T GAMBLE: Saying goodbye … the Catholic way

Last week, I traveled to Erie, Penn., to attend the funeral of my mother in law. I am lucky in that I did not have the stereotypical bad relationship with my mother in law. In fact, I don’t think I ever had a single cross word with her or about her. She was always warm and friendly and congenial. She lived a long life, but still funerals are gut-wrenching affairs and sometimes you just have to sort of endure them as part of the process.

The South has a special obsession with funerals, I think. I talk to folks from other areas of the country, and they will say they go to two or three funerals a year. I’ve been to two or three funerals in a week, more than once. Southerners go to everybody’s funeral. I’ve been to quite a few in which I did not know the person who died at all. You know, a friend’s grandmother or some other distant connection.

One thing is for sure: No matter how old the person, we generally wish they had been with us a little longer. And, somebody will think they would have been here longer if only they had taken better care of themselves. I guarantee you, at Methuselah’s funeral, the oldest man to ever live, who lived to be 969 years old, according to the Bible, somebody looked over at the person sitting next to them and said, “ If he would have quit eating all that wheat bread with gluten in it he’d still be with us.”

Now, my mother in law was Catholic like many people up North are. They may not go to but two or three funerals a year, but they don’t have to because when you go to a Catholic funeral they cover everything from Baptism to burial and everything in between. I mean they take communion at the funeral. We take communion at the Methodist Church, but we only take it the first Sunday of every month. If you are planning to play golf or watch the Falcons the first Sunday of the month might be your best bet to skip.

But you can’t plan to skip a funeral. And in the Catholic faith, only the Catholic can take communion and only if they also have taken recent confession. Being a Methodist, I could not take it, but had I been Catholic, I don’t think they had enough time for me to complete a full confession anyway.

The Catholics have a lot of beautiful singing, sometimes in Latin. I took one year of Latin in the eighth grade. I learned “agricola” means agriculture, and “aqua” means water, and that is about as far as I got.

We would sing songs in Latin at the Methodist church, but our folks have a pretty hard time with English, much less Latin. The Catholics have lots of recitations where the congregation responds to readings by the Priest. I mean they have all types of responsive occasions. They respond to every one without missing a beat. It took me until about the 10th grade to learn the Lord’s Prayer, and I’m still pretty shaky when we recite the Apostle’s Creed. I don’t think I would have made a very good Catholic.

Well, as the Priest said, “From dust we come and to dust we all shall return.” Whether Catholic or Methodist or somewhere in between, it’s never easy to say goodbye to those we love. We just move on knowing God is watching over us and holding the promise of a reunion in the future.

Email T Gamble at [email protected].