PeaceBang
The manic mind of the minister -- Auntie Mame Meets Cotton Mather. Blogging about Unitarian Universalism, UU Christian spiritual practice, occasional cultural and political ravings, and the inner life of ministry. PeaceBang is the alter ego of a small town pastor serving an historic New England Unitarian Universalist congregation.
Psalm 90 And the Power of Speed-Reading
June 1, 2007 on 7:02 am | In Liturgy, Mind of the Minister, Theological Reflection (Biblical) |I did a funeral yesterday for a man who was born Russian Orthodox and who became a Roman Catholic in his adult years (mostly because there was no Russian Orthodox church around), and who worshiped faithfully at a local Catholic parish.
At the end of his life, his priest refused to visit him. I know the priest, and he’s a cold, hard man. I do not doubt the man’s wife when she says the priest ignored her phone calls. She, the wife, is a child of our parish (hasn’t been to church in a couple of decades but still a child of our congregation) and she phoned me as her husband was in his last days to say, “Would you go do a blessing for him? He liked you.”
It seems that he had seen me officiate at the funerals and memorials of some of his friends and thought I was “his kind of minister.”
Of course I went to the hospital to bless him. You get that for free just for the asking, is my opinion. You don’t have to like me. Heck, you can even give me a Bronx cheer on your way to Heaven. When someone asks for a blessing at the time of death, we’re not talking about mutual admiration societies or even good relations between church and individual. We’re talking about preparing the soul for the ultimate transition. How could his own priest not be there? For one of his own faithful members? It galls me, it really does.
So anyway, we did the funeral yesterday morning and I wanted to include some of the traditional prayers and Scripture from this man’s tradition. We read from Thessalonians and the Gospel of John, lots of resurrection stuff that has nothing much to do with our tradition but has everything to do with Russian Orthodox faith. It was one of those funerals that takes place in our church but isn’t for a UU; leaving the minister with lots of liturgical and theological choices and hard decisions. I did the best I could. I read the things that I thought would have comforted and held him, had he been there. Actually he was there, in a lovely mahagony casket.
I thought I’d do something unusual and start with Sentences from the Universalist Book of Prayer. Then, reading along the night before, I found that I just loved the sentences from Psalm 90 in particular, so I thought I’d start the service in a strong, invocational way with it. You know, very triumphant and faithful and all that, before doing the welcome and pastoral piece (”we celebrate life in the midst of mortality,” and etc.).
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM.
Not having taken the Universalist Book of Prayer into the pulpit with me, silly me thought a Bible would suffice. And opening my Bible to Psalm 90 and beginning with diaphragmatic breathing and confident tones, I proceeded to lay it on the faithful. Here’s what happened, with my thoughts in parentheses:
Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. (oh yes, this is great)
Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (what beautiful stuff!)
You turn us back to dust, and say, “Turn back, you mortals.” (oh, this is deep, but it’s a funeral, we can take it)
For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night.
You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning;
in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers. (wow, is this gorgeous !)
For we are consumed by your anger; by your wrath we are overwhelmed. (Holy crap. What? This wasn’t in the Universalist Book of Prayer !)
You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance. (Panic! panic mode! Lord, this is a SITUATION! Help me out here!)
At which point I took a huge pause because there was NO WAY IN HELL I was reading the following phrases:
For all our days pass away under your wrath; our years come to an end like a sigh.
The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.
Who considers the power of your anger? Your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.
So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. (now THAT’S in the Universalist Book of Prayer, and I love it, and I’m so sorry I skipped it by accident. But you can see why. It’s nestled between some seriously Calvinistic stuff that to my mind, has no place in a service of the celebration of life.)
After a huge pause, which I tried to make meaningful by looking as though I was just absorbing the power of the text, I continued here:
Turn, O Lord! How long? Have compassion on your servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
(I skipped this) Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil.
(and continued on here)
Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands— O prosper the work of our hands!
