Homily by Francis X Clooney, SJ
I stand here at this place somewhat daunted — yes, even Jesuits can be daunted occasionally! — knowing that so many of you know Peter so well, have worked with him, family, friends, collaborators in the work that he has done over the years. I’ve known Peter a little for a long time and more fully in recent years. I knew him before he was a Jesuit when he came to do his MA in theology at Boston College when I was teaching there. Over the last two years or so, we got into the habit of having dinner every couple of months, always the same. Peter would take the Number One bus over to Cambridge where I live. We’d meet outside the Harvard Coop and we’d go to Maharaja, the Indian restaurant. We’d have dinner, we’d share what’s going on in our lives. When dinner was over, I’d tell Peter, please take the leftovers. We’d head to the Number One bus stop, he’d get on the bus and I would walk home. In those last years, he became a friend to me. And so I think I share something of the greater grief and greater sorrow that so many of you suffer today — and the amazement all of us must have at Peter’s life and ministry that we celebrate today.
We know all of us how he studied again and again in different places. His undergrad and grad studies at Boston College and Weston Jesuit School of Theology, his medical degree from Georgetown, his Master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University, Peter was a man of many degrees and great learning. He had it made: he became a scientific researcher at the National Institutes of Health. He could have at that point settled in and said, “Now I can do good work that I can be proud of for the rest of my life.”
But as Peter tells us — I’m sure you’ve heard this before — when the Jesuits and their housekeeper and the housekeeper’s daughter were killed in El Salvador in 1989, Peter like the rest of us who are old enough, heard the news, were shocked by it, were saddened by it, prayed. And so many of us — certainly me — then went back to our normal lives doing the things we were doing before, implicitly awaiting the next big news story.
And yet Peter, as he tells us in a book preface he wrote not long ago, said, “When I heard that news, I realized that I could no longer be a bystander. I could no longer be on the sidelines watching. I had to do something.” And so — having a comfortable position, being able to do whatever he wanted — he left Johns Hopkins, he went to El Salvador to use his medical skills to work with the poor, with the children, with people in need. He was risking his life. Six Jesuits had just been killed, and he surely was thinking ahead — “I too could be killed. I could lose my life here, but this is where I need to be.” There’s something wonderfully authentic about that. To hear the word, to hear the news, to hear of a great need — and then refuse to say, “Let someone take care of it.” Peter felt that it was up to him to do something.
And Peter did something — he was a man who did something and made a life of it, in El Salvador and every day of his life thereafter. He became a Jesuit, then he became involved in different pastoral ministries we all know — and out of it the wonderful work of A Faith That Does Justice sprung up, so compelling for Peter that even two Sundays ago when he preached here for the last time, he spoke directly to everyone listening at the end of Mass, “Please join me in this work. We need to be part of this work together, a faith that does justice. Give us a donation, indeed, but even better, give over your life to love of neighbor.” And I think he wanted all of us to understand that this is what you have to do when people are in need —stop your life, stop the things you’re doing and do something for the person who cries out for your help. He said all this again two Sundays ago, even if he knew — as Fr. John has already indicated — that of course people will always push back, reluctant to actually do something for the poor: “Peter, you’re asking too much. You’re pushing too hard. Leave us alone. Let us do the good things we do already.” But Peter insisted, “This is what the Gospel is all about.” Who can forget what Peter said at his last Mass? I watched the Mass on YouTube, and tried to write down the words that he had said toward the end of Mass:
“So if I have said anything that resonates with you, this idea then is that to be a Christian, to be a Jew, to be a Muslim, to be of any faith tradition is more than doctrinal belief. It’s moving beyond doctrinal belief and ritual participation, to practice the values that we claim to believe in society and especially on behalf of people in need.”
So we can be amazed at Peter today and grateful for the witness that he gives us living out the Gospel in our time. (Even as I say this, I suspect if Peter was here, he might interrupt me at this point and say, “Don’t make me a saint. Don’t canonize me. I only did what we all should be doing. Nothing extraordinary because it’s absolutely clear — as Jesus said, love your neighbor as you love your God.”)
