THOUGHTS AT A FUNERAL
Many of the bereaved I recognized. They appeared on the whole a jolly bunch, unrestrained in the volume and volubility of their conversation, and most were casually attired: one might even say, in the case of certain young women, scandalously attired.
The walls of the room were paneled in pale oak and punctuated at intervals with gilt-framed oil paintings or prints of the sort one sees at Thomas Kinkade galleries. There appeared to be a running theme in these paintings: the voyage. One featured a ship in full sail on the high seas; another, a young boy poised on a road that descended from some uplands onto broad plains that stretched far into the distance. The idea, I suppose, was to illustrate life not as an abrupt terminus but as a continuing journey. The colors were rich–too rich–and the texture of the images so thick as to make them appear to be almost in relief rather than on flat canvas. The artwork put me in mind of jigsaw puzzles, which often feature such garish pictures.
I have never liked jigsaw puzzles. The satisfaction some derive from reconstructing a picture that has been cut into fragments I can somewhat appreciate: we do like to make sense of things, to bring the bits and pieces of our experience and perception into a recognizable image. And, indeed, contemporary life increasingly resembles a jigsaw puzzle, which, when properly assembled, yields something along the lines of modern art: more Klee than Kinkade, or perhaps more Rorhshach than Rembrandt.
I was musing in this vein when my relations hailed me and began to pepper me with questions of the sort one finds on census forms: my age, the ages of my children, their marital status, our professions and where we are domiciled, etc. Everything except how many bathrooms our houses contain and what capital improvements have been made since the last property valuation. I find this sort of thing unbearably tedious. Of course, I respond in kind, at a loss to know what else to say or do.
When I first entered the funeral parlor and prayed at the casket containing the cosmetically enhanced remains of my relative, I faulted myself for having postponed my intention to visit him during his illness. Visiting the sick, I recalled, is a corporal work of mercy enjoined on me by my faith, and I had failed in the requisite charity. I did speak to him on the telephone from time to time: brief, awkward conversations, for imminent death made commenting on passing trivialities ridiculous, and his alienation from religion rendered sensible talk impossible. It is a fact that without God at the center of our lives, very little we can say to one another has any point. This becomes unavoidably obvious when someone is about to shuffle off the mortal coil and those near and dear to him search their brains for suitable subjects of conversation and come up empty.
When my relations and I had completed the exchange of essential data, we lapsed into an uneasy silence, broken now and then by a banal observation about the weather or other topics of pressing interest. I began to think that not only the pictures, but the talk resembled a jigsaw puzzle. If one could collect these fragments of human sound and piece them together, what sort of picture might emerge, I wondered. Would an otherwise undiscerned but unified vision of life take shape, or would they coalesce into something gaudy and sentimental, more cartoon than serious composition; or might all of these vapid expressions resolve themselves into a modern abstraction: clashing angular forms with no objective meaning, or melting swirls of color that fail to achieve definition and retreat into chaos?
Most of the people that I knew at the wake had been Catholics educated in the faith before Vatican II. Few of them now practiced that faith. Their deportment demonstrated how far they had drifted from the sensus fidei in which they had been raised. The silence and respect and sorrow and wonder that had been usual during the viewings and funerals I recalled from my youth were conspicuously absent; in their place was a casual coarseness: loud voices, raucous laughter, a restless milling about. That present among us was the body of man whose soul had passed from time to eternity and received judgment before its Creator was a fact that appeared to make little impression on the putative mourners. It was as though they were determined that nothing, not even death, would be permitted to shake their complacency. Worldlings through and through; sensual and secular in their marrow, they would admit nothing sacred, nothing transcendent into their midst. Mortality they regarded as a morbid thought they should refuse to entertain.
As the wake neared its conclusion, the funeral director, straining to be heard above the noise of the room, asked that everyone give his attention to a woman who wished to say a few words before we proceeded to the church for the Mass of the Resurrection. The eulogist was a family friend who offered some anecdotes intended to illustrate the virtues of my late relative. She described how he had enjoyed fishing and playing Trivial Pursuit, and reminisced about a group trip to Las Vegas during which he had made a killing at the slot machines. In her peroration, she anticipated the homily by assuring us that his soul was in Heaven. It seemed an odd conclusion to draw from her preceding remarks, as though playing the slots in Vegas had salvific value.
