Funeral Narratives 7 comments

By Beth Bevis
Guest Blogger

When my uncle died last February, the local priests were out of town for a conference, so my family called on a deacon to preside over the funeral.

We hardly knew what hit us.

The details of the funeral liturgy are fuzzy in my mind. The bulletin, which I kept, tells me that we prayed the Lord’s Prayer, but I don’t remember that or any of the other prayers we must have prayed. What I do remember in great detail are the jokes.

In line for coffee in the basement of the funeral home afterwards, I overheard a conversation that confirmed for me just how bad it had been. My cousin, an agnostic, was using the word “sacrilegious” to describe the behavior of the deacon who had performed the funeral. He was so offended that he wanted to give the deacon a piece of his mind then and there. His mother, devoutly Catholic and equally offended, asked him to leave it alone, lest he make things worse.

I understood his impulse for justice because I felt it, too. After the immediate shock of the day’s events had worn off, the first thing on my mind was that I had to find a way to write about what had happened. I started by making a list—first in my head, and eventually on paper: a catalogue of wrongs committed.

The offenses were multiple and shocking, even as I think back on them months later. There was the graveside joke the deacon made out of the act of sprinkling holy water on the coffin (“Watch out, don’t get any on you! It’ll burn if you’ve done something wrong!”); and how before the funeral he’d asked for a show of hands, how many Catholic, then how many Christian (“You’d better all raise your hands for that one!”); and how, in what I can only assume was a misguided attempt to lighten the mood, he poked fun at my father, aunts, uncles, and even the widow when they stood up to share their memories.

What making the list made me realize, though, was that it wasn’t the individual offenses that mattered, but their cumulative effect: a tone of irony that made it hard for us to take ourselves seriously. Though he probably meant to cheer us up with his jovial tone, the deacon’s behavior actually undermined our belief that something sacred, and yes, even serious, was taking place. What we were doing was important, we felt. But he told us: “You shouldn’t be crying; you should be throwing a party!”

I think he was wrong. I think what we seek at funerals is that which only the process of the funeral can give: even more than consolation, what we long for is a narrative.

The traditional funeral liturgy uses concrete images to place a particular death in the context of a larger narrative: we throw dirt on the coffin and remember the story of our earthly origin; we sprinkle it with holy water and recall the waters of our baptism. Our gestures and prayers look back to Christ’s death and resurrection and forward to our hope of rising again. If there’s any comfort in death, for me it’s found in this, in story.

On this level, I think my reason for writing and the reason for funerals is the same—to find, through the construction of a narrative, order and beauty in the midst of chaos. Perhaps my initial impulse to write about my uncle’s funeral, then, was not really motivated by a desire to teach the deacon a lesson or even to find cathartic release for my family’s anger. Perhaps it was motivated more by the desire to participate in the creation of narrative, to surround my uncle’s death with words, a prayer, a sprinkling.

Part of me balks at the audacity of it. Who do I think I am, to presume my writing can do what the funeral didn’t? There’s no guarantee, after all, that my attempt will be any less damaging or haphazard than the deacon’s.

Earlier this week, I read the section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that discusses the effectiveness of the sacraments. It says that the power of Christ acts in and through the sacraments—“independently of the personal holiness of the minister.” Reading that was a balm to me, because I took it to mean that even the unfit and ill-prepared can be called to do holy work.

Writing isn’t a sacrament, but I think it can be a sacramental act. That is, however flawed and susceptible to human fingerprints my writing inevitably will be, I proceed in the hope that crafting a narrative with words, like crafting one with liturgy, can be at the same time both the work of the clumsy person who is chosen to perform it and the work of God.

Beth Bevis is Program Coordinator for the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and one of the authors of God With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas (Paraclete).