To the Pastor at the Funeral I Attended Yesterday

The BBQ Pit
1

The woman who you consigned to the grave yesterday had a partner. A partner of 20 years. They had a house, and three children together who are all now left in a single parent family. A partner who graciously allowed her parents to bring in their family pastor for the services, even though she knew that would bring a bumbling, inarticulate, inflexable, asshole.

I can not imagine that the partner knew you would spend most of an hour on some various scriptures which had no relationship to the departed’s life. The only good thing you said about the woman’s life was that she was a good mother, the rest of the time was mostly an admonishment to the rest of us that she hadn’t come to Jesus in time. You talked more about abortion being bad (why this is appropriate at a lesbian’s funeral I couldn’t possibly tell you) and the gnostic scriptures being a lie, than about her partner, who you pretty much treated as the maid. Her only mention throughout the service was while you read the obituary (even that you stumbled through) and when you thanked her at the end for helping prepare the service. (With the exception of the songs, none of what was asked for was used.)

How dare you throw stones at a funeral, you pompus ass.

I am so scared for the children. They are the coolest, most confident, lovely young women. If this is what their grandparents deem an appropriate funeral for their daughter, I suspect their lives are going to be thrown into even more turmoil.

2

Yep, a srewed up funeral is very screwed up. Even worse, there is no way to go back and fix it.

3

The way I see it, the advantage of organized religion is that it provides a clear, concise, specifically-worded funeral service. The purpose of the religious official is to recite the words, manage the ceremony, and nothing else. Leave the editorializing to the breaved.

I mean, a sermon? This wasn’t his congregation - what right did he have to sermonize?

4

It was a sermon.

5

An hour for a funeral? I thought funeral services were supposed to be short and sweet.

6

It was an hour, and someone out in one of the rooms passed out so an ambulance had to come during it.

7

Was it her sins that did her in? Both of my wife’s parents died in this past year, and at both funerals the pastor railed on and an and on over how it was their sinful nature which killed them. Apparently speaking ill of the dead is de rigour in some denominations. :mad:

8

Some people, preachers included, just need a good ass kicking. This guy was an asshole.

9

The memorial service for one of my former professors was very much like this- the man himself was over-the-top non-religious, but his over-the-top Christian son took over the reins of the funeral (the wife was way too distraught) and as a result we got two hours of “come to Jesus” crap. Somehow I think bob was looking down at us, shaking his head and wondering when the guy would shut the hell up.

The funeral for my husband’s grandmother (which I was not present for) involved a pastor who knew nothing of the deceased (she wasn’t anti-religious, just not practicing) trying to convince a room full of family members that he knew all about her and that she had told him she wanted to repent all her sins. Never mind that she was comatose for the last few weeks of her life- the paster called her by the completely wrong name throughout the whole sermon (her name was Tomer- he kept calling her “Gomer”). :wally

The funeral for my husband’s other grandmother, which I was present for, involved what could only be called a cheering section sitting behind the holy-roller pastor. The funeral, which I had assumed would be a somewhat sedate affair given the natures of the deceased and those present, took on the appearance of one of those televangalist/faith healer meetings. I almost chewed through my tongue trying not to laugh.

I personally think that the idea of the Speaker for the Dead (not the poster) is a fabulous one. That way we don’t have problems such as this.

10

Ah… sorry about the crap coding on that. I get a bit riled up when I read about something like this happening.

11

Amen. Shouldn’t it be somewhere in the “Minister’s handbook” that one of your main jobs at a funeral is to offer comfort to the bereaved?

A couple of years ago I got very pissed off at the funeral for my stepmother. My father had married her several years earlier; he was a widower from the death of my mother in 1992, and she was a widow from her first husband’s death over a decade earlier as well. They had dated during WWII, and then were reunited in the early 1990’s after both of their spouses had died.

By mutual agreement, they both wanted to be buried with their first spouses when the time came, so the funeral was held up in Virginia, where she had lived with her first spouse.

I had never met the minister, but he had been minister of this church when Cora attended it when she lived in Danville years ago. The current pastor had met with the family in the choir room beforehand, and prayed with us then (a fairly brief, but comforting prayer — I liked him), but had graciously turned over the church for the former minister who had served there when Cora lived there to do the service.

