Recently I read a book that was so good it made me resolve never to miss praying the hours of the church again. Its author, David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, does not attempt to guilt us into praying. He comes at it differently. Praying or not praying, for him, are not questions of guilt or merit. What is at stake is rather the poverty or richness of life. God does not need for us to pray, but we need for us to pray.

His book is entitled, The Music of Silence  (San Francisco, Harper, 1995) and its thesis is simple: If we do not pray, at regular intervals each day, we will not meet the angel of each hour and our lives will be much poorer for that fact. How so?

Steindl_Rast begins by explaining the rhythm of the church’s liturgical hours of prayer. These hours, a combination of psalms, scriptural readings, and liturgical prayers, are the prayers that have been for centuries chanted by contemplative monks and nuns in monasteries and recited more simply by priests and other religious. In many Protestant traditions, some of these hours form the basis of church services and, more recently within Roman Catholicism, many lay persons have picked them up and begun praying them. While many of us have some familiarity with two of these hours, Lauds and Vespers, few of us are familiar with the others: Vigils, Prime, Terce, Sext, None and Compline.

These hours form an ancient rhythm of prayer which, whether we are professional contemplatives or not, should be the essential prayer-rhythm of everyone’s day. It works this way: An hour, thus defined, does not mean a simple hour on the clock. A liturgical hour is more a measure of soul than of chronology. It is like a season of the year: spring, summer, fall, or winter. These, our seasons, are as much a feeling, a temperature, a shade of light, and a colour as they are a date on the calendar. Each is a mood and, mythically speaking, each brings its own particular angel.

But that angel can be missed. A moment can pass us by for nothing. All of us have had this experience. And how often it happens. Because of heartaches and headaches, the pressures and pains that so chronically plague us, we can miss a season. A summer, a fall, a winter, or a spring, passes and we never really attune to its mood. It comes and goes unexamined, unable to really give us anything. We never seize the moment, its colours, its smells, its temperature, its particular shades of light, and the moods these stir in us. We miss greeting its angel.

Thus, for example, we say things like: “Because of mother’s death we had no Christmas this year.” “This year, with all the moving we had to do, we had no summer really.” “I have been so preoccupied and stressed at work that spring has made no difference to me this year.” Seasons come and go and often we simply miss them.

Coupled with this is the effect of pressure and worry within us. After awhile, we have the impression that time is limited, that there is never enough time to do all the things we are required to do. Many of us live with a constant feeling that we must hurry, that we are behind, that time is running too swiftly. Because of this, we too rarely notice, really, the season and the hour of day, with its changes of light, colour, and temperature. We miss its particular mood, its angel.

The church invites us to say Lauds and Vespers and whatever other canonical hours we can manage, precisely so that we do not miss our mornings, our afternoons, and our evenings. We all know what is at stake here because we have all missed countless mornings, afternoon, and evenings precisely because we did not pray. If I do not begin my morning with prayer, with a Lauds, which receives what the angel of each morning brings – the gift of a new day, the dawn of new light, refreshment after sleep, time and space for a renewed innocence and enthusiasm. I will soon find that it is noon and I have missed a morning. I won’t feel particularly guilty about not praying. I will just have missed a morning. The same will happen to me if I do not, through some Vespers, greet the angel of evening. I won’t go to bed feeling guilty about not praying. I will though, mostly likely, miss the evening, for I will not attune myself to that particular kind of peace and feeling of neighbourliness that can be received only as the light of day is fading.

Without prayer, we hurry compulsively through our days, missing most of them because we are missing the angels that God is sending each hour.

As a columnist, I rarely write about what is actually happening in my own life, given that my opinions already betray more than enough. I suspect that people who read this piece weekly know more about me than they really need to know to give them an adequate perspective on what I write. In this particular column, however, I want to share personally about a major change taking place in my life.