So, friends and pastors, the power of speed-reading, and the importance of marking up your Bible before you get into the pulpit. I’m not a fan of cutting and pasting our way through Scripture just to pick the bits we like (thank you, Thomas Jefferson) or that undergird our own personal view of God, but hell’s bells. You can’t minister to a group of 200 people grieving the loss of their beloved pal by giving them that kind of word. You just can’t. Southern Baptists can write in and slap me up if they want, but it’s moments like those when I think maybe I would rather be burned at the stake than tell a group of mourners that God is angry at them all their lives and that those lives end “like a sigh.” I mean, not without being able to add some words of explanation and interpretation.
Friends, the pulpit is a dangerous place. Ascend it with care.
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Universalist prayerbook PeaceBang mentioned…
PeaceBang wrote today about a funeral she performed yesterday and the risks for not having your liturgical elements prepared. She did not have her copy of the 1894 Universalist prayerbook at hand and discovered the canonic…
Trackback by Boy in the Bands — June 1, 2007 #
Thank you for this post. It made me laugh til I cried (recalling several very similar experiences) and then made me pause and breathe deeply at the wonder of it all. What holy, vulnerable, breath-taking and breath deepening places the work of ministry takes us to.
Comment by karla — June 1, 2007 #
It’s nestled between some seriously Calvinistic stuff that to my mind, has no place in a service of the celebration of life.
Well, no, it’s some seriously Jewish stuff. There’s nothing Calvinistic about it, unless you try very hard to read Calvinism into it. The Psalms are more than anything an authentic expression of the whole range of human emotions toward God — and fear of and anger towards God are part of that. When do we hate God more and feel more like God is wrathful beyond our understanding than when a loved one has died? Censored psalters like the one in the Unitarian Prayer Book send a message that these emotions are inappropriate — the unexpurgated Psalms are far richer and more pastoral.
As for a celebration of life — that’s not what funerals are in the Christian tradition. The man has already died and presumably entered heaven. He’s among the saints. What in the world does he need a celebration of his life for? Funerals are for sanctifying the passing on and celebrating the *resurrection* of that person while begin our own process of grieving. Just as Christian baptism has content that can’t be replaced by a generic baby naming ceremony celebrating the beginning of life, Christian burial has content that can’t be replaced by a secular funeral celebrating the life that is over. The Christian rite is fundamentally different from the one you describe in your post.
Comment by Fr Chris — June 1, 2007 #
I’m with Fr. Chris on that. It’s not so much that what you would have liked to omit was characteristically Calvinistic as that the urge to omit it because of its implication about God, or about the traits we attrubute to God, or at least those the Psalmist once did, was characteristically Universalist. That’s in fact why the Universalists of 100 years ago (but not the Episcopalians whose prayer book they adapted) edited it out, and it’s probably also why you, raised as a UU, didn’t think to anticipate what else was in the entire Psalm even with your Jewish and Eastern Orthodox family heritage when you rose to read it.
Something else was troubling me when I read your post yesterday, and I coldn’t put my finger on it until Fr. Chris’s comment helped clarify my thoughts. What was troubling me is the implicit supposition in your narrative that the ceremony you prepared — not just the “resurrection” content, but even the Psalms — was inherently foreign to what UUism is about today.
I agree that it may be, but I disagree that it should be. It was in our own Universalist prayer book, fer Chrissake (pun intended). It may be unfamiliar and therefore challenging to many of us, but we who pride ourselves on our ability to recognize lessons of value in other religious traditions need not reject the same sorts of lessons from the Christianity on which the foundations of our tradition rest. If we are honest about who we are and how we approach religious understanding, we ought to be able to understand these difficult Christian lessons from our own heritage not as a curious anachronism, but as “everlasting to everlasting”. Individually, we may not resonate so much with the idea of Jesus’ resurrection, or of our own, or of a wrathful God (or at least the ancient human apprehension of same). Nevertheless, even those of us who don’t ought to be able to recognize the value of these concepts as figurative expressions of the longing and angst of the human soul — as general archetypes of the human condition that also have a specific authenticity within our own religious tradition, even if that authenticity does not extend to a personal acceptance of them as literal fact.