Old minister started with the obligitory thanks to current minister, and then began:

“I’ve known Cora “Smith” for xx years…”

Well, folks, my maiden name is not “Smith”. And Cora Smith was not the name of the person who had died; she had not been legally known by that name for several years, as she took my father’s name when she married.

So, I started the service with my knickers in a twist over that. He did the usual blah, blah, sort of biographical stuff that covered the first half of Cora’s life. There was a lot of stuff about her nieces and nephews, and a bit about how she adopted her son Ronnie. Then he said “And now we’ll hear some of Cora’s favorite hymns.”

He turned it over to a pianist, who played a medley of 6 or 7 hymns, ending in a very stylized version of “Amazing Grace.” I didn’t recognize a single one except the last one, and I barely recognized that one. It just seemed very bizarre to be sitting there listening to a piano recital for 5 minutes. This was very disaffecting to me. The hymns really seem bereft of their ability to offer comfort and spiritual uplift without the words being sung (either by a soloist or by the congregation.) It just seemed very cold and out of place.

After that, minister took back over. He did then finally recognize that my father had been married to her, and pointed out that theirs was sort of a romantic story. They had met during WWII in Baltimore, where they had both been working on manufacturing war planes. They separated after the war, both married, and had long, happy marriages before their spouses died. One of Dad’s brothers had met her in Winston-Salem and then told Dad that she was living there, and they got back together ---- or, as the minister over-dramatized it, Dad had heard that Cora was living somewhere around there, and went to TREMENDOUS efforts to track her down. Then we went back to hearing again about what wonderful people Cora and Herman were. (My Dad’s name is Jim. Herman was her first husband.)
Then, off to the cemetery.

He read the 23rd Psalm, as Cora had requested. And then he said “And this isn’t one of the things that Cora requested, but I just wanted to read this little bit of scripture. Herman was a mountain boy, and I know he would have appreciated blah, blah, blah,” and then he read another bit of scripture.

I wanted to choke the man. Herman had been dead for over a decade. My father was the grieving widower. My father is the one who had lived with Cora for over a decade, and stayed by her side during several hospitalizations. My father was the one going home to an empty home. Herman is dead. Herman is the one lying in the grave right next to the one she was going to be lowered into. Herman is the one who supposedly should now be there at the doors of heaven greeting her.

Do you not think that it would be appropriate to offer just a tiny bit of comfort to the grieving widower and son rather than doing the whole damned service for dead Herman?

Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

How old are the children, furlibusea? Will they remain in the custody of the partner?

12

the girls are tween and early teens. The partner is a lawyer, and I am hoping they did the Is and Ts thing long time ago. The thing is even if they don’t have a legal leg to stand on, if the grandparents go for custody, wills can be overturned by a judge with an ax to grind. Even if they don’t win the fight can’t do anything but hurt the girls.

13

Why do so many folks assume that a minister’s role is to bring comfort and solace and peace? Around my parts, their role is very often to tell you what god wants you to do, and inform you that you’re not living up to it.

I don’t even to to the funeral services of a lot of local neighbors and relatives when they pass away, as I really don’t care to sit thru such services. I just go to the visitations.

Weddings have been the same way. A sermon generally denouncing abortion, non-christians, and other “so called” christians is often a feature of the wedding service in many local churches.

14

I can entirely sympathize.

A few years ago, my uncle died within thre months of his wife. As my uncle was a superintendent in the Church of God in Christ, both the church hierarchy and certain members of my family insisted that have an official church service, which meant that several bishops were in attendance. My uncle’s eldest son was at this time dying of AIDS, and he was too ill to serve as a pallbearer at either of his parents’ funerals. At Uncle’s, not only was S’s long-time partner (who had pretty much devoted his life to taking care of S, for which I am forever grateful) not allowed to sit with the family or mentioned as anything other than a 'friend," but the bishop giving the eulogy began it with a five-minute screed on the evil and abomination of “sissies.”

For the sake of my own freedom, I hope I never run into said bishop on the street.

15

furlibusea, I hope your friend’s partner finds peace in her loss, even if it is not from the preacher of the service.

And I have to agree with Qadgop– I would be surprised to go to a funeral and not hear a call to get with Jesus, etc., etc. Maybe it is just the south and midwest where I’ve lived about 33 of my 42 years, but at every single funeral I’ve ever been at, the preacher goes through the “get right with God before you die” routine.

