Graveyard Songs

The parish I serve, St. Francis Church, was founded in 1946. Over the past fifty-six years there have been 288 funerals from our parish. I know this because Episcopalians are meticulous bookkeepers and all Baptisms, Marriages, Confirmations, and Burials are recorded, along with every service. That's a little more than five funerals a year. As the fifth rector of the parish I've done more than my share, as of last week seventy-four of them.

This year has the potential to be a bit of an outlier: already we've had six funerals and there are five months left in the year.

Some people think that if you are ordained you must get used to dealing with death but that has not been my experience. In fact, I often remind people when I am helping them to plan for the burial of a loved one that grief is cumulative. Sometimes we lose someone we love, and then a job, and then maybe our marriage falls apart and we handle it all, by outward appearances, with grace. And then the cat dies and the tears begin to flow. I tell people that is not because we loved the cat more than those other things, but because grief accumulates and sometimes it is the last straw that finally breaks us.

I don't feel like I'm about to break, but burying people has never become automatic for me. Not only do I remember those other seventy or so funerals I've conducted over thirteen years in Holden, sometimes with great detail; but of course my own grief is also opened up again each time I walk this road with others.

My father died very suddenly and unexpectedly when I was a freshman in college. It was a difficult time not only for me, the oldest of four children but for my whole extended family. My grandparents lost a child. The community lost an elected leader. Since that time I've never had a grief quite so large. Hathy and I have buried all of our grandparents since then, but our remaining parents and step-parents are all alive.

My own sense of vocation as a priest is inextricably bound up with the death of my father. I don't know why some people grow closer to God in times of loss and others lose their faith; it is a mystery to me. But at every funeral we offer this prayer of petition for those who mourn: "...deal graciously with [this family] in their grief. Surround them with your love, that they may not be overwhelmed by their loss, but have confidence in your goodness, and strength to meet the days to come." (BCP 494) I believe that death puts us into one of those "thin places" where many of us do discover, or rediscover, God's goodness and love. At least it was that way for me.

Moreover, because death raises the ultimate questions, it ultimately raises the question about how we will choose to live our days. Death does bring loss and grief and hurt; but even at the grave we make our song: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. For Christians, this Easter claim is not about immortality of the soul nor about how the person we loved will "live on in our memories" but about the bold, scandalous, almost crazy insistence that we believe in the resurrection of the body. That if Christ has been raised, then we shall be also. Therefore life is changed, not ended, when our mortal bodies give out and return to the dust...

I don't pretend that is an easy thing to believe or understand. But I am pretty sure that I never feel more like faith matters than standing at the grave trying to make a song, even if that song sounds like the blues. It changes everything else; or more accurately, everything else needs to be seen through this lens. Baptism, which is about dying to self in order to live in Christ. Marriage, which is about vows "til death do us part." Raising children, finding meaningful work, tending to relationships...reflecting on death brings us back to life. As my favorite film of all time puts it, we can get busy living or get busy dying; it seems to me it is only in facing the reality of death that we become free to choose the former.