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June 14, 2005

In Memory of Msgr. Dick Allen by Father Clem

My friends, I am sure that I am not alone when I say to you that it is a sad and difficult task that we have come here to do today. The Rite of Christian Burial, or the remembrance of the death of a Christian is rarely a simple or routine matter, precisely because,in so many cases,it involves saying farewell to someone whom we have dearly loved.

And even though so many of us here today as pastors or parish directors or deacons may have officially participated in liturgies of death and burial or many of our own Catholic parishioners in the past, this does not make our responsibility today any easier. When we celebrate the death and burial of a priest whose friendship we have personally experienced and in whose ministry we have personally shared…all this demands of us a special sense of compassion, because we realize that in life we were joined and bonded in a common task, a pastoral role an ecclesial responsibility.

In short my friends, Monsignor Dick Allen was one of us, indeed, is one of us in this ministry of Jesus Christ. That is why attention must be paid. We come here joyfully as believers in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and we do this important work of offering thanks to our God for a man who spent so many good days with us doing the Lord’s work.

And yet, I should imagine that even with all our liturgical and pastoral experience with these Rites of Christian Burial, we must sometimes still find it difficult to deal with the mystery of death. Our theology does not always help us as much as we would like when it is the death of a special friend that we are experiencing. Death happens every day, of course, but when it comes close to us personally, we are often left without words, without answers. What should we do? What should we say? Fortunately, the liturgy itself gives us words to say and rites to celebrate that are immensely important to us.

But, despite all that, there may still be a longing in our hearts for something that we can personally bring to this moment, some tool with which we can celebrate Christ’s resurrection in memory of Dick Allen.

If you will allow me, let me say that I believe that the most precious thing that we can bring to this moment of our sadness is our personal and common memory. I do not believe that there is any way that we can discount memory. Memories run too deeply, they are too personal to allow them to be simply set aside and forgotten.

The reason I say this is because every Christian who comes through our lives leaves a mark upon it, the mark of Christ’s name. Of course, we can always say, “well, memories of people come and go: Some people are remembered, others are forgotten. Memory is such a short-lived reality.” All of that is true, of course, but still and all, we are changed by people who come into our lives and depart from them. To forget who these associates have been for us, to forget what they have done to fill our lives with questions, with thoughts, with mystery, with enthusiasm and joy for life, I say, we run a risk to our personal and spiritual fulfillment if we simply choose to forget all this.

It often occurs to me that even Jesus seemed to think it important that he be remembered by his disciples for all that he was and all that he did while with them. Remember what he said to them at the Last Supper as he share the bread and the cup? At the end of the supper he said to them: “Do this in memory of me. When you celebrate Eucharist, remember me.”

My sense, however, is that it was more than the “doing of the Eucharist” that Jesus was asking his friends to remember. My hunch is that he wanted them to recall occasionally their friendship on the road, all their joys, all their disappointments. All this, of course, was part of the ministry of Jesus and his friends.

So, that, at least in part, is what I think we do when we gather today to celebrate Eucharist together in memory of Dick Allen. We also remember the road we have traveled together, the joys and the disappointments, the successes and he failures.

I am not aware of what your memories of Dick Allen are. I can only share with you a few of my own because he was a partner in rural ministry with me, a next-door-neighbor to me.

If you were to ask me how I would like to remember Dick, I could do no better than to say that he struck me as a parish priest, indeed, a country priest, a pastor of rural parishes in North Carolina. Throughout his priestly ministry he was a “traveling man”, a man of the road or the circuit, as we say here in Alaska. It was a great joy for him to travel to small towns, small Christian communities to bring Christ to them. That was the joy of his life.

Almost by accident, then, it happened that when he was about ready to retire, he met Archbishop Hurley who invited him to come to Alaska. “You can work on the circuit,” Archbishop Hurley told him. “You can do here in Alaska what you have done in North Carolina.

And so, Dick came to Anchorage and did that very thing from the year 2000 until just a few months ago. He could easily have said: “No, I think I’ll just retire and play golf, or perhaps I’ll go up to Hilton Head and enjoy the sun and the beach.” But he did not: Rural ministry was still too much in his blood, it was too attractive to him, too much his first and only love.

Now, mind you, Did Allen did not come to Alaska for some of the reasons why others come here: He was not a fisherman, nor a hunter. Given his age and physical condition, he did not plan to climb any mountains. He simply waned to continue enjoying being a parish priest, doing country ministry.

Ultimately, however, my memories of Dick Allen are limited. If you were to seek for a more complete history of Dick’s impact on the Church of the Archdiocese of Anchorage, you would need only to speak personally to the folks at Our Lady of the Lake in Big Lake or to the folks at St. Christopher’s in Willow, or the parishioners at St. Bernard’s in Talkeetna and Trapper Creek. The church of Our Lady of the Angels remember him well, so too those at St. James in Ninilchik and St. John’s in Homer. They are the ones who knew him best, the ones who personally benefited from his ministry. They would tell you, for instance, that he was a “talker”, a homilist who sometimes gave two homilies at the same Mass. They would tell you that they remembered hearing him announce the news on APRN, the local radio station. He was a “talker,” no doubt about it.

But given all these small memories, Dick still enjoyed being a country priest most of all. And as I was thinking about all that, I remembered a book by the French novelist, Georges Bernanos, entitled: “The Diary of a Country Priest. It is the story of a priest who had been assigned by his bishop to country parishes throughout his entire priestly career. Time and time again, he had been passed over for monsignorial honors. But he never complained; his heart was with country people.

The last few paragraphs of the novel describe the priest’s last hours in this world. He is lying in his bed, dying of Tuberculosis. His apartment is small and sparsely furnished. He is lying there, saying his rosary when a friend of his came by to visit, a man who had also been a priest at one time but had long since left the ministry. At this point, no one had yet come to administer the “last sacraments” to the dying priest. His friend therefore says to him: “My great regret, my friend, is that I am unable to bring to you the Church’s consolation of the sacraments, the ministrations you offered to so many other during your life-time. The dying priest looked up at his friend, clasped his hand and said to him: “Does it really matter? Grace is everywhere, grace is everywhere.”

My friends, those words of Bernanos came to my mind when I thought of Dick Allen during his last hours. Without doubt, here was a good man, a holy man, a man who helped us all to understand in some small ways that “grace is indeed everywhere.

LeRoy E. Clementich C.S.C.
June 10, 2005

Posted by Dr. Peter J. Zografos at 04:01 PM.