CAN I MAKE IT THROUGH THE WINTER? [F, 10-15-21]

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

 Over the years, I have worked with many funeral directors. Some were very simple in their approaches, boring really. Some were more complex. The complex ones were much more interesting. I tried to stay away from them.

One of those had a dove ritual to close the service at the cemetery. Right after I pronounced the benediction, he would throw a white dove into the air. It was actually a white homing pigeon that looked like a dove. It flew away, into the infinite sky. Actually, it flew back to its cote, but we saw it only as it disappeared over the rainbow, not as it was going home for supper.

Except for that winter funeral.

Cemetery services in winter are tricky, especially if there is snow. When Helen’s great-aunt died, her only family was Helen and her sister. So not only was I the preacher, Helen and Mary and John and I were the pall-bearers, lugging her casket from the hearse to the grave through knee-deep snow. But at least we didn’t have a dove release to deal with.

In that other winter funeral that I’m talking about, the one with the dove, it was SO cold! I made the committal as short as possible. Dick threw the dove into the air. But either he had held it too tightly, trying to keep it warm, or the below-zero temps had just done in its little lungs, for instead of flying away over the horizon, it dropped to the dirty frozen snow, a lump of motionless feathers, dead. Not a very helpful symbol. It couldn’t make it through the winter.

Can I make it through the winter? That is what old people ask about this time of year. If they think they can’t, or don’t want to try, they go ahead and die in October.  Ministers and funeral directors know that.

If we do decide to try to make it through, it seems such a waste to die half-way along, so we wait until May to die. Ministers and funeral directors know that, too.

It seems so wrong, that October and May are the dying months. They’re the prettiest months of all—new leaves in spring, and colored leaves in autumn.

In October we face the question the colored leaves put to us: can you make it through? Through the snow, the cold, the boots, the isolation… so that we don’t have a winter funeral?

From Dick and other complex funeral directors, and from my own attempts at complex worship, through the years I became more and more simple, depending not upon doves or musical instruments or audio-visuals. I’m not opposed to those things. They do make worship more interesting, in the same way as the Chinese curse—“May you live in interesting times.”

Jesus didn’t have any of those things, and he did okay.

I’m old. I don’t have a lot of energy to deal with the fallout when things go sideways—literal fallout when the dove dies. So more and more, I just depend on the stories, the words of the Word. That way, I think I can make it through the winter.

John Robert McFarland