Requiem

Last month I started this blog with the story of Amy's grandmother. At the time it seemed that she would not live more than a few days, but I guess everyone underestimated the woman. She held death off for another month (making her total time spent in a coma just over four years), but eventually, as we all will, lost the battle with mortality. Today was her funeral.

There is no situation like a funeral to make us realize how dependent we are on God for life and hope. We can push death out of our minds for years at a time, but eventually we will come face to face with it, and at that moment we must all acknowledge that we are powerless to overcome death on our own. For Christians though, we have the hope and assurance that death has indeed been overcome and that we ourselves may participate in the resurrection of the dead. God did not leave Christ in the tomb, and he has promised not to leave us there either.

There is one moment from today that I already know has been permanently burned into my memory. It was during the viewing, while I was contemplating the bodily resurrection that Scripture promises, and I saw Amy's grandmother draw breath, rise, and leave her coffin behind. (Another is any moment that involved the presiding Priest, Father O'Brian. This man's personality was straight comedy. In one sense it was a relief. He unintentionally elicited a laugh from even the saddest in attendance. In another it was kind of disappointing because I find the Catholic memorial liturgy extremely significant and beautiful, but this was all eclipsed by Father O'Brien's demeanor. He would best, but not quite, be described as Stuart Smalley on Prozac after a thousand hours of sensitivity training reading a bedtime story to a four-year-old. At one point, in this voice, he abruptly stopped everything, sustained a histrionic silent pause, then reminded all attending to "Breathe...Just breathe.")

As expected, the most uncertainty surrounds Amy's grandfather. He has spent six to eight hours of every day for the last four years caring for his bedridden, semi-conscious wife. Now he does not know what to do with himself. He said today, "The last four years I've lived knowing that at any minute the call could come. Now I live knowing that it has come."

I can only imagine what that must be like. There are many people attending to his needs, occupying the vast amounts of free time that threaten him, feeding him, listening and talking to him...but if you do not mind, please pray for him. His name is Bob Long.

I recently bought Mozart's Requiem. That was a nice, brusque, post-modern shift in topic huh? Don't worry anyone reading this with other than post-modern tastes (is anyone reading this?); hopefully this will tie back into the overarching line of thought before you give up on coherence and move on to another website.

If you do not know, a requiem is a mass or composition for the dead (Already getting back on track). Now for most today a service or prayer for the dead any time after the funeral seems outdated and superstitious (And I would bet that even the prayers offered during most funerals asking God to recieve the deceased into his kingdom are much more for the comfort of those still living than they are for the dead loved one). And I admit that in some ways I fall into this group, but this CD is beautiful, moody and haunting. No matter what else I pop into my CD player I cannot escape it. So I gave up trying to escape it and started thinking about Christian prayer for the dead (which reaches back into our tradition a great deal).

I soon remembered a time last spring when I was sitting in Christian Worship class. It was one of those rare moments when my attention was not riveted on the words of Dr. John Wright (John, if you happen to be reading this, I promise those moments were rare...or at least intermittent). My attention was quickly recovered though when he said, "...and that is why medieval Christians had no problem praying for the dead." But it was too late, and I thought, "Dang. That sounded interesting. I wish I had been paying attention."

So I went back and re-read the book John was teaching from, Torture and Eucharist by William Cavanaugh, and I think I found the passage that led to the discussion that day. In chapter five Cavanaugh discusses a Christian conception of time, and how it has been lost over the last couple hundred years. He says on page 222:

The medieval Christian conception (of time) is marked by..."Messianic time," that is, the simultaneity of past and future in the present. Representations of biblical figures in medieval dress strike the modern observer as odd, but medieval Christians did not imagine they were separated from the past (or the future) by a wide gulf of ever-advancing time. The biblical figures were "contemporaries," connected to the present through divine providence.

In short, he says that the difference is that after the enlightenment time began to be understood according to human experience and reason. To a human, who only experiences time as one confined by it, time seems to be like a chain that is linked horizontally by cause and effect. To a Christian, on the other hand, time is understood in God, who is not limited by time, but is its Master. In God, Christians understood events in history not as vastly separated by horizontal links, but close and even overlapping because of their vertical links to God. That is why Christ's death is still effective and was able to reach back to the fall, and why Christians have a real hope in the Second Coming of Christ. It has already happened, thought we have yet to experience it first hand.

Now to graft this little excursus fully back into the original line of thought. I have already asked you to pray for her grandfather, and even though I may not completely understand how it can do any good (because I still exist as one within the confines of time), and if it does not offend your enlightened, rationalistic sensibilities too much, please pray for her grandmother as well. Pray that she would know God's mercy and partake in his salvation. Perhaps God honors our prayers before we even pray them, yet still wants us to offer them. Her name is Patricia Long.