Faith Works 7-18-20

Faith Works 7-18-20

Jeff Gill

 

To everything there is a season, and a time

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Next Saturday, I will be helping conduct my father's memorial service in Indiana. Like so many people, it's been over four months since his passing, and there's a strange quality to the processes of grief and mourning and so-called closure in these stuttering and stammering steps through the valley of the shadow of death.

 

In fact, before coronavirus upended everyone's applecarts, this stately sequence was already getting interrupted and spread out. The increasing prevalence of cremation, and less of a sense of sacred time and liturgical guidelines in many traditions, and the fact of fewer households having a church connection in the first place, has led to dramatic changes that preceded and will only intensify after the times we are now in.

 

As a serving parish minister, there was a rhythm to how it once was. At least for a couple of generations, you got "the call." Aunt Sadie died. Perhaps you expected it, maybe it was a complete surprise; Sadie might be at the hospital, or at home, but before smartphones and texting she would probably be at the funeral parlor before you even heard.

 

As a pastor, you'd find out who was where, what presence was needed, and as you discussed their immediate needs, in the back of your head you'd begin a series of calculations: today is Tuesday, meet with the funeral director on Wednesday, obituary appears in the paper Thursday, calling Friday and funeral Saturday. The sequence was inexorable, but consistent. Maybe an extra day, depending on the time of day when the passing and "the call" was made (late in the day pushes things back one more), possibly two but even that was unusual. Sundays were never a day for a memorial service, period. No one asked, and both churches and funeral homes didn't offer. And even Saturday services were rare.

 

Smash cut to the present. While some church traditions have firm (and I would add understandable) rules about no services on Sundays, for most of us it's just a tradition . . . and funeral homes are not against it at all. Many cemeteries have an extra charge for weekend committals, but families can work around that with a Sunday service and a private committal on Monday on the way out of town.

 

And in fact, with cremation now rocketing up past 70% with no sign of slowing, there's really no pressure. Unless you want a viewing, which many no longer request, it's quite common for cremation to happen almost immediately, and the services to be held . . . later. And the placing of the remains even later.

 

So not only is the old pattern broken, it's spread out. There's caring for the loved ones immediately after the shock of death, no matter how expected. Then there's the arrangements, which are now commonly a swift cremation but the formal meetings and signatures and payments that go with that. Weeks, even months later, the service, and committal weeks or months after that. A quick sequence of three or four days is now, for immediate family and for the ministry leaders involved, a complicated schedule that stretches across a season, or a year.

 

Dad died in Texas over four months ago. Cremation was pretty much obligatory (you don't want to know what it costs today to ship remains cross country), and before I got there, of necessity. I drove his ashes and a vanload north while my sister flew our mother home. And while yes, it's coronavirus shaped, our multi-month arc is not and will not be unusual. And yes, we're doing a Saturday service because that's ideal for other family traveling, not that as many will be able to come as might have been in other times. But clergy and funeral directors quietly converse about what we do as almost everyone starts to want Saturdays . . . there's only 52 of those!

 

And committal? Honestly, it will probably wait until a later day, and different circumstances. Mom and Dad have a plot and a plan and that plan isn't quite completed yet.

 

In all of this we have a former pattern of grief and support and recovery that's shattered and swept away, and frankly as a pastor myself, I can't yet make sense of it. We congregations and clergy need to rethink how we do many things, and the grieving process is one of them. I'm taking notes, of a sort, as I work out my own.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's sorting out many things these days. Tell him how you keep your priorities sorted out at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.