topleft05.jpg (18208 bytes)HOMILY
RIP: Corporal Kyle Grimes, USMC
04 February 05


 

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives
of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York.
I came to realize that life lived to help others
is the only one that matters and that it is my duty,
in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me,
to help others He has placed in my path.
This is my highest and best use as a human.

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

Ben Stein
 

Corporal Kyle Grimes' USMC Charlie Company takes Fallujah, Iraq:

 

Earlier in the day that Kyle’s Aunt Debbie informed me of her nephew’s tragic death in western Iraq, I received an email from my uncle who lives in Wisconsin.  The email contained a moral lesson that I believe has been making the rounds of the Internet lately.  This morning, as we memorialize and honor the life of Corporal Kyle Grimes, USMC, and having heard today’s gospel reading in which Jesus teaches his disciples about the pathway of blessedness―what this moral story identifies as “choosing a life that matters”―I thought it good to share that moral lesson with you as a way to focus our reflections as we contemplate what God may be teaching us through the life of Corporal Kyle Grimes.

The moral lesson reads as follows:

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end.

There will be no more sunrises, no days, no hours, or minutes.  It won’t matter where you came from or on what side of town you lived.  It won’t matter whether you were a “10” or a Rhodes scholar.  Your gender, skin color, ethnicity will be of no consequence whatsoever.

Your wealth, fame, and temporal power will be rendered irrelevant, as if you never existed.  Your grudges, resentments, frustrations, and jealousies will disappear; but so will your hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists.  The wins and losses that once seemed so vitally important will instantaneously be rendered meaningless.  It will not matter what you owned or what others owed you.  Everything you collected, whether treasured and displayed prominently or stored away in the attic or basement, will pass along to someone or else be transported by a garbage truck to its final resting place in a land fill.

So, what will matter?  How will the value of your days be measured?

What will matter is not what you purchased, but the life you lived; not everything you acquired for yourself, but what you gave others.

What will matter is not your depth of your competence and or the breadth of your skill, but the content and quality of your character.  What will matter is not your success, but the significant way you touched others’ lives.  What will matter is not what you learned, but what your life taught, not the number of people you knew, but who will remember you and for what.  What will matter are not your memories, but the memories of those whose lives you changed for the better.  In short, how you gave life to others as well as how you enriched and encouraged them.

“Remember, you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  Living a life that matters doesn’t happen by accident.  It’s not a matter of circumstance or Fate but one of choice.  Choose to live a life that matters.
 

This moral story is a 21st-century version of the message Fr. Anthony just proclaimed from the Book of Ecclesiastes, namely, there is a “time” and a “season” for everything “under Heaven.”  What each of us chooses to do during those times and seasons is not unimportant and devoid of purpose.  No, what we choose do is vitally important, because our freely‑willed choices during those times and seasons will determine whether we live a life that matters.
 



Cpl. Kyle Grimes, USMC
in Fallujah, Iraq

As we contemplate the specter of a 21-year-old Marine corporal’s tragic death, we need to recognize how we oftentimes choose to live a life that matters in quite the wrong way―as we follow the pathway of materialism―which equates a life that matters with the acquisition of things like money, fame, and power or the acquisition of a quality of life characterized by ease, pleasure, and being served by others.  This pathway is steeped in a set of values by which human beings judge their worth and success in terms of a materialistic “quality of life.”  If that is the true pathway to a life that matters, then the life of Corporal Kyle Grimes―like the life of Jesus―was a dismal failure.

In today’s gospel reading, we heard Jesus propose a different pathway.  To be a disciple, Jesus teaches, is to love God and neighbor as we love ourselves.  Foreshadowing what that would mean in terms of his life, Jesus also teaches that the greatest expression of this form of selfless love is when “a man should lay down his life for his friends.”

Last Wednesday evening, the Channel 10 News at 11:00 o’clock in Philadelphia memorialized Corporal Kyle Grimes.  I recognize a few people seated here today because you appeared in that televised memorial, each describing who you knew Kyle to be as well as what Kyle and his life meant to you.

Thinking back to that televised memorial, what I recall, in particular, is a photograph that was taken of Kyle, I believe, when he was four years old.  Perhaps you remember that photograph, too.  Kyle was dressed in military fatigues and his face was painted, all with the intention of camouflaging Kyle from the enemy.  I don’t know who the enemy was―it might well have been his sister, Rachael―but, no matter who it was, Kyle was poised and ready to engage the enemy in battle.