It seemed to me too, in hearing of Peter’s life and thinking of it the last few days, that today’s Gospel —Luke 10: 25-37 — was a perfect Gospel to hear proclaimed at Peter’s funeral. Peter is a perfect example of the good Samaritan on the road. The Samaritan is a man who is somewhat set apart, not quite fitting in. Surely that Samaritan who had been in Jerusalem and was on his way down to Jericho, might have even before been a bit uncomfortable. Perhaps he was thinking: “There’s the priest, there’s the Levite. If I go too fast, I’ll have to pass them by. Will they get off the road because they’re disgusted to see a Samaritan? I don’t really fit in.” But that Samaritan was the one who changed his way, who changed his habit, who changed his life because he saw a person in need by the side of the road.
I’m sure the priest was a good man. The priest had things to do, he had meetings to go to, he had obligations. He needed to go down to Jericho and come back, so he walked on the other side, so as to not get too close to the bloody victim. He just walked on. And the Levite, a priestly official in the temple, felt the same thing: “I have duties. I have to go down to Jericho quickly, and then I have to come back to Jerusalem. So many things need to be done. I will go to the other side of the road and pass by as if nothing had happened. Maybe I’ll say a prayer, oh God, please take care of this poor victim, but I’m too busy to get my hands dirty.”
And what’s extraordinary is that the Samaritan — who knew what it meant to be excluded, who knew what it meant to be on the edge, who knew what it meant to be disrespected by other people — was the only one to stop as Peter stopped: “The Jesuits have been killed in El Salvador. I have to stop and change, I need to go there and be with the people.”
The Samaritan goes up to the man, he cares for him, he washes his wounds, he bandages them, and he picks the man up and puts him on his donkey and then guides him to the inn. And even then he’s not done. He gives as much money as he can. Perhaps he’s a poor man, but he gives what he has or more than he has to the innkeeper: “Please take care of my brother. He’s a man in need. I will come back to see him and when I come back to see him, if anything more is owed, I will pay.”
If you hear this Gospel then — as Jesus says at the end— we too must go and do likewise. Your neighbor is not somebody out there to calculate, as if to say, “These are neighbors, those are not neighbors, et cetera, et cetera.” Jesus is blunt: You need to be a neighbor. You need to act differently. You need to change your life.
The scholar of the law who comes to Jesus with these questions probably didn’t want to hear Jesus saying, “If you say you love God, then show it by the way you love your neighbor.”
I could go on with this. I think you see the parallel —Peter and the Samaritan. We can be grateful to Peter for bringing a parable like this to life, showing us what it means to be the person who stops, who changes their life, who takes the command of Jesus seriously and says, “I will go and act in that way.”
I thought I would finish my brief reflection here by reading something that Peter wrote recently. You may know that he was working on a book at the end of his life on the Spiritual Exercises and the poor. He shared with me the preface of it about a month ago, and I took it to heart. In the preface, he talks about at one point in El Salvador when he was not a Jesuit yet, when he was the doctor going out into the hills to a village. He reaches the village, and there’s a sign on the clinic saying, ‘Closed Today’. Why is it closed? Because all the people had gathered at the church because they wanted to commemorate the hundreds of people who had been killed already in the violence.
And Peter realized immediately, “I need to be with the people there as they grieve and remember those who died.” So he joins them. The names are being read aloud as people pray — but then he hears the bombs start dropping. The military — either not caring or aiming at this gathering — start lobbing some bombs in. And suddenly Peter realized, he said, “I might have been one of those victims, not simply a person who cares for the poor, but a person who also will be lying there killed or maimed, like so many around me. He finishes his reflection with these words:
“I realized then that I had been invited to a holy place to be among a chosen people. While I had been born into a world of privilege, by the grace of God, I now stood in a world of human suffering. There God still lamented creation gone so terribly astray. Their prophets still challenge those who enjoy it in abundance of the goods of God’s creation to go and share them with those who could only dream of participating in even a fair share. There the spirit of Jesus still called for disciples to walk with him in his mission on behalf of the unfinished work of the kingdom of God. All the while denouncing fearlessly those who would undermine its tenuous hold in history in the presence of all that violence. And there also these forgotten people lived with a hope against all hope that they would one day realize their God-given human dignity and potential.”
And Peter concludes, “When I left my work as a physician scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, when I went to live among the Salvadorian people, I could never have imagined the extent to which they would change my life. It is for this reason that no matter where I find myself in this world, it is among these people that my soul rests each night. It is with this lesser God that I encountered among them a God who has not undone their suffering but continues to walk with them to their cross and resurrection that I have walked every day of my life since then.”
Amen.