I bury people

I bury people. 

That isn’t all I do, but it is certainly the most…most what?  Intense, certainly; important, I don’t know; frequent, not at all.  But the fact remains that no matter what else I do, if I am remembered at all it will be because I bury people. 

I am not naïve or egoistic about it, so I can say that it is probable that no one will remember me as anything more than the one who did the burying, more more true, they will remember only whether or not they were consoled by the burial.  That is as it should be, of course, and there is an interesting subtext: we bury people for us, the living survivors, not so much for the ones who are dead.

I have buried two men who were murdered, one by his adolescent client, one by his wife, both friends of mine. I buried another dear friend who taught me how to teach (her lesson? one word: empathy). I have buried students who should never have died before me, husbands and mothers, mostly grandparents, also my own aunts and an uncle…and a brother.  It is inevitable.  It stands to reason.

I also baptize people of course.

I should also say that I marry people, for that is certainly also true, and truth be told, so far, anyway, I marry more than I bury.  Once I walked into St. Hubert’s Club, which was a bar owned by the Parish  (no kidding: this is the Rural Midwest). I went in to tell our tenant to stop showing pornographic movies on our t.v. but as I walked in the door, then a kid of about 27 years old in clerics, I was met by a huge and burly man who had already had too much to drink.  He stood as I entered, pointed at me and bellowed out, and I quote: “I know you.  You married me.”  It was true, of course, syntax aside, I had done his wedding.

But if this man remembers me for long it won’t be because I performed his wedding ceremony, but because I buried his uncle or aunt or grandparent. 

Nor will anyone remember, that I was a teacher for 15 years, that I ministered the mass and preached, that I wrote, coached, lectured, that I had my own feelings, sins, desires, property and its contingent problems, or that I cried.

Unless, of course, I happened to cry at a funeral, they’d remember that maybe.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not bitter or even disappointed.  It is as it should be, I suppose.  The Church baptizes, marries, and buries.  The first event few remember, the second, usually for the reception, not the mass.  But everyone remembers the funeral…except, of course, the dead one, which really puts the whole event in a certain surreal light: the one person for whom this is all supposed to be happening is the only person who could care less about how it goes.

But I’ve already said, haven’t I?, that funerals aren’t for the dead, but rather for the survivors.  I’m tempted to launch into a philosophical observation that we are all survivors until we are dead and thus, the whole enterprise is rather amusingly illogical, but I’ll let my existentialist friends possess that particular court.  I guess I am writing this as a sort of my own existentialist whine.  You should know that it is not a lot of fun to bury people, even other people’s grandparents that I never knew.  But I can tell you this too: it sucks to bury your friends...your family.

But I wouldn't have it any other way.  I couldn't bear to not be the one doing the burying.  Hmmm. 

Goodness.  Page two and I am still not exactly sure what it is that I am trying to tell.

Memoirs of a fictional rural pastor

The best thing about being a fictional character is that I can say whatever I want.  Sure, I have to accept, as an initial premise, the constraints that my Creator has imposed on me, but that’s it: from here on out I assert and exert my autonomy to be, and more importantly to think whatever comes to me.  I won’t be held captive by any preconceived notions or already scripted plot line or stereotypical “genre” or “logical character progression” or whatnot.  Why should I be any different than Ivan Karamazov or Ismael or Phaedrus or Achilles?   Well, except, of course, for the parameters of my Creator’s limited talents, damn him anyway, why couldn’t he have been more like Flann O’Brian?

Oh, and to the point of those limits: let me just quote what he wanted to foist on me as a preface to my memoirs by way of establishing my base-line character.  Here it is, verbatim:

“My protagonist’s name is Fr. Thomas Harbinger.  He is a Catholic priest in the upper Midwest.  He is a pastor and teacher.  He is nestled into a tiny village parish that lays somewhere between Lake Woebegone and Hannibal, neither one, of course, being any more or less fictional than the other.

“Thomas is 30 or so years old, which means he is neither any longer a young man nor quite yet a mature man.  His personal temptations are not yet reduced to random tugs, but nor are they anymore diesel driven.  Rather, he feels like he is standing waist deep in a very strong current with the tide going out.  He sometimes loses his footing and slips, but he hasn’t (yet?) been pulled under.  He feels like he might make it, though sometimes, naturally, he feels like he doesn’t want to.

“He has already survived the great existential crisis of vocation that strikes priests some decade after ordination, which means he isn’t looking over his shoulder any more.  This isn’t resignation or even resolve, it is just the way it is.  It is neither tragic nor noble.  He is embarrassed that others—even in this most jaded-against-priests era—still think he is somehow heroic just for being a member of an all male class of celibate clerics with enormous entitlements in power, if not purse and even, again, without that once-automatic prestige that anyway was always disturbing to him.

“This novel will be scripted as a series of blogs by Thomas.  He will not try to write regularly and these won’t be the sort of syrupy inspirational spiritual nibbles and bits that seem to sell so well these days.  He will write when he has something to say, which is only when something has happened to him or in his world (which will look a lot like ours) that elicits some sort of reaction from him.

“Other than that, he is just pretty normal.  He’s medium height and build and looks, none of which he is happy about.  He is born-and-raised Catholic and though broadly ecumenical, he is secretly bothered in an inarticulately visceral way by evangelical protestants, especially the middle class White ones who pray with their hands up in the air.

“Whatever we need to know about his inner life, his biography, his beliefs, all of that stuff, will emerge naturally in the course of his blogs.  I hope you like him.”

So, that’s the starting block.  The worst bit is the name: so dully obvious.  Otherwise, being blessedly devoid of imagination, or perhaps just disorganized, my Creator has left me a lot of lead-way here, so I’ll be taking over now.  Oh, as for the inner life and personal biography stuff…don’t get your hopes up.  I am  a private sort of character, besides, I am boring.