I'm going to hell: I'm about to wax snarky about a funeral.
I went to a funeral today for a family member on the wife's side who I'd never met. Unfortunately, the minister presiding over the funeral had never met him, either, and said as much during his opening remarks. In total, his remarks had an unorganized feel that made me wonder if he'd been called in late to sub for the funeral home's regular minister.
The first five minutes or so also included an inordinate amount of information about the preacher himself, leading me to wonder if he was running for office. He also jumped from his self-referential remarks to reading the obituary (or parts of the obituary) to other remarks given to him (I assume) by family. Some of those remarks, such as the one that referred to the deceased as a puppet master (not sure if that term was used or not, but "pulling the strings" was), seemed unusal to start with, never mind including them in the eulogy.
And while it's been remarked in a kind of kidding fashion in some areas, noting that it was at least good timing for a Red Sox fan to pass after they'd won the World Series is not something best done in actual funeary circumstances. Asking the mourners for a show of hands to find other Sox fans is similarly problematic.
Part of the problem, perhaps, was that we weren't vocal enough. More than once the minister said that whatever sentiment he'd recently voiced would have gotten an amen from the deceased had he been with us. That none of us felt moved enough to do so may have made all of us seem lacking.
Towards the end of the service, a family member sang "Amazing Grace," but was unable to finish the last stanza as she'd started to cry. The rest of us pitched in and sang, perhaps the first touching moment of the entire event. The preacher then returned to the podium and had all of us sing the song again. It's a fine hymn, but that seemed like overkill.
So my three pieces of advice should you ever get called in to officiate a funeral on short notice:
1. Make a quick outline of the service so you don't jump around like you tried to cure your ADHD with a handful of No-Doz.
2. Try not to elicit biographical and genealogical information about the family during the service. Take a second to sort out who is who beforehand.
3. If you really are trying to comfort the bereaved, try not to say things like "I wish you had called me so I could have met him while he was alive." They may feel guilty after you say that.
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3 comments:
I guess I'm going to hell, too. I'm going to dis the Roman Catholic church.
Sounds like a wedding I went to three years ago. A good buddy of mine from High School got married at the Tufts University Chapel. They are both Armenian, but my friend was raised Roman Catholic and his bride was raised Orthodox. In an interesting twist, they held a joint Catholic/Othodox service with both a Jesuit and Orthodox priest presiding.
The Orthodox priest gave a short, but eloquent allocution (my big word for the day) on the importance of marriage sprinkled with a bit of platitudes for marital success. It was really quite nice.
The Jesuit, not to be outdone, begins his oration with the following statement, "Bertram and Gloria (okay - names changed to protect the innocent), you are about to embark on the most serious of journeys, one fraught with dangers, temptations, and challenges. A journey if not trodden cautiously and properly nurtured will inevitably end in the most shameful of sins, breaking a covenant with God". He then goes on for I swear at least a good 5 minutes talking about the ugliness of divorce. How more than 50% of marriages end in divorce and all kinds of other gloomy facts and figures. I thought for a minute he was going to pull out a Ross Perot pie chart and start going over the numbers.
After he finally winds up his morose homily, he concludes with the statement, "But we are not here to talk about divorce, we are here to join these two in holy matrimony." I mean come on, you brought the damn subject up in the first place. We all came to enjoy a nice wedding ceremony and all left the place wondering how long it was going to take before we too would end up in marital counselling.
I guess, in some twisted sort of way, he was trying to make sure that "Bertram" and "Gloria" were truly committed to the bond of holy matrimony and were not entering into a covenant lightly. Something far better dealt with in the pre-marital counselling session, if you ask me. But that's the problem I have with Catholicism, or more precisely, the Jesuits. Don't get me wrong, I love the church. I'm the product of 4 years of Jesuit high school education and far better a man for it; but, it's always about the guilt. I can't once remember a service, a retreat, even a religion class in which I wasn't left with an empty feeling of doubt for my worthiness. I guess it challenges us to strive to better ourselves, but for once I would have liked to leave a service, especially a wedding service, feeling good about myself and good about my fellow man.
Alright, I'll jump off my soap box now. See you "down there", Mark. Oh, that's right, I'm not baptized. I can't go to heaven or hell. Darn the luck.
I can relate to the annoying funeral. My militantly atheist uncle was given a Catholic funeral, officiated by a priest who had obviously never met the guy. Also can relate to the hellfire-and-brimstone wedding service; a similar one was imposed on one of my hometown friends back around 1978. The priest wouldn't stop railing about couples who lived together before marriage (which these two hadn't done, by the way).
On the other hand, a Methodist minister friend of ours once helped us organize a memorial service for a friend who had lived near us for some years, but had died of cancer at his family's home several thousand miles away. This minister did a great job at facilitating the service, and giving us some structure in which to share memories of Paul. It was the perfect example of a minister who did know how to run a service for a person he didn't know.
Another tip: Make sure the funeral home displays the correct "religious accessories". At my grandfather's funeral, the funeral home set up the room very nicely with neat rows of chairs, flowers in all the right places, and a closed casket. Since my grandfather was Jewish, the closed casket was appropriate. While notably, the giant gold cross that was displayed over the casket ... that would fall under the category of "not appropriate". Shiney, but not appropriate.
-- Laura
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