Julian recently attended his first Catholic funeral and found himself equal parts supportive friend and atheist anthropologist. This week, Matthew draws on his Catholic upbringing and experience as church organist (for close to 1,000 funerals) to help unpack this experience. In hindsight, it turns out that the rote blandness of organized religion may serve communities more honestly than the monetized performative charisma of New Age ritual. The conversation touches on the mythological and social dimensions of religion, as well as both Julian and Matthew’s experience of corporal punishment at school, meted out by the same authority figures who donned ceremonial robes for church.
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Thank you.
But here we go with the, you know, for us Christians, we know because we've taken this journey before and we've watched the stone be rolled away from the tomb and we know that Jesus was raised from the dead.
And we know that we will meet him and that even though we grieve the very real loss of Robert, uh, we know that he's gone on to be with the Savior.
Um, and I sort of, that was the moment where I let out a little sigh and I half smiled and I leaned forward with my elbows on the pew and my hand supporting the side of my face.
I was like, Oh, you bastard.
Oh my gosh.
Did anybody see you?
I mean, it was very, I was, I was very, I don't know, man.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe, maybe it was, it was witnessed by somebody.
I feel like I was, I was fairly, I was fairly undercover.
But I was, I really found myself wondering, like, how many, and especially, you know, for someone like me, where it's been 20 years since I was in a context like that.
So I'm like, wow, I wonder how many people in this room really are feeling that this piece of the service is an essential ingredient in the alchemy of solace as they're longing for, or if they're just sort of humoring this as like, oh, you know, we have to have this required reference to the life of Jesus and how it means something profound about the nature of death.
I think that there's a number of other possibilities for the observant Catholic that that language may not even register as a departure from what preceded it.
That as he moves into theology and out of the personal, so you're describing that there have been personal remembrances and eulogies and appropriate readings and so on.
Then, you're describing a movement towards the central sacrament, which is the celebration of the final communion mass that Robert will be a part of, in a way.
And so, everything that has been hyper-personalized is now moving towards theological truth in the ritual that you're describing.
And I think the observant Catholic just knows that that's where it's going, just knows that after the personal reminiscences that the deeper truth underneath the ephemerality of our personal lives
And so, it would just be inevitable that the priest at a certain point would turn the page and suddenly be reading from golden ink or something like that, and suddenly he's speaking about what we all know to be true about the nature of reality and death.
So, I also think that for maybe not observant but creative and perhaps almost lapsed Catholics, there's a way in which
That flip into theology invokes a kind of nostalgia that is laden with, you know, mystery and poetry.
And that's where the performative ability of the priest comes in handy, and it might be irritating or it might be really electrifying.
And it's hard to tell, like sometimes the person who really goes for it and tries to deliver it with some kind of panache just comes off like an asshole, and the person who is completely subtle and nerdy about it really invokes a kind of quiet space.
But, you know, if I was there, I think A very old part of my brain would flip on that would say two things at the same time that this is the ridiculous part and that's where I would like resonate with you sighing there.
But then the other part that would flip on would be, well of course, these are the things that we say and that we've said for thousands of years because we don't actually know what to say.
Like, this is the consensus agreement that we've come to with regard to expressing grief in the absence of any better explanation.
I had both of those things too, right?
I had the like, Mildly exasperated, like, Oh God, I was, I was right.
It actually still is this thing that I, that I find kind of ludicrous.
But at the same time, I also had that other, that other awareness that was saying, you know, this is, this is in this context, this is how these people make sense of it.
And of course, this is what's being said.
But I think I have my own little sticking place with all of that where I feel like, and this is where I can be dogmatic, I feel like the true process of grieving is in some way muted or distorted or denied through this false claim about what happens after you die.
And that really coming to terms with death is this really important existential work to be done.
And, you know, I'm less committed to that as a dogmatic position than I would have been, say, 10 or 15 years ago.
What I wonder about that, I absolutely understand what you're saying, and I think realizing that the rote liturgical kind of escapism into theology at a certain point seems to cover over a kind of You know, absence or a vacuum of gravitas.
It's like it's too easy to turn the page and read out of the book because somebody has died.
I think that realizing that as a teenager that did You know, push me out the door of the church.
I felt like you people are pretending to round something up.
You people are pretending to explain something.
You people are really...I remember it occurring to me that the stronger the claim the person was making about what happened after death, the stronger the claim the person was making about, you know, sin or, you know, I don't know, or what God wanted for your life,
The more doubt they must actually have about what is happening in their existence.
So, I started to see theological claims as expressions of doubt, actually, and expressions of anxiety, in fact.
I also have, I guess I've been alive long enough and I've revisited these spaces enough to realize that there can be an acclimatization process to the fact that a ritual just exists and that in the absence of anything else to do with other people, this is as good a thing to do as any.
And that you never really know what people believe when they say a thing, you know?
It's like, I remember this feeling that I had after maybe Funeral 847 or whatever, when I'm listening to the celebrants say, I commend the soul of so-and-so to God as they're walking around the coffin sensing it.
And I remember just feeling this deep melancholy Because I realized that maybe the priest didn't feel that it was true.
But I didn't have the bitterness of thinking, you must be making that up, Father Arbor.
You must be bullshitting right now.
It was more like you're doing this melancholic thing that you can't actually be certain of and you're doing it because you don't know what else to do and it sucks and I'm here with you too.
And so that's why I'm always a little bit...
I'm hesitant to be very clear about or to make assumptions about what people are feeling when they say they believe something.
Because I think believing something, or saying it, or showing that you believe something can feel many different ways at the same time, actually.
