Fr Peter’s pregnant silence
Less than a month before he entered hospital for the last time, Fr Peter Serracino Inglott preached the sermon at the funeral Mass for a two and a half year old girl, Rebecca Aakeroy.
Some of the most striking and startling aspects of Fr Peter’s thought came together in his understanding of death
- Ranier Fsadni
Fr Peter dwelt on her smile, her curly hair, the way she ran, how she loved giving things, her love of butterflies. He spoke as though he wished he could, right then, pick her up in his arms.
Her joy, he said, would always be etched in his heart, not as mere memory but as a living love that would not die. Now, that love would have to be experienced as though from behind a screen. But a time would come when it could once again be expressed bodily, in the Resurrection.
Whatever reservations we may have about Fr Peter’s convictions, there are some interesting things to notice. First, no words about God wanting Rebecca for himself; no platitudes about God’s mysterious ways. God stays out of it. He is present only in the living love that does not die.
Second, note how Fr Peter cannot help speaking of Rebecca’s hair, her light and lightness. Rebecca without her body was not Rebecca; being reunited with her bodily (even if in a different way from what we are used to) was essential if love for her was to be fulfilling and fulfilled.
Some of the most striking and startling aspects of Fr Peter’s thought came together in his understanding of death. They are worth comparing with the reactions many of us had when we learned of his rare, one-in-a-million, rapid brain-eating illness, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and as we watched it claim him.
Many thought it was a cruelly ironic illness. Fr Peter would have said that death is always, for everyone, a cruel irony – whether it’s a mother dying from breast cancer, like his sister Josephine; or a champion of organic farming who died from liver cancer probably contracted from the pesticides in the fields he inspected, like his brother Franco; or his sister Lucy, who he watched die aged four when he was six, three days after his mother gave birth to a baby boy, simply because at the height of war some medicine was not available.
Death is always ironic, he said, because we always die by mistake. We need not have caught pneumonia; we might have had a better diet; if only we had lived two centuries later, a mere ulcer would not have killed us. Whoever dies from natural causes, whether it’s a tsunami or a clogged artery, has died because of a chain reaction that need not have happened.
As usual with Fr Peter, he backed that controversial view with findings from science (years before research projects on whether death can be avoided were embarked on in major institutions like Cambridge). He took an interest in research on human cells that suggested that, in principle, the ageing process could be halted. However, he was mainly interested in its philosophical and religious implications.
For him, if we all die by mistake, it means that death is rooted in creation, not the Creator. If it happens by chance, then it is not fate. We can and should rise up – the only way is together – first to minimise, then to defeat it. As long as a single one of us dies, a bit of us all dies with her. As long as a single one of us is loved, death’s hold is weakened. The chanciness of the universe should not make us bitter. It should be love’s guiding searchlight.
Fr Peter was not glib. He would have expected those of us by his bedside to be heartbroken, as we were, to see his mind’s lucidity cloud up, his powers of speech reduced to snatches and then silence, his considerable physical stamina ebb. He would have thought it absurd to ignore the destruction taking place. But I thought I saw other things as well.
As his reason was obscured, other features of his mind came to light. Seemingly asleep, his arm would move in time with his favourite piece of Mozart. One long night, hallucinating he was on a storm-tossed ship, he gleefully urged me to look up: “The sails! The sails!”
It was unmistakably Fr Peter but we were beginning to know him in a new way. As the silence descended, we all had to communicate more physically, in turn discovering the strong grip of his hands, the remarkably muscled forearms when we stroked them, the ruffle of his hair, the taste of his forehead when we kissed him. All that was Fr Peter too, hitherto at one removed from most of us, and we came to love him more for it.
His hospital room seemed to become an extension of him. I read some of the latest books, friends’ gifts, just by loitering there. The space around him – with toy donkeys, clowns, children’s drawings... – was a living network of his various, far-flung friendships.
Over the last two months I saw a Noah’s Ark of humanity, all types, shapes and sizes, brought together at his bedside simply because he knew them all. We came to know each other better thanks to him. His silence was the foundation of our conversation. It was a pregnant silence – a quickening of conversation, with him and through him, which will not die.
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