Six years ago, I was enjoying a sabbatical, my first, when, one morning, I got a phone call from France, where the General Council of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the religious order to which I belong, were meeting. They were asking me to serve as Provincial Superior for one of our provinces of Oblates in Central Canada. My life changed in an instant, and quite drastically too. I drove my car from Oakland, California to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, abandoning not only an unfinished sabbatical and an unfinished book but a myriad of unfinished plans and dreams as well. I must confess that, as I made that drive, I felt considerably less enthusiasm than depression.

But God was good. And Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, was also good. I loved the city, it air, its water, its beauty, its parks, its pubs, its university, and especially its people, with their own particular warmth, humour, intellectuality, character, and faith. This is a good city. Perhaps most of the world cannot find it on a map, but that only proves that it is one of the better-kept secrets in the world and difficult to spell!

The job? Being Provincial Superior to an order of priests and brothers had its ups and downs. Whatever else it was, and it was many things, it was always interesting, always challenging, and it always stretched me and took me to places I would rather not have gone, in terms of geography and in terms of the heart.

It had a downside: one cannot be in a major religious superior for any length of time and not be forced into making decisions that will hurt some people, no matter which way those decisions are made and no matter if they are made at all. I had no previous experience with any of this and everything in my temperament is stacked against it, but I had no escape and I now have baggage I was free of six years ago. One loses one’s innocence when one is in authority. Would it were otherwise!

But there was also a major compensation, the dedication and faith that I witnessed, both among the men I served and the people to whom they ministered. In all organizations, about 10-12% of the persons you are dealing with are, as it is put today, dysfunctional. That can be discouraging. However, and this is what needs to be kept in perspective, this means that about 90% are not. 90% are honest, loving, faith-filled, generous, dedicated, and healthy. That is also true of the men to whom I served as provincial. In nine out of ten of them, I witnessed a faith, generosity, and dedication that left me humbled. Service is always more privilege than burden. We always receive more than we give and gratitude eventually dwarfs the scars. At least that was true of my six years as a provincial superior.

But it ended late this spring. In our congregation, we serve six-year terms as provincials. Mine is now finished. So what is next?

More immediately, sabbatical. From summer, 1997, to summer, 1998, I will be living with our Oblate community in Toronto, resting, praying, reading, attempting to write a book, taking in some baseball and football, and walking in the sun whenever possible. The book which I hope to write while on this sabbatical does not, as yet, have a name. It does have an aim. It may seem grandiose, and indeed it is, but I hope to write a book, a spirituality book, which, in essence, is an apologia for belief in God and (especially) in the church in today’s world. Teilhard de Chardin once commented that he always found it amazing that so many sincere, good, searching people could not believe in God. His conclusion? They, unlike himself, must not have heard about God in a palatable way. His writings set out to address this. I do not put myself in the same class as Teilhard de Chardin, not by a long shot, but my attempt, modest by his standards, will try to address essentially the same issue.

What happens after summer of 1998? I leave that in the hands of God and the hands of my community, the Oblates. I have a simple enough faith. It believes that wherever I am sent will be the right place. No place, as Rilke says, is poor in its capacity to fire gratitude. There will be good people to meet, I am sure, wherever I go.

“I have three kids. They don’t go to church regularly, but they’ve all turned out to be good adults, persons I can be proud of. All of them are caring, giving, fair, and gracious people. I think that they are Christian because they live like Christians, even if they don’t regularly go to church.”

These are words spoken to me by a mother recently and hers is an interesting assessment – you can be a good Christian even if you don’t go to church. There is a certain logic to her argument, but it is true? Are her children Christian, Catholic, despite their lack of ecclesial involvement? What is to be said about her statement?

At one level, one might agree with her assessment. If her children are, as she puts it, caring, giving, fair, and gracious people, much of it surely the result of a Christian upbringing, are they not Christian? Christ, after all, said that real belief is more in our actions than in our creeds and worship services: “What I want is loving, kindness, not sacrifice. … It is not necessarily those who say ‘Lord, Lord’ who enter the kingdom, but those who do the will of God on earth.”

