To Meet the Angel of Death

One of my favourite semi-liturgical times of the year is the month of November, the month of the Holy Souls.

I love the focus that we place on the ancestry of faith and family that we share. I love too how we might be accused of going overboard, remembering the dead with sadness and fun.

It’s in this context of our Catholic custom that I look on the modern customs, fixed and emerging, of facing death. Let’s ask some questions of the cultures around funerals. These will be hard questions and we do need to get a little squirmy.

As a priest, I’m part of that professional class that has to deal with dying, death, grief and all the emotions that come with this necessary part of life. In a sense, we develop a necessary detachment from the rawness of dealing with death because we face death more often than most people do.

In my first year at St Michael’s in Meadowlands, Soweto, we had more than 60 deaths and funerals. As a fairly newly minted priest, a white priest in that most vibrant Ndofaya, I admit that I was out of my depth.

Previously I had conducted only a few funerals, including my godfather’s as the first funeral I had presided over. I landed slap-bang in the middle of a strange and well-established funeral culture.

Saturday mornings always had a funeral, or two, or three. It became a logistical nightmare of timing departures to Avalon or Dobsonville cemeteries. Undertakers and burial societies ruled the days. My altar servers would debate hard and furiously which meal they would attend, and then, of course, those most notorious “after-tears” gatherings.

It was here that I began to notice that the Church’s important role of pointing to eternal life beginning to be eclipsed. And this eclipse has only got worse in the following 15 years.

While nothing can outdo the consolation and support of the  “tipa brigade” (tipa is the SeSotho word for knife) when they gathered to cook and peel and chop and accompany the family in the all important task of feeding the multitude after a burial, there were small signs of the loss of the eternal life perspective.

The first of these was the growth in memorial services where everyone was expected to say something. These usually turned into canonisations of untruth, sadly not reflecting the person at all but a formularised way of getting time to address the community about one’s own issues.

Then we had the growth in all communities of the bling undertakers, where the Church’s liturgy for eternal life became dictated to by timing and gimmicks.

And sadly we got more and more caught by the attraction of a “celebration of life”—but not of eternal life. Subtly the focus shifted from the liturgy which consoles to a liturgy that only looks back to memories. There is a need for balance between consolation and memory, one which is in danger of being lost.

Recently, I was deeply tempted to push an undertaker into an empty grave when she interrupted the final liturgy to release doves — homing pigeons actually — and then proceeded to give a homilette on how the doves were the soul of the departed leaving this earth. Um, no dear, I’m not going to heaven as a rodent with wings!

We get caught in the bizarre expenses of the funeral industry. I often warn the grieving family that undertakers provide a very necessary service, but that most are still money-making businesses which wouldn’t want the dearly departed resting on a sprung mattress in a tupperware-sealed casket — especially when said casket costs the price of a small car (Of course, I also know of other, more caring, undertakers)…

Recently, we priests joked about the choices of funeral music. Everyone wants their own favourite song played—even if that is “Burn Baby Burn”…at a cremation service.

So what alternative way is there?

I admired a parishioner who called me about three years ago to give me her set of instructions. What a comprehensive instruction that was, from what readings to who would read them and who had been asked to speak in tribute. This organisation was a deep consolation for her family when she died. It was an eternal life requiem.

The Church’s funeral liturgy is full of symbols of the Resurrection. From greeting the body of the deceased at the door of the church to sprinkling it with baptismal (holy) water, reminding us of the birth into eternal life that is baptism, to the resting before the altar, the burning of the Easter candle, the Eucharistic sacrifice and the incense symbolising our prayers. All of this points not backwards but forward to eternal life.

I have left strict instructions that my own funeral liturgy will be as early as possible in the morning as quickly as possible after death. I don’t want the grief to turn to duty.

After all, death for me is the end of the first chapter — and who mourns a great story with its first instalment?