“We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.”
To grieve not as those who have no hope. I have seen this countless times at funerals. Those without faith in Christ can be devastated, while those who have faith experience sorrow, but, in the words of the traditional Roman rite of burial, “through their tears look meekly up to you, the God of all consolation.”
Notice what St. Paul does not say, though. He does not say “do not grieve,” because we have hope. He says that our grief should look differently than the grief of those who do not have hope in the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus, today, we need a parallel reminder: Grief is not bad. We should not be ashamed to experience sorrow. You don’t need to hold it all together. Grief is a sign of love. To grieve greatly is to have loved greatly.
The liturgy – the Church’s prayer – gives shape to the great experiences of Christian life. Think of the Catholic nuptial Mass, which gives shape to our joy at a couple’s marriage. It shapes our joy and happiness to see marriage not as a cult of personal fulfillment, but as part of God’s plan for men and women, a living image of the love of Christ for His Bride, the Church. It shapes our joy for them to celebrate a life of fruitfulness and generosity, repeatedly asking for the gift of children. A non-Catholic friend at my brother’s wedding said I had them up to about ten kids by the end of it. I was confused because that hadn’t been (maybe I should be ashamed to admit) a big focus of the sermon. But then I realized – he was paying attention to the prayers of the Mass! This non-Catholic man had a better understanding of the Church’s vision of marriage than most Catholics! And it was because the Church’s prayer had given shape to his joy.
Likewise, the funeral Mass shapes our grief and mourning. It most emphatically does not exist to make our mourning go away. A woman who wasn’t fond of this embraced of an acknowledged and shape grief once told me, “Father, when I die, it’s going to be a celebration!” I couldn’t help but think, “well, there’s more than one way to take that statement!” (Fortunately, I managed to keep that thought to myself for a few hours.) But to ask that no one mourn at your funeral, is to wish that no one had loved you.
What is the shape we ought to give to our mourning? What is the shape that the Church gives to mourning? When we mourn as Christians, we come face to face with the reality of death. Our world hides death from us. In the traditional Roman burial service, though, we pray, “Let our hearts be deeply moved at this sight of death, and while we consign the body of the deceased to the earth, let us be mindful of our own frailty and mortality.” The Church’s prayer shapes our grief to reckon with our own mortality, to consider the state of our own souls, “that walking always in your fear and in the way of your commandments, we may, after our departure from this world, experience a merciful judgement and rejoice in everlasting happiness.”
What is the shape that the world has given to mourning? It has been largely to ignore it, to pretend that it doesn’t exist, to deny the pain of loss, and thus to make it even worse. And the worldliness that has crept into the Church has attempted to do the same. But to ignore something is to give it power. A liturgy, or indeed a church, that doesn’t allow room to express the full range of human experience will be abandoned for something that does. It is little surprise that when Christians ceased to grapple with the mystery and awe of standing before death, when schmaltz and trite platitudes are all we have to offer, that more and more people have turned to occult practices of attempting to communicate with the dead, of preserving cremated ashes in amulets, the macabre displays evidenced by a morbid fascination with the demonic increasingly on display each October. What have we offered them of gravity and substance? Have we been shaping grief, or ignoring it?
That we can’t look death in the face is clear in the wide-spread neglect of the elderly and dying, especially those with dementia or others who don’t seem to be the same person they used to be. We fear that we might one day be as they. And if we haven’t let our grief be properly shaped – because grieving isn’t just for after death – we lack the courage to confront death, and thus to humbly accept it, to love in the face of death.
In my experience, when non-Catholics experience a Catholic funeral that is informed by the richness of our tradition, that uses solemn Gregorian chants and music with soaring poetry, with preaching that grapples with the drama of salvation rather than eulogizing the deceased, they intuit that a deep need of the human person has been met. That an important reality so often neglected by our world has been acknowledged and wrestled with: that this material world is but one aspect of a much greater reality.
“Faith is not simply comforting, but puts before one the full tremendousness of being, its meaning and its consequences. If one is a materialist [believing only in the material world], then there is no meaning in death, apart from the negation of life. Such people live in the comforting thought that life is meaningless, and has only personal consequences or none; then death, too, must be meaningless, and the quicker its acknowledgment is over, and the less grief there is, the better.”* So often, this is precisely the shape we have given to grief, a shape that conforms to the materialism that denies that there is anything after this life, any greater mystery with which to struggle. “But if life has meaning, death has meaning, and if death has meaning, so does life.”* In a world that believes that life has no real meaning, we must grapple with the full reality and meaning of death to affirm the value and meaning of life.
Just as authors quote and reference other authors, sometimes explicitly, and sometimes more implicitly and cleverly, composers classical and modern quote timeless melodies in their music, referencing something great and giving shape to the emotions they wish to inspire. Little wonder, then, that the most quoted phrase in music history is not Beethoven’s fifth – ba ba ba BA – but rather a four-note sequence that would have been immediately recognizable to any Catholic before 1970 – FA, MI, FA, RE – perhaps followed by MI, DO, RE, RE – the first line of the Dies Irae sequence, sung at every Catholic funeral until 1970: “Dreaded day, that day of ire, When the world shall melt in fire, Told by Sibyl and David’s lyre.”
The historically Catholic approach to shaping our grief (that is, to commemorating a funeral) was to locate the drama of an individual’s death and life within the great drama of human existence. Thus, the traditional Requiem Mass (or funeral) included a focus on the second coming, the day when, as we confess each Sunday, the Lord will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, the day that, yes, will be a day of ire when the world shall melt in fire, but also the day when the longed-for resurrection of our mortal bodies will occur, when the definitive proclamation of the Lord’s justice and mercy will be known, when all will be set right and our joy will be complete. “Mournful day that day of sighs, When from dust shall man arise, Stained with guilt his doom to know, Mercy, Lord, on him bestow. Jesus, kind! Your souls release, Led them thence to realms of peace.”
Why is the Dies Irae the most quoted piece of music in the history of the West? Because when composers weave it into their music, they invoke the great drama of human existence. The drama of death affirms that life really must have meaning, must have weight. Death is the limit test of the meaning of life. And thus a funeral that emphasizes the universal – the meaning of Christian death found in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ – rather than the particular – the ups and downs of one particular life, affirms in a way more profound than any eulogy the meaning of this particular life, that it was and is a part of the mystery of the life of Christ.
At the same time, the Church in Her wisdom has always balanced the drama of the general judgement with the serenity of chants that calmly and comfortingly intone, “May light eternal shine upon them, O Lord, with Your Saints forever, for You are kind.” The majesty of the general judgement – the kindness and mercy of God to sinners. The universality and the particularity of death are faced, but not as those who have no hope.
The modern Roman rite gives various options for the prayers at the funeral Mass, and I make sure to use the ones that bring us face-to-face with that reality: “In the sight of this world, she is now dead. In your sight, may she live forever. Forgive whatever sins she committed through human weakness, and in your mercy, grant her everlasting rest.” It’s often the only time that the deceased is ever described as “dead.” It is only that which is hidden that ultimately has power over us. For death to be robbed of its sting, it must be brought out into the open, grappled with, and redeemed.
“For the Lord himself, with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, will come down from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.” The word of God and our mother the Church shapes our grief by the way She prays. She confronts us with the gravity of death, to excite in us an awareness of the greatness of our God, who in the person of Jesus Christ did not hesitate to undergo the tragedy of death, so that we might have life. As Catholics, we have the great blessing of trusting the Church to shape our grief rather than to explain it away or ignore it. We should have confidence, then, in consoling one another with Her words.
The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson
Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne
XXXII Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXVI
* Iain McGilchrist. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspective Press, 2021.