By the same logic, however, one could also argue that while her children are Christian they are not particularly Catholic. To be Catholic implies something else, namely, a certain ecclesial conversion. Bernard Lonergan, surely one of the foremost Catholic minds of the century, taught that true conversion, at some point, is not just conversion to God and to the fundamental principles of morality, decency, and generosity that flow from that belief. It is also, though not necessarily initially, a conversion to community, to ecclesiology, to the fact that we are meant to walk to God as part of a group. Full conversion is also conversion to the fact that true religion is not something we do alone, but in a group, with others. For Roman Catholics, that means gathering for Eucharist.

But, while all of this is true, it is, to my mind, not the most helpful perspective within which to assess this woman’s remarks. A more fruitful approach, I believe, is to insert the whole question of who is practicing his or her faith and who is not into the reality (not analogy, but reality) of family.

The church is a family and, as in all families, members are at different levels of commitment and maturity. Some are more adult and responsible, not just in terms of their own behaviour but also in terms of helping steward the welfare and ethos of the family. Others are more immature, taking more than they give, having only their own individual welfare as their concern. However, any family worth the name understands this, has patience with it, knows that maturity and commitment take time, and is not quick to write anyone off. Your kids might be too interested in their own lives to come home regularly, but you don’t, on that basis alone, say they no longer belong to your family.

Young people, and not so young people too, tend to treat their churches in pretty well the same way as they treat their families. Hence, it should be no great surprise to us that in an age when family life is at a low ebb the consequence is that church life is at an equally low ebb. Bluntly put, if your kids come home, and then briefly and distractedly, only at Christmas and on the odd major holiday, should it surprise you that they treat their churches in the same way? But you still consider them a vital part of your family – “a Jones, a Smith, a Prediger, an O’Brien, or Kronsky”. Why shouldn’t the church consider them a vital part of itself  “a Christian, a Catholic” for the same reason?  At what stage do you write off a family member? Surely not while they still have your name and family ethos, even if they aren’t home a lot.

Reginald Bibby, the renowned sociologist of religion, is fond of saying that people are not leaving their churches, they just aren’t going to them. There is a difference. That is also true for our children, both as pertains to family and church.

So is this woman’s statement correct? Can our children be Christian and Catholic, even if they are not going to church? The answer is yes. To the extent that they precisely are caring, giving, fair, and gracious persons, persons we can in many ways be proud of, they are also Christian and Catholic. That’s the good news. The negative side is that they are adolescent as pertains to ecclesiology, whatever their other maturities. Adulthood comes only when one begins to take some active responsibility for the family, for both its welfare and its ethos. That is also true for our relationship to the church.

There is no argument about its importance. Everyone agrees that one of the biggest religious struggles we face today as churches, especially in the first world, is that of inculturation. The problem is how to do it.

What is inculturation? Peter Schinellers, in his A Handbook on Inculturation, defines it this way: Enculturation is the incarnation of Christian life and the Christian message in a particular cultural context in such a way that this expression not only finds expression through elements proper to the culture in question, but becomes a principle that animates, directs and unifies the culture, transforming and remaking it so as to bring about a new creation. … And this must create an expression of Christianity not just in the local church, but in the church universal. (Paulist Press, 1990)

Many of us who grew up in immigrant or ghetto churches know exactly what that means. We had a first-hand experience of it growing up. The churches of our youth did indeed help animate, direct, and unify the cultures and subcultures within which we lived. The church stood in the centre of town, towered over its landscape, and life revolved around its feasts and cycles. Everyone knew when it was lent, advent, Christmas, Easter, or Pentecost. The church made the laws and dealt final truth.

As recent criticisms of those churches have made clear, not all of this was good. The church was powerful, but it often too was narrow and contained elements of racism, sexism, and bigotry. Much of it however was good and its real problem was only this: It broke apart as the immigrant cultures which spawned it broke down. It worked well, but within a certain sociology.

In any case, irrespective of what judgement God and history will make upon it, it has, save precisely for some present immigrant communities, broken down and we have not found anything to replace it with that in any way approximates its power in terms of a Christianity that is effectively inculturated. And so we are searching today for a new way.  Where should we go?