What does it say about us that so many of us seem to have lost this appreciation in the century since the Universalist prayerbook was published? What does it say when we claim to honor lessons from all religious traditions but so thoroughly suppress some of the most poignant ones from our own? What does it say for our chances of reclaiming what we have lost when even those of our clergy who are most sympathetic to Christianity, the ones who do believe in the power of Scripture and even the rarest of them who do believe that a real resurrection occurred on Easter morning, are so steeped in the supposition that we have left all that behind that they won’t preach it except when filling in as an officiant in someone else’s tradition?
Comment by fausto — June 2, 2007 #
Fellas, I totally hear you, and appreciate what you’ve said. Syncretism is often just sloppiness. I had my doubts. Still do; always will. But Fausto, a clarification: the passages I ommitted from the psalm are, in fact, edited out of the Universalist Book of Prayer as well.
Comment by PeaceBang — June 2, 2007 #
Yes, I understand that. What I was trying to say was that it was the same anti-Calvinist Universalist urge that edited them out then and that prompted you to do it again when you unexpectedly encountered them now, even though their presence in the original text was not itself Calvinist.
Comment by fausto — June 2, 2007 #
Gosh, and I thought I was bad off last week when I had to read the following at a memorial service (for the mother of a member):
God saw you were getting tired
and a cure was not to be.
So he put his arms around you
And whispered “Come to me.”
With tearful eyes we watched you,
And saw you pass away.
Although we loved you dearly,
We could not make you stay.
A golden heart stopped beating,
Hard working hands at rest.
God broke our hearts to prove
to us, he only takes the best.
There is NOTHING in here that I agree with theologically, and I tried not to grimace as I read the words. But the woman had torn them out of a card (mass card?) and kept the poem with her papers, so her daughter thought it would be appropriate to read them.
In my case it was really just a matter of not taking the time with the daughter (a long-time UU but without much depth of understanding) to talk about this and see if it was REALLY what SHE wanted.
Memorial services can really test us.
Comment by Judy — June 2, 2007 #
That reminds me of the old Dorothy Parker quip:
I’d rather fail my Wasserman test
Than read a poem by Edgar A. Guest.
Comment by fausto — June 3, 2007 #
Oh my heavens. I hope to God I don’t die anytime soon because I can’t even imagine what my funeral service would look like! My poor relations!
Comment by h sofia — June 4, 2007 #
What an important discussion your funeral has produced. I was in Washington/Fairfax recently and worshiped at Universalist National Memorial Church, a place that I really treasure. They used a hymnal from 1961. It was a tad awkward, I think. But the service was lovely–Lily preached on the Gospel of Judas. The important thing, though, is that I had a dream that Sunday night that the UUA had put red Xs all over the inside cover, to indicate that this was no longer acceptable for UU congregations. I have no particular grievance with the UUA. I like the new hymnal supplement! But it was something about being confronted by our past, and the complexity and nuance of the selections in that hymnal, and finding our current language inadequate to the task. Well, this post has little, I suspect, to do with your funeral scenario. I just thought it an interesting dream.
Yours in Davenport,
Roger Butts
Comment by Roger Butts — June 6, 2007 #
How can I get ahold of a copy of the 1894 universalist prayer book?
I don’t need a bound copy a down load is just fine. i had a link once but I lost it.
Mary Pat
Comment by Mary Pat Barnett-Lewis — September 17, 2007 #
Also I’ve gone to Scott Wells WEB site and it says that it has a link to the 1894 prayer book, but my computer won’t take me there, anyother suggestions
Comment by Mary Pat Barnett-Lewis — September 17, 2007 #
Fr Chris: Wow! Thank you. I reread your comment several times and pasted it into my Outlook Notes to keep.
That squishy term “celebration of life” that people use so much now instead of funeral, has been giving me a creepy-crawly feeling for a while. Now I understand better why it’s been bothering me.
Peacebang, I think you’re great, that’s why I read your blog and I thank you for it–and I know you give people comfort every day–but I think sometimes you just have to say “funeral”, “death”, and yes, perhaps even “wrath”.
Comment by Lynn — December 9, 2007 #