Letter #87: reflexiones sobre un funeral mexicano en inglés

Dear everyone,

Well, now that politics is out of your face, if not my system, onto México we go. About two weeks ago, I went to the funeral service for the mother of a close friend from my office. My friend and colleague, Magda (short for Magdalena, as in Mary Magdalen) has been so gracious to me in my tenure here.  Magda edited the booklet I put together, with the much needed help of seven experts (six in the Peace Corps), as well as the core of my weekly letters to the science center where I serve.  Her children are lovely and never fail to treat me like the long lost eccentric uncle, turned gringo.

It has been over ten years since I last attended a funeral and that was in the United States.  There have been five or six memorial services for fallen soldiers or private security personnel (including Gurkas) along the way in Iraq and Afghanistan.  While moving, these services are different since the casket is not present; that damn box is the material reminder that, while some things may be eternal, people are not.  While feelings run high with the acknowledgement of loss at a memorial service, it lacks that feeling of severing the life-presence that a funeral does.

When my father died after a long and valiant struggle against a foe he could not defeat (i.e., cancer), we kept the casket closed.  After all, chemotherapy is a war of attrition.  Either cancer or the patient dies.  My brother-in-law is right: it resembles the medieval quackery of bleeding patients in the hope of draining the disease along with the blood.  With his body ravaged as much by the failed cure as the triumphant disease, we decided that dad should rest in peace and out of direct sight.

On the day of the funeral, we had the opportunity to view the body one last time before the service and burial.  I had refused one such opportunity before, at the beginning of the visitation.  At the last second, I decided on impulse to do it. And I was glad I did.  My father’s body had been well taken care of; but THAT was not my dad.  That moment enabled me to accept that he was gone, really gone.  Which brings me back to service I attended in Querétaro. 

Unlike any other funerals I had attended, and to my surprise, the casket was open during the service.  When I took communion, I was on the side from which I could not see the body because I was behind the open lid. The pall-bearers stood round the casket as if it were a body lying is state.   That was a touch of arguably maudlin wisdom – leaving the casket open.  The wisdom lies in the body reminding the congregants that the deceased is truly gone but the communion refuses to commend the soul of the dead to the nullity of nothingness (i.e., non-existence).

My colleagues were surprised to see me in the line.  Yes, I am no longer Catholic, nor even Christian, and I often take communion when I attend church for two conscious reasons.  First, I need all the help I can get. Second, if it is an action that merits burning in Hell, trust me in saying that I have done far worse things and so I am a goner in any case.  So that leads to a third reason of conscience, reserved for weddings or funerals.

That is, I want to honour the family in a time of profound change: one as a door opens to two people properly conjoined in the eyes of God and the other when the chapter has closed on someone’s life.  These acts of taking the sacrament are something like spiritual syntax.  Is what I do hypocritical? Almost certainly it is.  Nevertheless, I will continue to do it.  Besides, taking communion is often the only visible support, especially at a funeral, that I have the opportunity to give my mourning friend or familiares. 
 

A couple of days later, I wrote the most solicitous note that I could.  One aspect of getting distance on the odometer lies in the fact that I have conveyed all of these thoughts before and so I needed only to translate. Their repetition makes them feel hackneyed at best and phony at worst.  Yet I do mean them and have to rest content with accepting that my words of solace are trite but true, even in my limping second language. 

Truthfully, I had a lot of free time at the service since the acoustics rendered unintelligible  a language I normally do not understand when native speakers whipped through it. I had time to think.  I looked closely at the altar.  Emblazoned in gold-leaf and dedicated not to the bleeding Christ but to his mother, the queen of this earthly existence of mourning, noon and night.  Usually, in most churches I have been to, above the altar is a crucifix or a cross.  The only exceptions I remember are chapels, perhaps not even all of them.  