When one surveys what is being tried, both theoretically and practically, one sees four basic approaches being taken:

Enlightened Christianity. The approach here is to try to affirm-the-culture, to try to make Christianity relevant within the culture by positively affirming what is good within that culture. At its best, this approach moves beyond the old dichotomy which puts faith-against-the-world and helps the culture to evangelize its desires. At its worst, it degenerates into Gallup-Poll Christianity and becomes so relevant that it ceases to have any relevance, salt without tang.

Immigrant Christianity. The approach here is fear-the-culture-and-create-a-subculture.  This still exists in some immigrant ethnic churches and also in some situations where the church is in a minority or oppressed situation. At its best, it comes closest to true inculturation. Its problem, as already mentioned, is that it eventually comes apart when the immigrant sociology that helped spawn it breaks up. Put more simply, it is powerful in that given, ghetto, situation but often loses its power when people move out of that particular community.

Evangelical Christianity. The approach here is to try to create-a-counter-sociology. We see this in the Evangelical churches and among those who have been influenced by Charismatic renewal. In essence, this is the purest biblical position since it tries to mimic the original apostolic community and evangelization. It is also strong on prayer and on having a deep private relationship to Jesus. Its major problem is that it is too easily marginalized by the mainstream culture. As well, it runs the danger of falling into fundamentalism and elitism.

Prophetic Christianity. The approach here is to critique-the-culture. Its strength is that it emphasizes the preferential option for the poor and presents the world with the crucial agenda, justice and survival. Its problem is that, too often, it lacks a sufficient link to private prayer and contemplation, is too ideological, and substitutes a vow of alienation for a vow of love.

So if these are the possible approaches, where should we go? Given their strengths and weaknesses, I suggest that the road to making the church again an effective instrument in the world is for all of us, churches and individuals, to become selectively-affirming, inner immigrant, evangelical, prophetic Christians.

If one looks for what is wrong with society, one need not look far. A single image provides a whole commentary: We have rich athletes, making millions of dollars, asking poor kids to pay for their autographs and we admire the athletes!

We have long known that the struggle for social justice is about trying to change unfair structures, systems that unduly reward some at the expense of unfairly penalizing others. However, most of the time when we think of the systems we live under, we focus on economic, political, and social structures. Generally, we give little thought to the symbolic infrastructure that helps undergird it all. Part of that infrastructure is the system of heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses, we adulate.

Let me try to illustrate this with a story shared by Neil Postman. In his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death – Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Postman tells how at the 1983 commencement exercises at Yale University a number of honourary degrees were awarded, including one to Mother Theresa. They were stacked in order of importance, from lesser to greater, so that the big crescendo would be at the end. As each recipient was introduced and the list of his or her achievements read off, the audience applauded, though always with some restraint, indicating clearly that they were still waiting for the moment for which they had really come. Finally that moment arrived, and it was not when Mother Theresa was introduced. The last person to be introduced and given an award waited in the wings and as her achievements were being recounted the audience already began to stand and applaud so that by the time her name was announced, Meryl Streep, the audience, in Postman’s colourful words, unleashed a sonic boom that woke the dead in graveyards of the entire city.

I suspect that Meryl Streep is a very fine person, but that is not the point. The point here is that while this system perdures when we and our children so unduly adulate the rich, the famous, and the beautiful, social justice is going nowhere. We are, for the most part, moved more by unconscious symbols than by any explicit philosophy. All the talk in the world and all of our efforts at trying to change the system so that it is more fair to everyone will not go very far when what moves the hearts of our young people, and most times too our own too, are images of our athletes, entertainers, pop stars, and famous achievers having, in essence, achieved redemption right now through beauty, fame, achievement, status, money, adulation, and glamour.

