Preached this morning at Christ the King - Memorial of St. Vincent DePaul:

I was out in South Bend Indiana four weeks ago, and there was a picture on the wall of the hotel we were staying at. It was a picture from 1930 of a ticker tape parade in downtown Chicago.  The streets crammed with people celebrating the arrival of the victorious Notre Dame football team, just returning from the west coast having defeated archrival Southern Cal to clinch the national championship.

Maybe it’s macabre, but what struck me about that picture was that every single one of the people in that picture <pause> is now dead, some 85 years later.  I looked carefully at the picture, for ten minutes or so, trying to see if maybe there was a baby or small child in the picture, SOMEONE who might still be alive today.  But alas, I found none younger than maybe 25 or 30.

This picture came to mind as I was praying with our first reading from Ecclesiates. 

For this reading gives us a sense of just how temporary our lives here are.  How quickly they pass and are over.  How nothing much seems to change in the world, but we come and go, and generations from now, who will remember us?  Our lives here are indeed fleeting.

But we live in a world, in a culture, where most people seem to live as if they’ll never die!  A culture that denies death.  Where vanity is a perfect word to describe many if not most of us.  We go to health clubs and work out, we buy cosmetics and visit plastic surgeons and spend billions trying to look and feel young.  Quoheleth would laugh at us, at our vanity.  Oh, that day will come, Quoheleth would tell us.

And given that, the question is “how will we live?”  If our days are numbered, and they are, how should we spend our days.  The message of Ecclesiastes is that we should spend our days clinging to God and living according to His law.  Faithfully following God who is, after all, unchanging in His constant love and mercy for us. 

And the message of Jesus is that we must faithfully love God and show that love in all we do and say, especially by loving our neighbor.  We celebrate today a great saint, Vincent DePaul, who even though he was surrounded for much of his life by the wealth and vanity of his day, remained unattached and unimpressed, and lived a life of devotion to the poor and the imprisoned and the sick.  A man whose life is not forgotten, 400 years later. 

Let us, then, resolve similarly to spend our days in service to Our Lord whom we encounter each day in our neighbor and in the poor.  And let us partake of the One Body of Our Lord to give us the strength and spirit to so spend our days.