When I think of chapels my thoughts revert to the breathtaking beautiful Heinz Chapel / la Sainte Chappelle which, if memory works, do not have any altar or at least no cross or crucifix at the head.  Yet, this was a church and, while virgin queen of all queens adorned the sacred canopy, the cross or crucifix did not dominate.  Now, this catholic-protestant split may seem like quibbling over details.  It really is not; the distinction is mission-critical to the core beliefs of the two broad strains of faith.

The crucifix is the cross with the dead and drooping body of Christ draped on it while the cross is the only the cross.  The former signifies the path to glory through sacrifice, pain and martyrdom, not so dramatically for us these days but through mortifications of the flesh (i.e., mini-sacrifices of the self to God by way of fasting, retreating to desolate surroundings, etc.).  That is to say: class is not exactly a barrel of laughs with Sister Mary Elephant in charge. 

The cross, at least as my Christian friends have stated to me, represents the gift of salvation that Christ gave to us, not so much by dying on the cross, but by leaving the cross as a vacant symbol of oppression through His resurrection.   Therein lay the new covenant, based not on suffering but on liberation.  While I can not really buy into either of these narratives, they deserve my respect, nevertheless.

These symbols – along with the various beliefs they punctuate – have brought solace to billions over the millennia, just as they did for Magda and her grieving family that hot, humid day in the midst of Querétaro’s rainy season.  Yet, I continued to stare at the altar and canopy, overflowing with precious metals and presided over by a woman.  And, for some reason, that made sense to me.  The southern Mediterranean societies tend to have a matrilineal dimension, especially in Spain where, traditionally, the surname of the father is followed by that of the mother. 

So the Marianism seen in Spain and even Italy – where a lousy Pope but good Italian (Pius XII) tentatively placed Mary into the R.C. godhead in 1950 – could quite easily show up in México.  Supporting this manifestation would be the more naturalistic reverence accorded to women in the indigenous cultures of México; and that is where the flaunting filigree of the gold-leafed canopy in that church came home to me.  The alter and canopy obviously reeked of Romanesque over-show.

On the other hand, the tastefully metallic majesty hinted at something else, something older than Catholicism in México.  Perhaps, the altar and canopy, for all their finery, represented something not quite lost with the conquistadors, that is, a lingering hint of the Azteca culture of gold and sacrifice. Some say the genius of the Roman Catholicism lies in its simplicity in that there are four levels between God and man: Pope, cardinal bishop, priest.  That is simply not true. 

That structure derives from the Book of Exodus with Jethro – as history’s first and, perhaps, only effective management consultant – instructing Moses to delegate his burdens for the faithful to groups of ten or fifty (priest), hundreds (bishop) and thousands (cardinals) and the whole congregation (Pope, the first of whom was Moses, not Saint Peter).  To tell you the truth, I really do not know enough to identify all that endures in Catholicism from the mother-faith. 

But a lot does.  As a priest once pointed out to me before my ‘fall’, that peculiar genius of the mysticism in the machinery lies in the ability and willingness of the Roman Church to absorb and integrate alien cultures – some say, less than flatteringly, coöptation – into the symbology as well as calendar and, to a lesser extent, the liturgy of the Church. 

This genius lies with another Jew, Saul of Tarsus (later, Saint Paul), who made a tribal religion open to the world of his day, as well as to Constantine, a tough emperor nevertheless drowning in Wiley’s momism, who imposed it as the church of the State.  The genius of Catholicism, as of any mainline religion with its own depth of tradition and varying degrees of dogma, that I witnessed that day was a whole lot more basic than organizational structures or the coercive canon of empire. 

The genius lay in the comfort that a good and decent woman, my Magda, and her husband and children could be part of something far larger: a sacrament centuries in its uniform application, millennia in the making.  You see, it was more than the Son of Man; more than the Martyr of God; and even more than a thoughtful rabbi and ridiculed revolutionary whose arm was around Magda’s shoulder that day.  It was God Himself, with uttering His sympathies with that peculiar Spanish from the Bajío, the central highlands of México.