Despite all of our efforts at social justice we still have not recognized how significant this is and how our own inconsistencies here hinder what we are trying to achieve. Let me again try to illustrate this:

I want to recount this story with some sympathy, given that I strongly endorse the intent behind the effort, even as I see the inconsistency in it. Recently, in Toronto, a group strongly committed to justice had a large colour poster printed. On it, they had pictures of many of the top business leaders in our country, complete with a listing of their salaries. The intent, among other things, was to publicly expose the salaries of these men (and in a few cases, women) so as to highlight the gap between the rich and the poor. The poster caused a fair amount of controversy and was banned in Toronto churches.

My point here is not to take sides in the controversy, whether this poster should or should not be allowed to be hung in our churches. I ask a different question: Would we, who believe that the present system is unjust, be as eager to hang up a poster on which we would put the photos and salaries of our leading entertainers, professional athletes, pop stars, writers, and other cultural icons? We would we want to hang up a poster on which we had, for instance, the pictures and salaries of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Paul McCartney, Celine Dion, Mick Jagger, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Oprah Winfrey, David Letterman, Harrison Ford, Julie Roberts, Sandra Bullock, and hundreds of other such popular stars? And indeed, if we did hang up such a poster would it not, in fact, bring admiration rather than censure to those on it? Our kids, I suspect, would be hanging the poster on their walls for reasons quite other than accentuating the gap between the rich and the poor.

It is safe to morally whip a few corporate CEO types, who are symbolically unpopular anyway, but the struggle for social justice is going to require more than this. The point here is not to protect those men and women who were pictured on that poster. No. The point is that the roots of injustice go much deeper © and we who work for justice need to have the courage to face our inconsistencies.

Social justice is about changing systems and so we need to challenge those places where our present politics, economics, and social structures are unfair. However we need too to look at what helps undergird them, that unconscious system of worship that has us set up gods and goddesses to whom we give happy exemption. Yet most of these are earning millions of dollars and being admired, by us, for doing it. But simple mathematics dictates that if someone is getting millions, somebody else will not get enough and it is of small consequence whether the person who is getting those millions is an unpopular corporate type or a popular star whose beauty, grace, or intelligence take our breath away.

As a young man, Nikos Kazantzakis once sought spiritual guidance from a renowned master, an old monk named Father Makarios. In his autobiography, he describes a conversation he had with the old monk:

“Do you still wrestle with the devil, Father Makarios?” I asked him. “Not any longer, my child. I have grown old now, and he has grown old with me. He doesn’t have the strength. … I wrestle with God.” “With God!” I exclaimed in astonishment. “And you hope to win?” “I hope to lose, my child. My bones remain with me still, and they continue to resist.” (Report to Greco, p.222)

As we grow older, what, in our bones, continues to resist God? How is it that we switch from wrestling with the devil to struggling with God?

I remember a confession I heard as a young priest. It was just before a Eucharist and everyone was hurrying through the line, hoping for a two-minute confession, when a woman, somewhere in her fifties, knelt before me. Hers was not a regular confession, a quick listing of sins, but words to this effect:

This is hard for me to talk about, and even just to admit, but lately I’m finding myself filling constantly with anger. It is hard to describe exactly because it is not so much that certain things trigger it, but that I find myself growing bitter. I’m resentful at my husband and family because they take me so much for granted and I am angry at the world, I guess, for the same reason. Also, and I don’t understand this at all, I have resentments towards God. I can’t word this exactly, but I’m angry at God – angry about some things in my life, angry because life is so unfair at times, and angry that everything is so hopelessly the way it is. I don’t understand this, I never was an angry person when I was younger and now I’m filling with anger. How is it that now, that I am older, I am getting more immature?”

I told her the Kazantzakis story about the old monk who ceased fighting with the devil to begin a more important struggle with God. I assured her that hers was not the struggle of the immature, as she so humbly thought, but rather the struggle of the mature, the struggle of those who have conquered enough of the weaknesses of youth to come face to face with a bigger hurdle, the barrier of resentment.

We wrestle with the devil when we struggle with the weaknesses of youth, but we wrestle with God when we struggle with the angers and resentments of aging. The latter is the struggle to move beyond the death of our dreams, beyond how we have been wounded and cheated and all the resentments that come with that, so as to feel instead inside of us the compassion of God. That is the final task of the spiritual life, the movement from resentment to gratitude, from cursing to blessing, from bitterness to graciousness. And it is a monumental task.

