I have attended an increasing number of funerals lately. Luckily for my hypochondria none so far have been of contemporaries but rather for the parents and grandparents of my age cohort.
Almost without exception they have been appalling performances. Almost without exception the officiating religious character who was tapped to do the service was clearly going through the motions. No hint of actual appreciation of grief or sorrow, a life well lived or hard fought. No individual touches.
Rather, familiar Bible quotes from St. John and St. Paul, “Amazing Grace,” 23rd Psalm, “How Great Thou Art,” occasional dark grace notes from the Book of Common Prayer, yadda, yadda, yadda. Paint by numbers piety. And even the familiar scripture is often surprisingly poorly read. Haven’t these guys read these words aloud before? It is their job.
When there’s been some actual attempt to offer a mini-eulogy or at least a glancing reference to the person now reclining in a box, the results have been consistently lame, if not shaming. In some cases the reverend clearly went down a checklist with the family to gather a few crumbs on which to base his remarks, but often seems to have gleaned nothing useful. The lousiest beat reporter would have come back with a better haul of facts and color than this:
“I’m told she loved to garden and cook and talk with friends and family. She had a good life, but now she’s in a better place.” Yeah, I suppose so, since for the last three years she was in an Alzheimer’s care facility. Or didn’t anybody mention that? Clearly you didn’t make any pastoral visits.
One can’t help thinking, does any sentient creature regard this kind of superficial gloss as even a halfway respectable stab at summing up a life of 80 years? Is this really the best you can do? This sort of thing might be understandable if the deceased had been a hindu or agnostic who never darkened the door of a church, but most of these people attended the same church, and not a megachurch at that, for the last thirty or forty years.
Did the pastor really never bump into them? Was there no one in the congregation who might have offered a hint, a clue to their life and character? Was there nothing the preacher could turn up to personalize the standard model service? Or was it just that he couldn’t be bothered? One size fits all.
Even worse was a service for my wife’s uncle some years back. He’d been a deacon for decades. He was a reasonably well-known guy in a small community. He was a flight instructor in World War II and some of his old cronies did a light plane flyover of the cemetery. Seems like a bit of grist for the mill there. Luckily a few of the family said a word or two, but the preacher in this case had apparently never met the man. He did seem to have gone over the books, however. He also seemed to have only one preaching mode– accusatory fire and brimstone which seemed a bit out of place at a funeral.
Yet it didn’t stop him from saying the late uncle was supposed to have been a good Christian but he hadn’t been to church lately (perhaps because he was so busy dying). And he hadn’t been making offerings as he once had. So, maybe he would go to heaven, we sure hope so, but the rest of you had better learn the lesson. Attend religiously, so to speak, and contribute generously. Or else.
This isn’t a funeral service, much less a eulogy, it’s a protection racket, a shakedown. This preacher was clearly an extreme example, but even those who didn’t learn their bedside manner from the mob or Cotton Mather still seem to care less about the person who has died and the persons who are left behind than about the chance to deliver an infomercial for their sponsors — father, son and holy ghost.
After having endured several of these embarrassments, it seems to me that the only hope is when the family takes over and asserts itself, plays some music the dead fellow actually liked, reads some words he really loved and talks from the heart about what made mother, father, sister or brother wonderful or trying or funny or infuriating. Remember some quirks, eccentricities, passions, pet peeves, touching moments, funny stories, laughs, tears, anything to capture and celebrate a life — individual, never to be duplicated, irreplaceable. Anything less in not a church service but a church disservice to both the living and the dead.
The best service I have seen lately involved a careless, clueless preacher but was triumphantly saved by a daughter who spoke for the family with love and affection of their mother, her funny ways and kind heart as discovered and epitomized by the clippings and reminders and photos and kid’s art the daughter found fixed by magnets to the door of mom’s fridge. It was admirable heartfelt, personal and moving.
And if you can’t trust your family to find the words, write your own farewell to the troops with a list of stage directions and a musical score of your choosing. It’s your last appearance on stage and you’ll probably be paying for it, so you might as well make it a really big show the folks will remember.