COMFORT LANGUAGE [R, 3-26-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Word Sayer—COMFORT LANGUAGE [R, 3-26-26]

 

After Tom Cone--my late, great friend, and former college roommate--had a stroke, it was hard for him to find the right words. One day we drove up to Greenfield to take Tom and Sally to lunch. Tom mostly listened to our lunchtime chatter; that was easier for him. But as we were leaving, he wanted to ask me if I were still preaching. He worked hard, but couldn’t frame the exact sentence he wanted. Finally, he blurted out, “Do you still say the words?”

Too often now, I have to write a condolence letter to a friend, usually because their wife or husband has died. With most of my friends, it is hard only because of the grief. It is not hard to find the right words, because they are Christians. They already know the right words. They know which are the comfort words. All I have to do is remind them. All I have to do is say the words.

Especially in former times--before old age pretty much confined me to my house--in addition to the church, I was in other fellowship communities—writing, running, cancer, baseball, university, continuing education, pickle ball, folk music... Since I was the only preacher most of those folks knew, I was often asked to do a funeral for someone who was congenial to me but marginal at most to the church, who sometimes had no relationship at all to the church and its language.

At those occasions, not only was I looking at the faces of folks who did not know Christian language, but those funerals were usually in secular buildings. Church buildings provide comfort just by the way they are constructed, and by the symbols, like crosses and stained glass and open Bibles. Secular buildings provide none of those automatic points of meaning, these points of comfort.

In my retirement years, I did not have a church building I could use for funerals, which was probably just as well. Non-church people don’t want to have funerals in church buildings anyway. Just as automatically comforting as those buildings are for believers, they are automatically uncomfortable for non-believers.

I knew that my job in a funeral was to provide comfort and help people to grieve well. I was experienced at that in a church setting. I was good at it there. But I was in uncharted territory when I did not have my usual building and my usual language.

When church people see someone in a collar or pulpit gown standing in front of a cross and reading from a black book, there is automatic comfort. “If God is for us, who can be against us…”

But what if they have no awareness of a loving God? What if a robe just means you’re still in your underwear? What if that black Book of Worship is no more special than the Betty Crocker Cookbook?

I never solved that problem completely, but I tried to generalize the specific language of Christian faith, being true to its meaning even if not the same in its syntax. After all, as Marcus Borg said, “We are not saved by syllables.”

There are many ways of saying that God is love, and that God is with us. I learned that I could lean on the everlasting arms without using that image to folks for whom it would have no meaning.

When I die, though, I want someone in a black robe to intone, “In that we know not what a day may bring forth, but only that the hour for watching baseball is always with us…” Yes, that’s comfort language for me, because today is Opening Day of the baseball season!

John Robert McFarland