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Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Vincent Browne should go to more funerals
By: Fr Brendan Hoban
Vincent Browne - journalist, radio and television presenter, barrister, columnist, former newspaper editor and man about town - was in Ontario, Canada recently. He was attending the funeral of his brother Malachy’s partner and fiancé, Janine, and was quite taken with the religious faith she had, the religious community bonded in solidarity and love she was part of and the rituals and prayers that surrounded her death and burial.
Browne wrote - in his weekly column in The Irish Times - that they recited the rosary at the funeral home and that in between the decades there was an invocation to the Lord (‘Save us from the fires of hell . . .’) and after the five decades they said the Hail Holy Queen, which he hadn’t heard from childhood.
At the funeral Mass the priest spoke movingly about how Janine had ‘ennobled death by her spirit’ since she discovered she had terminal cancer 18 months ago and despite the ‘valley of tears’ that was the graveside scene, Browne was taken by how the faith of those present, including Janine’s young daughters, comforted and strengthened the grieving.
Tribe
Browne wrote: ‘There is a stark simplicity about this faith here, which I have not seen at home since my childhood.’ A psychologist told him that for those who were part of a tribe death came easier and Browne’s conclusion is that at a time when we were all part of the Irish Catholic tribe, unquestioning, loyal and bonded, death was easier. But now that so many are ‘individuated subscribers to the anonymous society, acquisitive, rootless, unbonded’ death just seems to be the end. There’s no faith, no religious hinterland, no familiar rituals.
But of course there is. While Browne’s point is well made and while he has described well the faithless situation of a growing number of Irish people today, he didn’t need to go to Canada to witness faith-people incorporating the reality of death into their faith-experience of life. And the saying of the rosary and even the glorious mysteries and the Hail Holy Queen are not exotic practices experienced occasionally by Catholic Amishes in far-flung places. Rather they are part of the lived experience of individual Catholics and Christian communities throughout Ireland today.
The latest survey indicated that in urban areas 50% of Catholics no longer attend weekly Mass. This also means, in case anyone actually misses it, that 50% of Catholics actually go to Mass once a week - a huge figure by international standards. And of those who don’t go, many attend less often than once a week and many of those who rarely, if ever, or never attend church services still believe in God.
The point I’m making is that the impression is often created that religion is a minority interest, that faith has died, that a religious perspective on life has disappeared or will soon when the unwashed catch up with the sophisticates. In fact that’s not the case at all.
More people may now want their marriages in registry offices but the vast majority still want their marriages in a church because, regardless of their level of practice or even faith, they still have a sense that there’s a spiritual dimension to that solemn moment.
Many people who no longer practice their religion insist on baptising their children, are anxious that their children make their First Communion and are confirmed. And despite the fact that atheists, agnostics and wonky Catholics die no comparable rituals to the Christian rituals of death and burial have emerged as an alternative.
Same rituals
The impression is sometimes given that because practice is dropping, because the Church is bruised and battered, because vocations are few that the religious enterprise is going to be dead and buried in a few years.
That’s far from being the case. All over Ireland, every day of the week, thousands of people go through the same experience as Browne witnessed in Canada, say the same prayers, participate in the same rituals, listen to the same message about death and resurrection, sense the same comfort of a faith family and a faith community, and see death not as an end but as part of a continuum into a new form of life. It’s not exotic or exceptional, just the norm. (Browne should go to more funerals, now that he’s old enough to sense that he hasn’t all the answers to all the questions.)
And while psychologists and other professionals analyse the experience of death, it is beyond what is susceptible to analysis. It is about the presence of God in the bits and pieces of our lives. It is about sensing that presence at special moments. It is about believing that beyond what we can see or measure there is a God who loves us and cares beyond all our imagining.
There’s a great sadness in Browne’s words on Janine’s death, a sadness not just with the loss of her life and what it means to his brother Malachy and her daughters but a sadness in Browne himself that the faith that gives the grieving such comfort and hope is not now part of his life. ‘For a moment in that funeral home,’ he wrote, ‘I almost wished to be back in those days of rosaries and the valley of tears. There was a solace and a camaraderie about those days, which seem missing now.’
That loss of faith is part of the story of modern Ireland but it’s not the whole story.
Quote:
At the funeral Mass the priest spoke
movingly about how Janine had ‘ennobled death by her spirit’ since she discovered she had terminal
cancer 18 months ago and despite the ‘valley of tears’ that was the graveside scene,
Vincent Browne was taken by how the faith of those present, including Janine’s young daughters, comforted and strengthened the grieving.
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