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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Saints and Dust1/29/2006 14:20:04There is something beautiful and attractice about the cowboy funerals of the wild west movies... in particular I am thinking of the one at the beginning of "The Searchers," where John Wayne is satisfied that enough has been said after "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." Like this, I was amazed how (despite the media circus) on the day of the death of the most recent Pope, the Catholic church near me made no big hubub about it, only briefly mentioning the Holy Father in the homily. Solace was to be found in continuity, in remembering that this is only another of God's days and that death comes just as naturally as life. At my university, though, this is hardly the aesthetic. When a student dies, people practically burst out beating their breasts and wearing sackcloth - or, more likely, lacking much of any ritual expression, are confused and filled with the overwhelming sense of not knowing what to do. The chaplaincy offers service after service, memorialization after memorialization - what the priest here described to me rather sarcastically as "canonization." Last night I went to one of these services for a friend who died suddenly in an accident in the waves. He was a powerfully bright soul, and loved by many. The incredible group that his memory brought together was itself a testament. As the praise and memories came pouring out on the stage of the theater he once performed on, I remembered what the priest had said - it started to sound less worthy of ridicule. There is truly a sense in which we are all saints and should be canonized in death as in life. This especially in light of our imperfections - one guy there told me that he had known mainly the "darker side" of our friend, so he didn't want to go up on stage to speak. Glory be to that as well. I was amazed, though, how this largely "post-religious" crowd immediately fell into religious language, specific to the point that our friend became a saint and avatar in the order of Jesus, and I found myself, as with the Church's saints, worshipping and knowing Jesus through this friend's memory. There must be both - a canonization and the here-and-now unsentimentality of John Wayne, and they must inhabit the same space as best they can. All the same, there is something so universally horribly tragic for we the weak and living about the death of a young person, beautiful and alive and filling us all with life. Recently in India I saw the cremation of an old woman of a village and was amazed to see people standing around, not really paying attention, smoking cigarettes. When I asked someone about it, amazed at their unflinching face to death, she told me that the day before, when a young boy had died, the same village came to the pyre screaming and tearing at themselves and beating themselves with grief. If there is one thing perhaps God will have to answer for from our tired souls it is the death of the young. (in memory of Luis Pagan) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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