There is a lot of anger in us as we get older. This is not a case of growing angry as we grow older, but of angry people growing older. Psychology tells us that we get our wounds early on in life, but our angers emerge later. When we are young our energy and our dreams are still strong enough to shield us from the full brunt of our wounds, our hurts, and life’s unfairness. I remember, as a young man of twenty, living in a seminary with nearly 50 young men my own age. We were all pretty immature, but strangely we lived together pretty well. Today, if you would put those 50 persons together again in the same living situation we would, soon enough, I suspect, kill each other. We are more mature now… but also full of the angers, disappointments, and resentments of mid-life. Like the older brother of the prodigal son, we are now acutely aware that someone less deserving than ourselves gets to dance and eat the fatted calf.

But this must be understood for what it is, not a sign of regression, but a critical new moment in the spiritual life. As we age and become ever more aware of our wounds, our wasted potential, and the unfairness of life, we come face to face with the final spiritual hurdle, the challenge to become mellow and gracious in spirit. The spiritual task of midlife and old age is that of wrestling with God, namely, of standing inside all of the ways in which life has disappointed and betrayed us and, in spite of that, there, understand what God means with the words: “My child, everything I have is yours, but we must be happy!”

You don’t expect to see an icon of the trinity on an airplane, at least not on a really small commuter plane at 6:30 in the morning when it is still dark outside and the temperature is near minus 30 degrees celsius and you are waiting on the airport runway in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. But God is a God of the unexpected, and so these things happen.

I had boarded a very tiny airplane on a particularly frigid morning, during an especially awful winter to fly to Calgary so I could board a bigger plane which would take me to Los Angeles where I was scheduled to speak at a conference that, to my good fortune, had the convention center at Disneyland as its venue. God can be good, at times.

I took my seat across the aisle from a young mother and her preschool-aged daughter. They were silent, as we all were, waiting for everyone to board the plane so we could take off.

Then, just as the captain was announcing the particulars about our flight, the mother and the daughter turned to each other and I am not sure I can describe what exactly transpired between them, but it was a mystical moment: The child looked at her mother, smiled briefly, and moved her whole body in a way that said: “We are really doing this! It’s finally here! We’ve talked about this for a long time and now it’s finally happening!” Her body literally quivered with delight.

Later, since we were on the same planes all the way to Disneyland, I learned the cause of her joy. They were off to Disneyland, she and her whole family. For her, it was a day of firsts: The first time on an airplane, the first time on a long trip, and the first time on a journey big enough to match the fantasies of a fertile young mind. She was happy and her body might well have been a musical instrument.

But it wasn’t just her delight that I noticed and palpably felt. It was also the delight of her mother. If the daughter was overjoyed and basking in a special moment, even more so was the mother. Her body too quivered with delight – delight in her daughter’s joy, delight in a child’s anticipation, and delight in being able, as a mother, to provide this for her daughter. Her joy not only matched her child’s, it surpassed it. It was deeper, far deeper. Hers was the delight of being able to give delight, the joy of giving joy, the unique gladness of providing, of being source. To do these things is to do what God does and so to feel what God feels. That is what she must have felt.

And their exchange, that glance towards each other that made them both quiver with delight, is an icon of the trinity, as surely as is Andrew Rublev’s masterpiece. Like Rublev’s icon, it too captures a little of the river of life and love and gratitude that flows between the Father and the Son and creates a fire, an energy, called the Holy Spirit. To have that flow go through you is to know God.

Like all authentic icons, it reveals something about the inner life of God. What does it reveal?

When a mother and daughter exchange a look that makes each of them quiver with delight, what is revealed not, in the end, something about God’s gender, namely, that God is mother as well as father, female as well as male, that God also loves us with the instincts of a mother. That is true, of course, but it is not the central point.

