Driving in Central Italy’s hill country a number of years ago Alice and I were unexpectedly confronted by a funeral procession on the road. The cortege consisted of a small band of musicians playing a funeral dirge, a priest, the casket, and black-clothed relatives and friends. Reminiscent of a scene from the movie “Godfather,” they were processing from a Mass that had just been celebrated in the town’s small church to the local cemetery. In this land where Catholic belief is taken for granted, we found the funeral procession a sad but entirely natural happening.
From the Catholic perspective, a taking part in a funeral procession in the Italian hill country, is to walk with the People of God .
Today, many young Americans styling themselves “post-moderns,” have difficulty with such concepts. Although they consider themselves “spiritual persons,” they reject the trappings of conventional religion and prefer to craft their own private belief system, but. face a dilemma when honoring the death of a loved one.
Responses vary. Ceremonies are created in which ashes of the deceased are spread upon the ocean or scattered on the winds. Poetry is read. Some families pass a funeral urn from one member to another. For many the funeral liturgy might just as easily be replaced by a comfortable restaurant meal where old friends gather to reminisce about the deceased and at times no memorial event held at all. The unfathomable mysteries of the life and death in the passing of human being are glossed over.
A first-time encounter with the Catholic funeral liturgy presents unchurched young people with an entirely different approach to this topic. There is a surprising amount of physical motion in the Mass: small processions, the coming and going of clergy and lay ministers, the sprinkling with water and the movement of candles. The worshipping community accompanies the priest in a counterpoint of prayers, and gestures. There is a graceful choreography to the priest’s movements that the congregation complements with processions, the standing, sitting and kneeling.
But it is the message of the funeral liturgy that is the most striking. The ritual invites the participant into a different continuum of space and time: they are asked to join with the angels in proclaiming the glory of God. The deceased person is said to be on an eternal pilgrimage shared by the Virgin Mother, the prophets, and the saints.
If a hallmark of new age religion is its hesitance to take a definitive stand in religious matters, the liturgy takes a decidedly contrary approach. The ritual repeatedly affirms that there is a divine center point to human history. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the great “paschal mystery” and the basis of Christian hope. Because of the Christ event, death of the beloved is seen only as an episode in the People of God’s journey “to the holy city, the new and eternal Jerusalem.”
In this cosmic mystery, past events are also wrapped into an eternal now. When the community approaches the altar to receive the Eucharist they are partaking in Christ’s death and resurrection permanently etched in human history. In receiving the consecrated bread and wine, the Catholics understand themselves to be at the last supper, the foot of the cross, at the empty tomb. In the liturgy, human time is obliterated, and the living and the dead are conjoined in God’s once-and-for all embrace.
The encounter with the humble funeral procession in the Italian hill country was for us a walk of the People of God toward their heavenly home. For the non-believer, none of this makes sense. If the first-time observer, however, is not convinced, it is not because the funeral mass smacks of superstition and empty ritual. Rather, it is because the reality it proclaims is too radical, too transcendent, too mystical. But such is the faith of the Church.