Sir Rhosis

16

*Ye miserable, crawlin’ worms. Are ye here again then? Have ye come like Nimshi, son of Rehoboam, secretly out of your doomed houses, to hear what’s comin’ to ye? Have ye come, old and young, sick and well, matrons and virgins, if there be any virgins amongst you, which is not likely, the world being in the wicked state that it is. Have ye come to hear me tell you of the great, crimson, licking flames of hell fire? Aye! You’ve come, dozens of ye. Like rats to the granary, like field mice when it’s harvest home. And what good will it do ye? You’re all damned! Damned! Do you ever stop to think what that word means? No, you don’t. It means endless, horrifying torment! It means your poor, sinful bodies stretched out on red-hot gridirons, in the nethermost, fiery pit of hell and those demons mocking ye while they waves cooling jellies in front of ye. You know what it’s like when you burn your hand, taking a cake out of the oven, or lighting one of them godless cigarettes? And it stings with a fearful pain, aye? And you run to clap a bit of butter on it to take the pain away, aye? Well, I’ll tell ye, there’ll be no butter in hell! *

[/Amos Starkadder]

17

See, this is one major reason why I don’t go to funerals. I’d probably be the one who’d get up, shove the minister out of the way, tell the bastard to get stuffed and proceed to say something NICE about the deceased and something comforting to the bereaved. I doubt I’d be appreciated for it, however, as most people seem to think that whatever sort of shitty thing a “person of God” has to say is automatically to be accepted, hence my refusal to make nice and go to funerals. That, and the horrifying tendency to put the leftover meat out on display as though it were still containing the person. The last time I was persuaded to go to one of these things was because a friend had no transportation–the dead person was in his late twenties and had hanged himself. They had him out on a table of some sort, not even in a coffin, draped in his boyhood comforter, and the ligature marks were inexpertly covered up. It was fucking horrible. There’s just no good way to deal with a bad death like that, but I have to say of all the possible ways this didn’t strike me as the best… Not my call, though, and I just tried to talk to the parents and give them whatever solace is possible under the circumstances. The guy was the same age as my kids, it was fucking tragic.

Not a big fan of Christian style funerals, me… when I go everyone has strict instructions for quick cremation, scatter the ashes someplace wild and go have a roaring drunk party where everyone makes inappropriate jokes and remembers me the way I want to be remembered–as a politically incorrect, somewhat crazy, irreverent, iconoclastic, iron clad bitch of the very first water. Anything else is hypocrisy and I will come back to haunt the first fucker who tries to quote the bible at my party!

18

A few years back, around the time of the last space shuttle disaster, one of my friends had a funeral service for her mom during which the minister went off on a tangent about how some of the folks on the shuttle hadn’t gotten themselves saved before it blew up. Seriously.

I’m glad my folks have made all their cremation arrangements and have ordered it all to be private–i.e., no funeral service.

19

I’ve been to quite a few funerals in the past two years, and maybe it’s the religious tradition I grew up in (they were family funerals), but they were worlds away from what you describe. At the funerals, hymns were sung, favourite psalms were quoted, and there was a decorous eulogy given by an officiant and a more personal one given by a member of the family. The focus was on the deceased - NOT on any external event like an “issue of the day”. I couldn’t imagine a mentality where pontificating on any subject - abortion, salvation, SOCAS - was seen as appropriate. We paid our respects, we honoured the departed in a way that they would have approved of, and then we went out into the hall and had coffee and finger sandwiches and gave one another lots of hugs.

An officiant who tried to pull that kind of shenanigan at one of these services would have been regarded with horror, and snatched away with the provberbial Giant Cane before they could cause any more disruption.

The closest that anyone came to “get right with God” was when the minister at my Lutheran grandmother’s funeral talked about how strong her faith was and what an important part of her life it was.

I can’t express how crass, self-serving and flabbergasting a minister would seem to my family and I if they tried to preach at a funeral. Where I come from it just isn’t done. I can accept that in some places it’s SOP and everyone thinks it’s normal - I just don’t understand it.

20

White Sea Star That is the tradition I am from, so I guess its why it upset me so much. The only thing that made the whole thing ok was that the youngest daughter has been my daughters best friend now since kindergarten, and she looked like she was grabbing onto a life line when she saw my daughter. I was so proud of my daughter too. She behaved so very well.