and to a whole lot of other things. He was the consummate teacher. He had a passion for teaching, a passion for truth, and a passion for beauty, and his mission in life was to ignite others with that same passion. And he did. Perry set people on fire. That’s true whether they were high school students or students at Seattle University; Young Artists at the opera, or opera goers who became opera lovers, thanks to his magic. Perry once told me that he thought the most important work he ever did was those years he taught at Kennedy Catholic High School. He didn’t know it at the time, he said, but over the years, so many of his former students had told him what he did for them and what he meant to them, that he realized that the seeds he planted there had really taken root and borne fruit. “The wise shall shine brightly like the splendor of the firmament, and those who instruct the many to justice shall be like the stars forever.” By any measure you apply, Perry Lorenzo was a star. He achieved stardom early in his too short life. But the stardom he really cared about is the stardom that is now his as he takes his place among the blessed to shine forever from his place with God. I have no doubt that the heavens will be a little brighter now, thanks to a new star that has taken its place in the firmament. I chose the reading from the Book of Revelation (John’s great vision of new heavens and a new earth) because of the sweeping picture it painted of the time when God will be all in all, when chaos and darkness will be put to flight and beauty will be everything, beauty without end: the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God beautiful as a bride on her wedding day. Perry, of course, got glimpses of that beauty all his life long. He got glimpses of it in the world of opera and in the life of the Church he loved so much – in its liturgies, its music, its art, its poetry. And he gave glimpses of beauty every time he opened his mouth to speak or to teach. On this subject of beauty, I’m going to step aside and let Perry speak for himself. Just three months ago, in an article he wrote for our parish journal, In Your Midst, he reflected on the question, ‘Why are you a Catholic?’ Perry’s words: “I am Catholic because the Church is beautiful,” he wrote. And he went on, “A couple years ago, on a hot June Sunday, a couple of non-Catholic friends of mine came with me to the 5:30pm Mass: that’s the Mass with the beautiful singing of the Women’s Schola -- exquisite refreshment on a hot early summer afternoon. The day also happened to be the annual Pride parade festival, so Capitol Hill was staggering into a wearied post-party exhaustion. My two good friends were not only not Catholic but also rather ideologically anti-Christian -- Christians and Catholics having appeared to them as hateful, mean, ugly people, the people who spoil the party.” He continued: “That Sunday, the grace and magic of a Midsummer Night’s Dream seemed to bedew us. I remember distinctly three sprinkles of grace that afternoon. "One: as the server came down the altar steps with the thurible and incense, one of my friends -- the more anti-Christian of the pair -- said to me, “Wow! I didn’t know Catholics thought human beings were worth incensing and bowing to!” Second: during Communion we sat in the front pew and watched the people line up and walk by: old women, couples, grown-up men, children, all races, obviously rich people, obviously poor, intellectuals, musicians, families, straights, gays and lesbians, couples, students, sick people, wide-eyed visitors, rather typical Capitol Hill denizens, the whole panoply of humankind. My friend turned to me and said, ‘Well, there’s more diversity here than there was in the Parade this morning!’ Third, when it was all over, as the organ blazed away, my friend said to me, ‘That was about the most beautiful thing I have ever seen!’ And, then, when my friends learned that St. James not only had beautiful liturgies but also fed hundreds of poor and homeless people in our parish kitchen every afternoon, they were moved beyond words.” Perry concluded: “That’s why I am in the Catholic Church: because she is beautiful, like that.” You who knew and loved Perry won’t be surprised by any of that. Beauty was the coinage of his realm, his path to God, and he never tired of preaching the Gospel of Beauty. And even though he knew only too well the manifold failings and foibles of the Catholic Church, it was nonetheless the place where beauty came alive for him as nowhere else. And that brings me to the third of the scripture readings we heard earlier – the magnificent Prologue from St. John’s gospel. Much like the overture to an opera, it sets forth the major themes and motifs of all John’s gospel in some of the most beautiful and lyrical poetry in all the scriptures. That passage was read in every Catholic church throughout the world on Christmas morning and I thought it needed to be read – and heard – here. It echoes the opening words of the Bible from Genesis, “In the beginning.” “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” says Genesis. And John says, “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.” “In the beginning.” We are not in chronos time here (human time, measurable time, Greenwich Mean Time, if you will); we are in kairos time (God’s time) – time without measure, time we cannot begin to grasp, try as we might. But God’s time intersects with our time when God speaks the creative Word and beauty and wonders without end spring into life in the formless void. And God’s time also intersects with our time at that most stupendous and breathtaking moment in all of human history when the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us. From that moment on the chasm between divinity and humanity is finally and forever bridged. God, the All-Beautiful One becomes one of us. God takes on a human body, a human face, and in that moment, and in every moment since, humanity – our humanity – becomes a reflection of the All-Beautiful God! By any human reckoning, it is almost preposterous to think that divinity could somehow be contained in humanity, but that makes it no less true. Poets understand it, I think, even better than theologians. Gerard Manley Hopkins speaks of it as nature becoming a Heraclitean Fire: “I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what
I am, All of this Perry knew in ways most of us don’t. It’s why his whole life – both personal and professional – was caught up in beauty. It was never beauty for its own sake; it was beauty for God’s sake and for our sake; beauty as the path to God, beauty as the very revelation of God. Beauty as the eighth sacrament, as I like to call it. Is it surprising, then, that Perry was quite taken by some words Pope Benedict wrote some years he became Pope: “The only really effective apologia for Catholicism comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb?” I am going to conclude here, but not before relating a little story. A week or so before Perry died I was visiting with him as I always did after giving him Holy Communion. It was clear to me that his days were very numbered and there was a favorite prayer that I wanted to share with him. But, to be honest, I was a little hesitant to do so – for two reasons: who was I to be introducing a prayer to this man with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of all things Catholic? And secondly, would the prayer come too close to acknowledging that the battle was not going to be won? Oh, and there was a third reason: the prayer was by the great Jesuit theologian and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and I had no idea of where he stood in Perry’s pantheon. So I asked him, “Perry, do you like Chardin?” To which he quickly replied with typical unvarnished bluntness, “No!” A brief silence ensued and then he asked me, “Plato?” And then I thought, well, he either didn’t hear me correctly or his medicines are playing tricks. So I said, I don’t know any prayers of Plato, I was talking about Chardin. And he said, “Oh.” Well, that wasn’t a lot of encouragement to share the prayer with him but I decided I would anyway. The next day when I went to see him, I brought it with me on a little card and gave it to him. He read it slowly, looked over at me and, then, without a word, he reached out and took my hand and held it for a long time. Nothing more. Whether or not he liked Chardin, I think he liked the prayer and so I’m going to let that prayer be my penultimate word. When the signs of age Perry, dear friend, God has penetrated to the very marrow of your substance and borne you away within Himself. You have passed from the land of reflected beauty into the land of Beauty Itself, into the embrace of Beauty Itself. We would be selfish to want you back. And we will best honor your memory by continuing along our own search for meaning, and by doing as you did: letting all that is beautiful enchant, enthrall, and intoxicate us. And lead us to God. Father Michael G. Ryan
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