What is centrally revealed is the heart of God, the flow of life and gratitude that makes the Father and Son quiver in each other’s presence. What is revealed too, quintessentially, is how God, as creator and parent, blesses us and takes delight in us. Just as God, after creating each element in creation, stood back, beamed, and said, “This is good”, and just as God looked down upon Jesus at his baptism and said: “This is my beloved child in whom I take delight”, so is God still looking at us as we embark on our various fantasy journeys, so is God’s heart swelling still in sharing our anticipation, and so is God quivering with delight when we receive creation’s delight. God is enjoying the joy of a mother who can provide, just as God must surely suffer sometimes the pain of the mother who cannot.

On a very cold morning, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I was shown an icon of the trinity which has helped me to understand somewhat more those early pages of Scripture which tell us that God looked at the first creation, young and immature though it was, and saw that it was good, indeed it was very good.

Mircea Eliade, the renowned anthropologist, tells us that, within the wisdom of tribal cultures, there was often the belief that unless the dead were properly buried, with appropriate ritual and attentiveness from the community, disasters of all kinds might strike the people. Anything from infertility to drought might be caused by not properly attending to a death.

This is not so far fetched. A death, he writes, can be botched, just as a war can be lost or psychic equilibrium and joy can be destroyed. Life is tied to both of its ends, just as community life is integrally bound up with its births and deaths. To not be properly attentive to a birth or a death puts one at some peril. For this reason, among others, the last corporal work of mercy instructs to properly bury the dead.

However what does it mean, today, to bury the dead?

We must resist the temptation to put too much of a psychological spin to this, namely, to focus it on the question of putting proper psychological or emotional closure to the various kinds of death we experience in life. People and things are always dying around us, just as one day we too will die. Some of our relationships die, our youth and health eventually die, as do many of our cherished dreams and hopes. To get on with life we must, daily, bury our dead.

But the corporal works of mercy are not about emotional grieving and psychological closure. They are about burying real physical bodies.

Obviously what is commanded here had a much great importance, in the literal sense, in past cultures were sometimes people, especially the really poor, were left unburied, to be eaten by vultures and the worms. That is still true today in a number of war-torn countries. One has to only to watch the news any night to see how many people, still, do not receive the dignity of burial. The counsel, bury the dead, is first and foremost about this, no human being should be deprived of the dignity of having his or her body properly returned to the earth, be that through burial, cremation, or some other culturally sanctioned (sanctioned, as in sacred) practice.

In our Western world, however, for the main part, this happens, our dead are buried with reverence. In fact, this is one of our strengths, culturally and morally. We are horrified at the thought that in past ages, and in some present cultures, bodies are violated after death, stuck on posts to decay publicly, thrown into open graves, or simply left to vultures. We take moral offense at this. Rightly so.

So where should we be challenged?

Simply put, for us the challenge is to be more attentive to deaths within our communities, both by attending more funerals and by using those funerals (and wakes) to let the spirit of whoever we are burying bless us. For us, burying the dead means, in the words of Eliade, not botching our deaths.

The first thing we do to not botch our deaths is attend more funerals. We have, as I have already stated, a great strength as a culture in that we treat our dead with reverence. However, I can be reverent towards something even as I largely ignore it. We want our dead buried, with proper respect and dignity, but, mostly, we do not want to be there when that happens. More and more, we are going to less and less funerals.

I am old enough to remember another time. Growing up in a tightly-knit immigrant community, I went to a lot of funerals. Everyone did. It was not a question of whether the person who died was a relative, friend, or close neighbour. They were a member of the community and that was enough. Everyone was expected to be at the funeral and, generally, everyone was.

And what happened at those funerals was not just that a body was committed back to the earth with proper dignity and that each of us got to say a personal good-bye. What happened is that, in everyone being there, the whole community was able to better know and feel the words of scripture which tell us: “The life and death of each of us has its influence on others.”  When we recognized that influence then we were affording the body we were committing back to the earth its proper dignity.

To bury our dead is to make sure every body is afforded its proper dignity. It also means not botching our deaths.