We then were invited to file past the remains one last time. There would be no burial: the body was to be cremated. The noise increased to an unseemly level during this rite of leave-taking, and I found it impossible to compose my mind to say a prayer until I had exited the funeral parlor and moved away from the crowd. I then sat inside my car, undecided about what to do next. There was to be a Mass, and then a luncheon. I would be expected at both, but the prospect of enduring hours more of the sort of thing I had suffered through in the funeral parlor overwhelmed me. I knew that the Mass would be a canonization service during which some chirpy priest who had never met the departed (he had not attended Church for several decades) would declare definitively that my relative was among the saints and angels, and try to strike the upbeat tone that is de rigueur now at "Catholic" funeral Masses. The luncheon would follow and become a running recitation of the old family anecdotes that are dusted off for such occasions. We would also be eating our chicken entrees while the body was being incinerated. I could not face such an agenda and found myself driving home instead of to the local parish church.
I passed about an hour on the highway, alone and pondering what changes time had wrought in the manners and morals of my family, and in me. In years past, I would have visited my relative in his illness. What alteration had I undergone that made me indifferent to such an obligation?
When I got home, I slumped into a chair in the family room and noticed on the edge of a bookshelf the stack of pale green flash cards I had once used to teach my children aspects of the faith. I shuffled through them until I found the list of the corporal works of mercy. I could no longer recite them from memory, nor could I recall so many other of the things I had once known by heart. I looked at the cards one by one, and it occurred to me that all of my older relatives I had seen that day had also once been familiar with their contents. We used to have to memorize a great many things in Catholic schools, especially as preparation for Confirmation: the works of mercy, corporal and spiritual; the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost; the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost; the four cardinal virtues; the three theological virtues; the four sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance; the four principal effects of original sin; the distinction between actual and sanctifying grace; the sacraments of the dead and the sacraments of the living, etc.
Most of my relations who no longer practice the faith had spent 12 years in Catholic schools memorizing these things. To what end, I wondered? Why did all of this knowledge fail to influence the conduct of their lives? They were certainly not passing on what they had learned to their children. But what had they really learned?
I looked down at the cards, which now lay in my lap in a jumbled heap, and the idea of the jigsaw puzzle recurred. So many bits and pieces of the faith had been so carefully arranged, then impressed on the minds of so many children, who parroted them through so many years; yet so few seemed to have come into any lasting and vital relation to the faith through this process. Why?
All of the villainies and vagaries perpetrated by ecclesial miscreants during the past 40 years go some way toward explaining the falling away of the laity, but the evil was worked with such evident ease that it would seem there must have been a predisposition toward it. How deeply implanted could the faith have been for it to be peeled away so effortlessly? The question is one of great moment for those of us who are trying to hand on the faith to our children.
St. Augustine says that we cannot love what we do not know, so it is essential, of course, to know the faith. The things we memorized should have been memorized and must continue to be learned by heart by our children. But that is just a beginning. To know is one thing; to love, quite another. Too few Catholics who knew the faith genuinely loved the faith. If this were not so, the depredations that followed Vatican II would have met with such entrenched resistance that those who were behind them would have retreated and recanted. But many of us raised in the pre-Vatican II Church learned the faith in bits and pieces, some of which we fitted together, but most of which we carried around as fragments in our pockets for a time, then placed in a drawer of memory, where they lay, disconnected and forgotten. Accepting a radically different picture of the faith proved not at all, or not very, unsettling, because few of us had a coherent and compelling image of it impressed on our minds and hearts.
