IT’S HARD TO GIVE UP HATE [F, 3-26-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

IT’S HARD TO GIVE UP HATE   [F, 3-26-21]

 

In one town where I pastored, I had a love-hate relationship with one of the funeral directors. I’ll call him FD. Well, love-hate is probably too strong. More like-dislike. To complicate matters further, he wasn’t just a major funeral director that I could not escape working with, he had important official positions in my church.

No one was quite sure why he disliked me. Even his partner, who went to a different church, once told me that he had asked FD about it and got no response.

To his credit, in church meetings and at funerals, he did not go out of his way to create problems for me. He wasn’t cordial, but he was professional.

That was especially important, because I had to do some—a lot, actually—of really difficult funerals with him. Suicides, children, car accidents, murders… my pastorate there seemed twice as long as it was because of the agonies my people had to go through, that I went through with them. FD was not the only funeral director who had those funerals, but he had the bulk of them. They would have been much worse if he had been difficult to work with.

As time went on, I learned that he had been told something about me, before I ever arrived, that was not true. Someone had blamed something on me to cover up their own mistake. I confronted FD about it, and told him it was not true. He acknowledged that he understood, but it didn’t change his opinion about me.

I knew that he didn’t change his opinion because occasionally someone would tell me when he had bad-mouthed me. Again, to his credit, not in a funeral setting, or at church, but in other situations. One young father, for whom I had done one of those difficult funerals, for his child, told me that he had been in a personal setting when FD began to express his dislikes for me. “I had to tell him,” he said, “you might as well stop right now, because I will not listen to one bad word about that man.”

That was so strange. FD was a funeral director, a position that requires sensitivity. You would think that he would know that a father would appreciate the minister who pastored him when his child was murdered, who did the funeral. Of all people, why would FD think it was okay to badmouth me to that young father?

I think that here is a clue to Donald Trump’s appeal, why people support him and make excuses for him against all good sense: Some people hate to give up their hates, because it means they were wrong, not just about information, but about emotions, about relationships, about love, and that is the hardest thing of all about which to admit that we made a mistake.

Especially for people who say, “I’m a good judge of character.” They aren’t, because no one is, but they hate to admit it… so they don’t.

Except…

Shortly after I had left that church to take another appointment, one of those difficult funerals came up. A young man committed suicide. His parents felt especially close to me. I had spent a lot of time trying to help their son get his life together. They did not really know the new pastor because he had been there such a short time. They asked the new pastor if he would let me to do their son’s funeral, and he, very graciously, did so. It was at FD’s funeral home. We both knew it was the last funeral we would do together.

After, when everyone else was gone, FD said to me: “When there is a funeral at my place instead of the church, once it gets started, I leave one of our staff out there in case someone needs something, but I go catch up on office work. I have the audio on, but I don’t really listen. They’re all alike. I’ve heard the same thing every day for years. Except for you. You’re the only one I’ve always listened to.”

John Robert McFarland