Thursday, October 27, 2005
FAITH AND FUNERALS AND FAMILIES
I spent yesterday evening and the better part of today attending my uncle's funeral. His was not an unexpected death. He was 99...a lot of years that brought a lot of changes. When he grew up on the farm, there were no such things as automobiles. The road past the farmhouse that is today being turned into a four lane highway was a wagon trail when he made his first communion. He could remember seeing the very first car that drove down that road, and tell stories of funerals when the casket was loaded onto a horse drawn wagon. We tend to forget how recently life was very different.
Maybe, though, the greater changes in the last 99 years have been in the way that people relate to each other. My uncle was a man who spoke his mind unhesitatingly; a man whose word was his contract--a man of integrity. The kind of man who is rare now, but was the norm at the time when he was born.
In 99 years, people take a lot of pictures of you. A great many of these were on display at the funeral home. The picture of him in his football uniform was perhaps the most striking. He played for Kent State University back then. Had he not been holding the helmet, I would not have known what he was wearing. It looked more like an air suit tied into a sort of sausage-links configuration than any sort of protective clothing. Instead of school colors, the football uniform was mostly brown, or looked that way in the picture, anyway; but then, that was before color film.
It was before birth control as well. He had ten children, nine of them still living. They gave him thirty-three grandchildren, forty-nine great grandchildren, and two great, great grandchildren. Several rooms of the funeral home were overflowing. As I walked around talking with those present, it hit me. They were all members of his family, and that was why there were so many people and so few flowers. When you outlive your friends your funeral can be a dismal affair, but not when you give birth to a dynasty.
My uncle never made a mark on the world. He labored long hours to keep bread on the table and didn't have time to do things that would have made him famous. His children grew up without the material things that we began to take for granted about the time that the youngest was in her teens. Yet what a wealth they have today in each other. Nothing that money will buy can even come close. A family funeral when there is plenty of family and the person who has died lived a long life is a joyous affair. There are children running everywhere, of course, and no one lacks for someone to talk with. The loss is less when there are so many on the side of gain. He will not be forgotten for a long long time.
One of my cousins told me a story about my uncle and his best friend and fishing buddy, George. It seems that George had no belief in God. When they went fishing, George would cuss a blue streak, and my uncle would admonish him that he had to stop doing that and had to learn to believe in God. George wanted no part of it. George died last month. He had not been able to speak for a period of time before he died, but one day his daughter went into his room and found him on his knees beside the bed. He had crawled over the siderail in order to be kneeling there, and he was praying. Before he died George accepted Christ, and his daughter could hardly believe what she was seeing. My uncle's many prayers for George were answered, and today they must be sharing stories about the one that got away over there beyond the territory of the Grim Reaper.
If my uncle isn't in that territory, most of us have little hope of seeing it. You didn't spend much time around him without hearing about his faith. It was central to the man that he was. He talked about it when most of us remain silent. God was very real and very present to him. He knew the Bible like most of us know the balance in the checkbook or the status of the stock market. He should have, he read it cover to cover many times. One of the events that gave him pleasure was to have a Jehovah's Witness ring his doorbell. He would invite them in and commence to debate them into silence. He always said he could confound their arguments. He may have a few more friends in the land beyond who are there because of some argument he made.
It aggravated him that "They have changed the Bible." When he read it, he read the Douay Rheims, and he knew what had been altered in later versions. He never could understand why it had been changed. When I think of him, I will remember most his faith. And maybe when I remember it, I will also think about how much the Church changed for him, yet still he weathered the changes without losing confidence in the One the changes were about. That's quite an achievement considering where he came from 99 years ago. He not only coped, his faith grew stronger with each passing year. There is a lesson in that, a lesson he told with his life. A lesson I will try to hold onto when the latest Catholic headlines send me reeling into doubt.
Eternal rest grant to you, Uncle Gib. May you be winning Scripture debates with the angels tonight in your eternal home.
