St. Anne’s Church, Fiskdale, MA
December 10, 2024
God blessed Fr. Roland with a long life. God blessed us by giving Roland a long life.
There’s some presumption in claiming to have found the key that opens the mystery of a person’s life. But when you look at the number and variety of ministries that Roland was involved in throughout our North American Province – in Quebec, in Mexico, and here in the States – it’s his availability that stands out.
He said so himself. Later on in his life he wrote, “I have tried all my life to be available. I accepted many duties without any specific preparation for any of them.” There’s no hint or resentment in this. He says two things: one, that these many changes helped him to stay young at heart; and second, that he saw the hand of God in this. He doesn’t elaborate on this, but what comes to mind on the face of it is that these various assignments gave him a wealth of experience that he would not have had otherwise.
But I wonder if he also meant something more deeply spiritual, that he learned in accepting these different assignments how to grow in his trust in God. I venture to say that this – his trusting in God – is the real key that opens up the mystery of Roland’s life.
And this is where the word availability falls a bit short. It can lend itself to a certain passivity – “I’m not doing much of anything, I’m available.” The French have a word, “disponible,” that better expresses the spiritual disposition at play here and that comes to light in the title of our popular hymn, “Here I am Lord.”
This is where Roland’s consecrated life, in which we religious affirm that our life is not our own, that our life belongs to God, converges with his apostolate. To accept assignments for which one does not feel especially prepared is always an invitation to trust that God will provide what is needed in these particular circumstances. When this is borne out repeatedly, as I think was the case with Fr. Roland, this only serves to deepen his trust in God and to show in concrete ways that God is the one who’s in charge. I think that Roland came to believe this at a very deep level.
To go a bit further with this, all the human and pastoral gifts that we all appreciated in Roland – his human warmth, his generosity of spirit, his kind and compassionate heart, his capacity to be really present to others, his good humor and good cheer – were certainly products of his God-given nature and of his upbringing in a loving family, but they were also the fruits of his knowing himself to be a child of God. This is the deal that needs to be fleshed out: to know oneself to be a child of God is to open up room for others. Roland made room for others in his life.
This also means that the assignments Fr. Roland accepted were not simply assignments, but more than this, a response to the question posed by our “old” hymn, inspired by the prophet Isaiah: Who will bear my light to them? Whom shall I send?
Allow me to briefly highlight three of these assignments that strike me as emblematic of Roland’s life in religious apostolic community. The first is his time in Cassadaga, close to Buffalo, NY, where for six years he was director of a family retreat center. This work in particular always struck me as a beautiful match for Roland’s gifts. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Roland gathered a team made up of men and women religious and lay people (need it be said that Roland collaborated effectively with women?) in a program aimed at the renewal of family life. He later noted that this was a time of spiritual growth for him.
The second is the Mexico years – three assignments spread over time, two of them as pastor and superior of the Our Lady of Esperanza community in Mexico City. The first of these, in the 1960’s, Roland found himself participating in the early stages of the Mexico mission, experiencing some of the birth pangs that went along with that. By the time of the second assignment as pastor, in the 1980’s, he had found his pastoral stride and helped lead a parish renewal centered in a renovation of the parish Church, and putting in place programs for evangelization and stewardship. The Mexico years were also the occasion for Roland to draw close to the poor, for whom he came to have a special affinity.
I will need skip over a swath of time, including his six years as Provincial and his later years in Worcester as a warmly-regarded superior of the 50 Old Road community and chaplain on the college campus, to arrive at his recent years in retirement in the Assumptionist Center community in Brighton. The presence here today of several lay residents from our residency program over the years attests to the importance of Fr. Roland’s presence in Brighton and the esteem in which he was held. When I arrived in the summer of 2017, Roland was already 91 years old, and in my mind, I gave him at most a year of two to remain in a house not especially congenial to elderly care. Well, Roland had the last laugh, as when I left in the summer of 2023, he was still there, still the spiritual bedrock of the community. Roland enjoyed living in a community that included younger lay residents, and God enabled him to fulfill this wish until almost the end of his life.
It was the constancy of his prayer that stood out. Every day, two hours a day, Roland was in the Chapel praying. What is it that inspired and sustained that prayer? I take my cue from the liturgical selections that Fr. Roland made in the planning of this funeral Mass – with the unmistakable theme of spiritual longing that pervades them: Jerusalem, my Happy Home; I know that my Vindicator lives and my inmost being is consumed with longing; My soul is longing for your peace; This momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison; Sing with all the Saints in Glory. It was this great desire for the fulfillment of God’s promise of life without end, together with a deep sense of gratitude for being shown the way to the Father – I am the Way, and the Truth and the Life – that gave rise to and caused Roland’s prayer to be so persevering.
In the name of our provincial, Fr. Chi Ai, I would like to acknowledge the wonderful assistance provided to Fr. Roland by the brothers and staff in Brighton, especially during these recent months of declining physical and mental health. Allow me to single out four people in particular who, over the course of many years, closely accompanied and supported Roland: three members of our staff – John Gauthier, Michelle Omiecki and Sister Clare Bertero and a dear friend from the Cassadaga years, Sister Corona. I know that Roland was deeply moved by your care and the gift of your friendship.
Our farewell to Fr. Roland includes as a matter of course, our prayers for God’s mercy upon his soul and thanksgiving to God for giving us a brother, a priest, and a companion along the way who taught us so much about trusting God and the enduring fruits of that trust. In the peace given him in his later years, a peace that he desired to share with others, Roland might have quoted one of his baseball heroes, Lou Gehrig: “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
