Jim Taylor’s Weblog

By Jim Taylor

I celebrate my 74^{th birthday today. I never thought I would reach this age. Not that I planned to die sooner – I simply never thought about growing older. Somehow, I expected to remain 40, 50, or whatever I was, until I went “Poof!”
        I now expect to remain 74 for at least another decade. After all, most of my father’s side of the family lived into their nineties. My uncle died at 94; my aunt at 99, my father at 93.
        But living that long means attending a lot of funerals and memorial services. By the time my father died, there weren’t many of his generation left to attend his memorial service. Most of his contemporaries had already died or were too infirm to attend. Quite a few of his students had also predeceased him.
        Even at my age, a number of friends struggle with life-threatening illnesses. Several have already died.}

Saying farewell
        Forgive these possibly morbid reflections, please. But I’ve attended enough funerals and memorial services (I’ve even led some of them) to feel some dissatisfaction with how we handle them.
        A funeral, for example, is not a wake. It’s not an occasion for a long series of aimless and unfocussed tales about the dead person’s eccentricities. Save those for the reception or the pub.
        Nor is it a time for telling lies. “Speak no ill of the dead,” says the proverb. Fine – but don’t gild the truth, either. The dead do not require glowing testimonials to get into heaven.
        The story is told of a service for a dissolute reprobate. During an effusive eulogy, the mom whispered to her son: “Go peek into the coffin; make sure that’s still your pa he’s talking about.”
        I also object to relentlessly cheerful “celebrations of life.” The life may well be worth celebrating, but at this moment I do not feel happy-happy-happy. I’m grieving my loss.
        As a young man, I attended a Roman Catholic funeral — before Pope John XXIII, so it was still in Latin. I understood nothing. The priests were distant, isolated. The dead woman was irrelevant; she contributed nothing but her name to fill in some blanks. I resented the impersonality of the service.

Reverence and respect
        More recently, though, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of a liturgy, a ritual, to give shape to a service. It reminds us that this service is not just for venting a grab bag of emotions; it’s a rite of passage.
        Perhaps it’s the ultimate rite of passage. In a bar- or bat-mitzvah, a graduation, a wedding, we know something of the new situation a person is entering. In a funeral, we can only affirm that this person has passed into a dimension that we do not and cannot know.
        It’s commonly said, “When one door closes, another door opens.” But all these doors are one-way only – once you have crossed that threshold, you cannot go back. In life, you’re already a different person. In death… well, who knows…
        So we approach these thresholds, as someone said, “with reverence and respect.” Our ceremonies need to express those feelings.
        Our responsibility has ended. We can do nothing more for this person. So we remind ourselves why he or she mattered to us. Then we entrust them to what AA calls “a higher power.”
        It’s more than goodbye. It’s a handing-over of someone we love to another’s care.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn



Alex McGilvery sent the first response to last week’s column, in which I pondered about our conviction that life should be fair. “No life isn’t fair,” Alex wrote. “I’m like your daughter and tell my son to get used to it. I take it a step further though and tell him if he doesn’t like something, it is his responsibility to change it to make it more fair. I think the prophets tell us that same thing. Life isn’t fair, but it is our job to make it more fair by the way we choose to live our lives.”

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NEW BOOK COMING

Five years ago, I swore I would never write another book. It was simply too much work! Then Mike Schwartzentruber, now the President of Wood Lake Publishing, asked me to write a sequel to my earlier “Everyday Parables.” For reasons I explain in the book, I could not say no to Mike.
        The result is “More Everyday Parables,” available this month from Wood Lake. The official price is $19.95 Canadian; they’re offering a special introductory web price of $15.96. (I understand there may be an electronic downloadable version coming later.)
        You can read about it, and order it, by clicking here.
        Or you can contact Wood Lake at 9590 Jim Bailey Road, Kelowna, BC, Canada V4V 1R2, telephone 1-800-663-2775.
        My first book of parables consisted mostly of “object lessons,” metaphors relating things of various kinds to insights about God, Jesus, the church, the Christian faith… Jesus told quite a few of that kind of parable, likening the Kingdom to a mustard seed, yeast, a lost coin, etc. But most of his parables were stories. So I decided for this second book of parables to concentrate on stories too, and see how they might spin out into religious insights.
        They’re not just re-tellings of Jesus’ stories, in modern guise. I tried to look for stories that he could not have told, because the circumstances and technologies did not exist in his time. Whether they work or not, only you can tell me.

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