Later, when Kyle was seven years old, he completed a homework project entitled “All about Me.”  In the booklet Kyle produced, he wrote, “My name is Kyle.  I have a dog named Mike.  I want to be a Mreen.”  Also included in that booklet―and giving me reasonable suspicion that Rachael may well have been the enemy Kyle was prepared to battle with in that photograph taken three years earlier―was a picture of Kyle’s sister, Rachael.  Interestingly, Kyle placed that picture on the booklet’s first page.  He inscribed the picture with these two sentences: “This is my sister. She has a big fat butt.”

Fourteen years later, here’s what Corporal Kyle Grimes wrote about his sister in a letter:

I and her are closer than any other siblings in the family….We…had to depend on each other at an young age….it made both of us grow up a lot faster and depend on each other a lot more.  I feel that Rachael is most proud of me.  She never tells me that but I can tell just by talking to her.
 

Kyle Grimes was a son, a grandson, a brother, an uncle, a nephew, a “Christmas cousin,” and a friend.  What made Kyle different from all of us is that he viewed these relationships in terms of what Kyle believed was his purpose in life, namely, to belong to the “band of brothers” we call the “United States Marine Corps.”

Just as some of us gathered here today appeared in the Channel 10 memorial to Corporal Kyle Grimes, some of us were recipients of Kyle’s telephone calls and letters.  In these, Kyle expressed his love for his family and friends.  What many of us did not know until this week, however, is that Kyle oftentimes would use much of his pay to purchase calling cards and then stand in line for two hours so that he could make those phone calls, speak with his family members and friends, and assure all of them that he was fine.

Whether it was through a telephone call or letter, Kyle worked real hard to connect with everyone in a special way.  He personalized his communications, tailoring them to meet each person’s individual interests.  In doing so, Kyle reminded each recipient of the particular and unique bond Kyle shared with them.  No one person was more important than any other person; each person was special.

In addition to making each recipient feel special, Kyle’s letters provide a glimpse into what was transpiring in Kyle’s soul during his last years of an all-too-short life.

After completing basic training on Paris Island and finally achieving his dream of being a United States Marine, Kyle was focused more intensely upon choosing to live a life that matters.  Now, in retrospect, his letters chronicle what Kyle thought was crucial to living that kind of life.

In one letter to his grandmother, Phyllis Hazler, Kyle admitted that she had been right all along.  Hearing Kyle’s words, it’s easy to imagine a young teenage grandson named Kyle rolling his eyes when Phyllis preached her sermons about the importance of God and faith to a disinterested teenage grandson.  But, as a Marine, Kyle wrote his grandmother:

One thing you might find interesting.  I found God at Paris Island.  I’ve been going to church for the past few weeks.  It started when my rack mate asked me to go to church with him and I figure that I’d give it a chance.  We went.  I loved it and I cried my eyes out because I was so happy.   We got to sing songs, smile, and just feel good.  Now, that is what keeps me going when I’m feeling down or scared.  On the rifle range, I was really nervous.   I went to church and asked God to give me confidence and help me relax.  And I qualified.  I know you are going to say “I told you so,” but sometimes people only find God when they need Him.  I guess I never needed Him until now.  And I’m not the only one.
 

We might conclude that those who “only find God when they need Him” were Kyle’s band of brothers.  But, Kyle was also speaking of all of us.  Who among us―burdened by the weight of grief and the pain of loss―doesn’t need God and right now?

In letter Kyle wrote on the eve of the battle in Fallujah, Kyle told his Uncle Kendall that he wasn’t afraid of dying.  What Kyle did fear, were two things.  Here’s what Kyle wrote:

My biggest worry is not the fact that I might die.  It is the fact of my family having to carry on without me, them being in so much pain.  The grieving of my mother losing a son, uncles losing a nephew, Kayla and Gabe losing an uncle, a father losing a son, sisters losing a brother….
 

The second thing Kyle feared was that of a fellow Marine―and especially one of his band of brothers―being injured or killed.  As Kyle expressed this fear: “I have made some friends that I could not live the rest of my life without.  I couldn’t imagine one of these guys getting hurt.”

