Many years ago, before I was ordained, I was teaching an English class. For a writing assignment, I had the students write their own obituary. However, they could not use their real name or include any other explicit identifying information. When the obituaries were collected, I distributed them at random to the students, and each one read the obituary they had received to the class. The other students then had to guess whose obituary they had heard. Was it true to life or merely wishful pie in the sky?
In the 1890s, Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel read his own obituary one morning in the newspaper. It said: “Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who died yesterday, devised a way for more people to be killed in a war than ever before, and he died a very rich man.”
The reporter bungled it because it was actually Alfred’s older brother who had died. Nevertheless, Alfred was greatly disturbed by the obituary and was determined to change his life’s legacy. Thus were born the annual Nobel prizes for peace, science, literature and other areas of human endeavor.
In a sense, every obituary is a kind of judgment pronounced on one’s life. The parable of the wicked tenants we heard in the Gospel for the 27th Sunday was a judgment on their lives. They had mistreated and even murdered the emissaries of the owner of the vineyard when they came to collect the owner’s due. Jesus asked, “What will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants when he comes?” The priests and the elders answered, “He will put those wretched men to a wretched death.”
Of course, we are the modern-day tenants of the Lord’s vineyard, and it’s time for a reality check. How are we doing as a church and as a nation as God’s tenants?
What is the spiritual soil of our soul like? Is it rich or deficient in faith and morals? Have we properly transmitted that life of faith and morals to our children? Perhaps we have, but later they abandoned it all. Not to worry if you’ve done the best you could. They have free will. Continue to love them, support them, encourage them in their search for truth and meaning, and, above all, pray for them. They may yet return to their roots.
As a nation, do we cherish and pass on to our children the importance of the Judeo-Christian principles on which our nation was founded? Do we emphasize to them the basic premise that all men and women are created equal and the foundational blocks of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
There are ideas out there today that seek to shift the focus of government away from the centrality of the rights of the individual human person to the state itself. There are even subversive ideologies prevalent in many colleges and universities that portray everything in American history and our democratic system as fatally flawed and unredeemable. This has given rise to such things as the cancel-culture movement and revisionist anti-American histories, which have been adopted by some public-school systems. We would certainly be wise to keep abreast of the decisions of our local boards of education and to inform ourselves about those alma maters of ours which have gone far astray from their original philosophy of education.
It has been said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Expanding on that, President Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in our bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
British politician Edmund Burke once said that the only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing. One morning over a century ago, Alfred Nobel awoke to read his own obituary in the newspaper and he hated it. So he set about in earnest to change it. If your obituary appeared in the newspaper tomorrow, what would it say? Would you be happy with it?
Father Edward Kolla is parochial vicar at Christ the Good Shepherd Parish, Vineland.
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