funerals
A poet’s truth at the graveside
At the interment, the holy words I needed to hear weren’t from the Bible.
Funerals make me miss being a parish pastor
Standing at the graveside with the last lingering family members, time seems thick.
A pastor's job isn't to make bad things seem better
If you have to choose between offering false hope and the truth, go with the truth.
Where should the stepkids sit at the funeral?
As family configurations change, so does pastoral care.
A call to death
One gift of being a pastor is that death stands right in front of us. We understand that our days are numbered.
Children at the grave: Making space for grief
For career day at my daughter's school, I brought pictures of some of the things pastors do. The students were mostly interested in the funerals.
Dignity is deeper than marriage equality
For no reason I can remember, I put the ’90s classic Four Weddings and a Funeral on my Netflix queue and re-watched it recently. The scene etched in my mind all these years was that of the funeral. John Hannah, with his beautiful Scottish accent, reads “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden.
What the clip leaves off is the funeral officiant, presumably an Anglican priest, introducing the beloved partner of the man in the coffin as “his closest friend.”
Public intimacy
U2's subway prank created a strange sort of intimacy and spontaneous community. I felt a similar dynamic at play at a recent funeral.
The shape of ashes
To say "earth to earth" is a good thing, we have to believe it's really going to happen.
The good funeral: Recovering Christian practices
With surprising swiftness and dramatic results, a significant segment of American Christians has over the past 50 years abandoned previously established funeral customs in favor of an entirely new pattern of memorializing the dead. Generally included in the pattern is a brief, customized memorial service (instead of a funeral), a focus on the life of the deceased, an emphasis on joy rather than sadness, and a private disposition of the deceased.
A family undertaking: Caring for our dead
When Harriet Ericson died at age 93, she went to the grave in the same manner in which she lived her final years—lovingly tended by her son Rodger Ericson of Austin, Texas. The former U.S. Air Force chaplain and Lutheran pastor (ELCA) bathed, anointed and dressed his mother’s body, then laid it in a casket he had built himself and named “hope chest” to reflect the family’s faith in the resurrection. The next day, with the help of his daughters and grandsons, he lifted her casketed remains into the bed of his pickup truck and secured the precious cargofor a road trek to Minnesota, where a family grave plot waswaiting.