I Must Decrease

Over the past week I have sung several funerals at our parish, each one different. A older wife, mother, and pillar of local society who died after a brief but difficult battle with cancer. A man, not quite middle-aged, who died of a drug overdose. And today, a 13-month-old boy who drowned.

Today's funeral was the hardest. The devastated parents clung to each other. The reader could barely make it through the first reading. I myself could not look up from my music, lest I see the little half-sized coffin and choke.

As we were driving there, I talked to my 10yo son, who was going to serve the mass. "This is going to be a sad occasion, and many people may be overwhelmed. If you start to feel emotional, remember that we're here to serve the family. Our job is to help without calling attention to ourselves, or do anything to distract the people who are grieving more because they're closer to the situation."

One temptation that I've had to fight at funerals at which I don't know the deceased is to make it about myself: indulging in the luxury of imagining myself in the situation of the bereaved. What if it were my father, my husband, my child? How easy it is to build up a scenario full of pathos, secure in the knowledge that it's all in my head. And yet, how contrary to God's nature: "I AM". It is no part of God to spend the present moment (especially in church!) in fantasies and counterfactuals, whether sad or idealistic or glamorous or actively sinful. The present is meant to be lived, whether in active love and service and sorrow or in quiet waiting with those who are joyful or suffering. Even our imaginations are meant to be used in the service of God and others, not for our own private emotional wallowings.

The antidote to this behavior is to stay in the moment: to focus on the words of the prayers, the notes on the page, the physical details of breathing at the right places and standing straight while I sing. The sorrow and the emotion have to be channeled into prayer and service for the deceased and the grieving. Errant trains of thought that start out, "What if...?" have to be redirected back toward the people at the inmost circle of grief, the ones who are now living the "what if?".

I have not lived the "what if?". I have never lost father, mother, husband, sibling, or born child. Every funeral I've ever attended has been outside of me. I have not been the bereaved. God has been merciful to me, but with that mercy comes the responsibility to pray and sacrifice even more for those who are suffering, either in the first throes of grief or in the long dull ache of loss. "He must increase; I must decrease," said John the Baptist (John 3:30).