Those who were, and continue to be, responsible for the wreck of the faith maintain that their new religion is but a return to the primitive and animated Christianity that had been superseded by a deadening formalism. Such a claim, fraudulent and self-serving as it may appear, should not be rejected without extracting from it what modicum of truth it may contain. Obviously, the current corruption of morals and doctrine that issues from the Vatican and the chancery offices like a breath of the plague cannot be considered a revitalization of the faith along the lines of the ancient Church. It is clearly a product of modern decadence. But has it superseded a deadening formalism? To some degree, it has.
The enemies of the faith usually follow what St. Ignatius describes as Satan's standard battle tactic: they survey the edifice of the Church in search of places where the structure is weak and most vulnerable to attack. The Church before the Council did suffer, as it is prone to suffer at all times, from a certain amount of what might be called pharisaism: too much emphasis on external observances to the detriment of the spirit of the faith. We had priests who gabbled their Latin and children who unthinkingly recited their catechism and parishioners who mechanically attended Sunday Mass. And although the old adage applies–abuse does not take away proper use–those who wished to tear down the old edifice and erect a new one deliberately confused abuse with proper use until the two appeared inseparable. Thus, we who are now styled Traditionalists are caricatured as the heirs and would-be propagators of a moribund formalism that elevates the accidental at the expense of the essential.
How do we respond? Our most effective rejoinder, it seems to me, is to avoid all degrees of pharisaism in our personal conduct and in our teaching of the faith. We must get rid of the jigsaw puzzle approach to Catholicism. Memorized lists and creedal formulas and ritual obligations provide a structure, like the outline of forms in a painting, but it is the animation of the structure, like the laying on of color, that imparts significance and unity to the whole. Our faith is the most beautiful of all beautiful things, but it will only appear so to us when we see it in its full splendor, that is, when we see it in the person of Christ.
Not long ago, I met an old acquaintance who had moved from the Northeast to the rural South. He told me of his esteem for his Protestant neighbors, who, despite the manifold errors of their faith, made a genuine effort to be "Christian," as they understood it. He sighed his regrets that they seemed more committed to an imitation of the Christ they posited than were many traditional Catholics to the true Lord.
Such an indictment is not without cause, yet, to an extent, such a failing is understandable, for we are in a pitched battle to defend the integrity of doctrine; and we run hither and yon to this and that spot in the fortress where the enemy has made a breach, and our spiritual life can become a series of skirmishes of such preoccupying intensity that we sometimes forget the purpose of the war and the face of our commander.
But we fight for Christ. And we win, not so much by encountering the enemies of the Church, both within and without, but by becoming immersed in the love of our Savior, so that, as St. Paul says, we no longer live, but Christ lives in us.
I submit myself to correction in the following matter to those who may know better, but it appears to me that there are two ways to come by knowledge of the faith: by learning and by loving. The two are complementary rather than mutually exclusive, but there are simple souls who acquire great depths of perception more by means of piety than study. The devout layman, innocent of all erudition but unswervingly loyal to a daily meditative recitation of the rosary, is likely to have greater rectitude of judgment than a heavily credentialed theologian, at Fribourg or Tubingen or Rome, who never prays. Likewise, one can perform the works of mercy through the impulse of grace without being able to recite them from memory.
I am not, of course, counseling the abandonment of catechetical instruction. We must know the faith and teach it. But replicating the sort of pharisaism that my lapsed Catholic relatives may have represented is a thing to be avoided. Occasionally, some traditional Catholic parents will express their dismay that a child raised in a scrupulously correct manner has abandoned his faith as an adult. Where did we go wrong, they wonder? Perhaps, they didn't go wrong at all, for there are such things as the mystery of iniquity and free will; but perhaps they did go wrong, and the faith they imparted was more formal than fervent. The moral strictures of our creed appear crippling to the those who would walk with the times, as all young people are tempted to do; and it is only through love that that which appears binding becomes liberating. To know the faith without loving the faith is to risk losing the faith.
We may keep our flash cards, by all means, and continue to teach our children the articles of faith, but let us never forget charity, which is Christ. And the only way to teach Christ is to live in Christ. So, to make our children saints, it is only necessary that we become saints ourselves. Charity truly begins at home.
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