I Like Funerals.

I don't know why. I've given a lot of reasons over the years when people discover this odd fact about me, and non of them are entirely satisfactory. I have a clear feeling about funerals, but I'm not sure what underlying beliefs and assumptions have created them.

Funerals feel complete, they feel hopeful, they feel forward-looking. Funerals often feel sad, but they feel sad in the way that high school graduation feels sad, knowing that you will never see these same people again, but with a look to the future at their center that creates a clear sense that that sadness is not the end of the story.

Not that I like graduations. They're boring.

I do have some working theories and ideas about my underlying assumptions. They are far from authoritative, but may perhaps be helpful:

1. A disclaimer: my appreciation for funerals does not have to do with some sentiment connected to "going someplace better." I'm fairly sure that I do not believe in the common concept of heaven, as it seems too disembodied to make sense as a reading of Jesus' words about His house and its many rooms. I may affirm a literal resurrection of the dead, a physical restoration of this earth to what it was always supposed to be as a culmination of the here-and-coming-and-not-yet kingdom, but I have to be honest about my uncertainty here and therefore its lack of play in my feelings of looking-ahead and reassurance. I'm not saying that a resurrection offers no reassurance or denying that my lack of certainty may rob my understanding to an extent. It would simply be a mistake to claim that this is behind my particular feelings on the matter.

2. I think that grieving, as a process, is an important part of communal life, particularly the life of something that could be be called the Church. Alexander Schmemann's wonderful book For the Life of the World has a chapter that deals with time as a part of the life of the Church, how living a life marked in time and having that time redeemed and given significance is core to how Jesus enters into the life of the world and offers to make it whole. Funerals and time given for grieving gives embodied existence and significance to the passing of a loved one, acknowledging their importance in the life of the community. As such, I have noticed that the funerals I most appreciate are those that are not a single moment, but mark the beginning or ending of a period of grieving. I don't like funerals where the person is put in the ground as quickly as possible. I like funerals that happen a week or weeks later, where the family and community has been in process for a while and this act marks the beginning of moving forward to a new stage of grief, the beginning of the world turning once more. The grieving process perhaps never fully ends, but it cannot be brushed aside and not given its time before it must come back alongside the revolving door of daily life. This time take apart from daily life to grieve is truly sacramental, as surely a marker of the inbreaking of God in the passage of time as feast, Eucharist, or anything else.

3. Perhaps I feel that funerals, as such an inbreaking, point toward this ongoing, shared, life by pointing first backwards on a single life in the community, reminding us of what God has done in that life and of the hope, love, and promise made manifest in that life. Perhaps that remembrance is part of the inbreaking that points backwards over what God has done.

4. Perhaps I also feel that remembrance points inevitably forward, to the promise of future life that is similarly interconnected, similarly touched by and reaching out with love. It is in this life that we have been given, this life of a person who is no longer with us, that we find the promise of life that can hold just as much significance, the promise of future meals shared, future hopes and dreams, future loves and joys.

5. In the spirit of kairos, this divine time that breaks into and redeems our own, the future and remembered elements of the sacrament of the dead stems from and points back to a present, a recognition of there we are, at the loss of a great life, in mourning and grief. This mourning and grief is intermixed with joy at the remembrance and the promise but is no less potent for it. Indeed, it is this joy at what was had and what will be had that makes the loss so great. Joy is not the opposite of mourning- it is the sugar which ferments in the bitter wine of grief to create its potency.

Perhaps this is why I like funerals. For some reason it is the experience within which I can most plainly see kairos. It is the experience in which I most fully understand the reality of sacrament.

Have good funerals people. Don't cut them short, don't try to just move past grief as if it never happened, don't miss the joy of past and future even if ignoring it may numb you to the screaming lament of the present. And thank Jeremiah Catling for reminding me of all of this.

For the record, I didn't know I was going to write all of this when I started. I wouldn't go so far as to say I figured out all of why I like funerals, but my view is less hazy than it was.