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).
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.
