It's A Crazy, Crazy Faith

Our emergency priest last Sunday (the 15th) pointed out in his homily that, sometimes, our Christian faith is crazy. We always talk about heaven and the resurrection and saints in glory, about how that is our goal and the fulfillment of our lives. Except when someone actually dies: then we don’t want to talk about those things at all. Which is healthy – it would be a bit worrisome if one didn’t grieve.

However, at some point we must transcend our grief and share in the joy of our loved ones, who are in the Kingdom of God. I don’t know how it is anywhere else, but in the Catholic Church that transcendence is meant to occur during the Mass of Christian Burial. This may strike one as ironic, but really it isn’t. The whole process of Catholic dying leads up to it.

If a person receives last rites, the celebrant will be wearing a purple stole. The rite includes Absolution (or presumed Absolution, depending on the circumstances), Unction and Viaticum. The purpose of final Absolution is pretty obvious: it is a cleansing of sin before a person goes to meet God. Unction is an anointment of the body that embraces a kind of holiness of the flesh, presumably; I tend to understand it more as a sacramental recognition of the fact that the body already possesses an inherent holiness. It blesses the body before you die, imbues sanctity, but it is not intended to heal – which is of course why it’s permissible to anoint a dead body. Viaticum is simply Eucharist received for the last time as part of, or constituting, the last rites. Originally, it was so named because it was intended to give strength for the journey. Now, Viaticum is a plenary indulgence, making it the only indulgence in the Catholic Church that itself carries and creates the conditions necessary for receiving it.

Anyway, the point of all this is that it emphasizes the fact that you’re going away. The purple is a color of sorrow and mourning; but notice that it is the celebrant who wears purple, and not the person who’s dying – they don’t, like, drape a purple cloth over you or something. We are sorry about the going away, because it is our lives that you as we knew you will be missing from.

Purple, of course, has a second meaning, that of awaiting or anticipating the arrival of Christ and his Kingdom (hence the use of purple during Advent). Already, even in the sorrow, there is the anticipation that lies deep within all of us, always.

So here, here in the beginning of the journey, there is mourning for loss, as well as resolute anticipation of the things to come. There is anointing of the person who is dying in a way that expects the effects of that anointing to travel with him.

Next comes the actual handling of the body after death. The body is (thank God) embalmed, which has more to do with the people at the viewing than the actual body, so we’ll leave that aside. The body is laid out in clothing, usually something in some way representative of the person. In this case, Father is wearing his Christ the King chasuble. The vestment was new and unworn, probably because he was saving it for the feast, and he is now wearing it for the first time. I find this to be appropriate. For one thing, it’s white. For another, it emphasizes the kingship of Christ, a Kingdom which Father is now experiencing, the Kingdom to which our deaths look forward and which already abides among us: now is the Kingdom, now is the day. The feast brings a clarity to this reality and to our faith, as do these vestments. As we are in communion with all the Saints, the Kingdom is already our reality, though in this present darkness we cannot see it clearly. But we believe, and so we celebrate both Christ’s kingship and our Christian deaths. The vestment also points to the fact that, even though there is no Eucharist in heaven, the sacrament of Holy Orders leaves an indelible mark. Father is, like all other clergy, a priest forever, as we all remain ourselves in one way or another. After all, it is we ourselves who are saved, we who are loved, in all our sin and human frailty; our lives shaped and sanctified by the sacraments and realized in our deaths.

[A brief aside. I was saying to my brother, ‘Father is wearing his Christ the King vestments,’ to which he responded with something along the lines of, ‘no he’s not. He’s dead: his corpse is wearing them. He’s gone, he no longer exists.’ Of course, this is unacceptable. The person and the body we understand to be connected in some mysterious way that passes beyond death and into eternity. We speak about the body as the person because we recognize that, in some way or another, the person is coming back to get their body in the resurrection – or, perhaps more precisely, that the final resurrection will be an embodied one. Catholicism is not a faith that believes we shed the body as a snake sheds its skin, leaving it behind as a useless and meaningless thing. We take such care to prepare and present the body because we believe that even in death and eternal life a person is still themselves, still who they are, though they have also become so much more in the transformation that awaits us all. This conversation drives home an interesting point: in the reality of death our faith is both most deeply challenged and most strongly affirmed. Death exists. Death is real. This is no mirage. But eternal life is also real, also exists, is also not a mirage. Powerful stuff, this collision of two realities. Powerful. One might perhaps call it the center and definition of our faith.]

Then there is the funeral Mass. The celebrant(s) wears white vestments: the color of resurrection, eternal life and glory, sanctity. All sadness has been left behind, at least liturgically. At Father’s Mass, three bishops celebrated, along with a bunch of priests, at least one deacon, and a seminarian. The priests sang a song around the coffin: Ave Maria. In our Mother Mary, whom Father loved very deeply, the saint closest to the throne of God, we find an expression of brotherhood. That, too, is everlasting. We sang his favorite song (Lord of the Dance) and all simultaneously thought that if he were singing the Ave Maria with his brothers he’d be ruining it. Father loves singing, but can’t sing at all. Incense and holy water anointed the casket: again, we pray and sanctify the body until the moment when we commit it to the earth. We celebrate the Mass, the gift of God to us, the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ, given for us for the remission of our sins. In the Mass we are all united in the mystical Church (itself a sacrament – the only one remaining after the final coming of the Kingdom, the one only fully realized within it). In the Mass we realize that God has shared in our death, in all of its horror, and so we are never alone in it; the feeling of aloneness is real – even Jesus felt it – but in reality it is an illusion. It is something we, in our humanity, must feel, but it is also a time when the Lord does not leave our side. I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.

The priest who gave the homily said something I believe is brilliant. He said that, throughout his life, Father experienced a dark night of the soul – only once did he feel the Lord’s presence and joy, when he was in the choir loft at seminary (perhaps why he loves singing). The fact that I seem to already have known this is a story for another time, or perhaps never. The priest said that it takes real courage to keep going, day after day, as a priest, without ever feeling anything, and he is right. Saint John of the Cross said that wood needs to be thoroughly dried out in order for it to burn. Father was consumed by the fire of the Holy Spirit when he died – a moment he had been waiting for all his life now come in completeness. Maybe that's why he looked so at peace, in a way I've never seen in a body before. Sudden, but not something for which he was not ready or unprepared. The Lord comes like a thief in the night, and we must be ready, because where one is taken there is another who will be left behind.

Thus we see, in dying and death, the promise and reality of our faith, in which we all participate through the rites and sacraments surrounding it.