I experience it in our lives in this parish. I know that I am a sinner no different before God than the ones who are still kept behind those horrible banging prison doors. I sit with you and hear of betrayals and death, divorce and adultery, cheating and lying, embezzlement and drunkenness, abuse and bigotry, and discrimination and false pride. My friends, we all pass through the winter seasons of the soul. They may be nothing to go to prison over, but enough to know that some death needs to occur, something needs to be let go.
Life is, by definition, tragic.
Life without death does not exist at all. If there are beginnings, there are so, necessarily endings. If life is going anywhere at all, it is going inexorably toward death. Perhaps we have feared death because we have misunderstood it, have lost our memory of the ocean into which every river runs. There are some interesting scenes of really a tragic situation, a place that could be the winter place of the spirit - an orphanage in Maine.