In a letter to his mother, Mary Beth, Kyle described the living conditions confronting him when he arrived in Iraq.  “They’ll either make you laugh or cry,” Kyle wrote.  Because Kyle viewed serving in the United States Marine Corps as making his life a gift that would benefit others, Kyle chose to laugh at his living conditions.  Kyle had learned that choosing to live a life that matters requires accepting personal responsibility for one’s choices as well as for all of the positives and negatives that follow upon those choices by fulfilling one’s responsibilities, even if it required laying down one’s life for one’s friends.

For those who knew Kyle when being a Marine was his “dream,” Kyle’s experience on Paris Island seems to have sparked in Kyle the realization of how important love of God and neighbor would be if he was going to choose to live a life that matters.  It might be said that Paris Island prepared a young man named Kyle Grimes to serve as a United States Marine; but, it was his life as a Marine through which Kyle became the adult God created him to be, a man strong and brave, a man who carried himself with dignity and grace.

In that letter to his uncle, Kyle also noted:

Today is 11/05 the eve of one of the biggest battles in a long time.  I really don’t know what or how to think.  Everything seems kind of trivial.  Me and my buddy were talking about the ignorant bliss that most people live in back home.  We see on TV people at football games and people doing everyday things and their biggest worry is whether or not they get that promotion, or pay the phone bill, or pay the rent next week.  I’ll be happy to be alive next week….I feel lucky to have made it this far and still be alive.  I am, and will always be thankful for everyday I get because it is in places like that you realize how fragile life is and how fast it goes away.
 

As a Marine, Kyle possessed a sense of mission and, when he completed his tour of duty, Kyle very much looked forward to returning home, getting on with his life, and―as Kyle stated in a conversation―responding to the stirrings of God’s grace in his soul by studying about his faith and perhaps even getting confirmed.

In our second reading, St. Paul described the time when we shall always be with the Lord.  Following the description, we heard St. Paul sound a warning:

About dates and times, my friends, we need not write to you, for you know perfectly well that the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night….all at once calamity is upon them, sudden as the pangs that come upon a woman with child; and there will be no escape.
 

As we memorialize the life of Corporal Kyle Grimes, it is understandable that we also contemplate the reality of a life tragically cut all too short for Kyle to experience everything all of us hoped and wanted for him.  As we experience this loss, our feelings of grief and the pain are just as St. Paul described them.  The loss seems today, as St. Paul says, one from which “there will be no escape.”

But, this is what Corporal Kyle Grimes feared most and did not want any of us to bear.  Kyle closed one letter by stating:  “Tell everyone I love them and miss them and I will be home before they know it.  The later I come home the better.  I think you know what I mean.  Semper Fi.”

Just as Kyle willingly sacrificed his hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists to achieve his dream of being a United States Marine and as he willingly served his nation, so too we must accept the painful fact that all of Kyle’s hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists were not meant to be.  What was meant to be is that Kyle Grimes always dreamed of becoming a Marine.  The price Kyle willingly paid for his freely-willed choice to pursue and to achieve his dream required Kyle to demonstrate what Jesus’ taught was the greatest example of love, to “lay down his life for his friends.”

St. Paul told the Christians of Thessalonica not to “grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope.”  St. Paul then went on to describe an image of what will be for those who possess this hope.  It is an uplifting and inspiring image, one that adverts our eyes away from the grave and fear of judgment and toward the heavens and thoughts of eternal life.  St. Paul tells the Thessalonians, “Console one another, then, with these words.”

In this Liturgy of the Word, we have memorialized Corporal Kyle Grimes; despite our grief and pain, we experience hope in the fact that his mission is complete and Kyle has returned to God.  It is our mission, however, that remains incomplete.  Moving forward, if we are to honor Kyle, we must imitate him by choosing to live a life that matters as we “console one another with these words.”

“You are my friends…I chose you,” Jesus taught his disciples.  “I appointed you to go on and bear fruit, fruit that shall last….This is my commandment to you: love one another.”
 

V. Eternal rest grant unto Kyle, O Lord.

R. And let perpetual light shine upon him.

V. May Kyle’s soul and all the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace.

R. Amen.

 

 

mail2.gif (2917 bytes)      Does today’s homily raise any question(s) that you would like
                   me to respond to? Mail your question(s) by double clicking on
               
    the mailbox. I will respond to your question(s) at my first
                   available opportunity.

 

   Double click on this button to return to the homily
                                         webpage.