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 “In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;”  Brooke

Over the years I have celebrated hundreds of funerals, most prepared in detail with family and friends gathering to celebrate the life of the one they love. There are efficient funeral directors, beautiful flowers, glossy brochures, photographs and video presentations, eulogies and even artificial grass and sterilised sand at the graveside.

Yet despite our efforts to soften the reality of death the pain of grief remains and is raw and real.

In the past couple of weeks it has been a privilege to commend Brian and Kieran to God celebrating their funeral Masses.

It was the Chatham Islanders who taught me how to really do a funeral well.

My first funeral on Pitt Island (two hours on a fishing boat after the six-hundred mile flight from Aotearoa to Chatham) was for Eva, matriarch of the small Pitt community and midwife on the island for as long as anyone could remember.

Over the next few years I buried several Islanders, Ken, Bill, Tim and Charlie among others.

In the absence of city niceties each Chatham funeral followed the same down-to-earth pattern with active participation of many in roles of communication, transport, food, hospitality, speaking, digging and filling the grave, singing, as the community carries the grieving family and friends through difficult funeral days.

All of this in funeral rites lasting two or three days, not a funeral director in sight and certainly no hint of washed sand or artificial grass.

Instead there was more often mud and gumboots on the hill-climb to the family-farm place of burial, and the rain and wind welcomed as a sign of divine blessing on the proceedings.

At a Chathams funeral there is no escaping the messy aspects of burial. There’s a rare readiness to speak of the dead with respectful honesty understanding that the God of love is greater than human imperfection, and a knowledge that God’s enjoys the quirks of human personality and temperament.

When grief is raw and family tensions surface we are brought down from our pedestals of achievement and ambition.

Our vulnerability in the face of the death of the one we love brings us to our knees in the earth.

Those who do not run from this reality become like the humble and therefore holy tax collector of today’s gospel.

Wikipedia gives a clear and helpful definition of humility:

“The term “humility” comes from the Latin word humilitas, a noun related to the adjective humilis, which may be translated as “humble”, but also as “grounded”, or “from the earth”, since it derives from humus (earth). See the English humus.”

From the earth.

Grounded.

We can’t avoid being brought-to-earth when we take a fist-full of soil then open our hands to let if land loudly on the coffin of the one we love. And we leave the cemetery with hands soiled with rich earth from which new growth comes.

I have seen family bring buckets of soil from the garden or farm of the one who has died. That’s powerful, the soil, once worked by our loved one, is now the reminder that they too will come to new and eternal life.

And today as I rest with these scriptures brought to ground by my own failures and fragility, I am moved anew by the hope-filled words of the Old Testament prophet Hosea

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Send your date and time to add to the list, and just turn up at at one of the advertised gatherings, just one hour, focussing on where we are encountering Christ.

CHRISTCHURCH
Monday 30 March 10.00am (& every Monday)
Moku cafe, Bush Inn Centre Waimairi Road.
Invitation from Trish

KAPITI COAST
Monday 31 March 11am
The Cafe at Harrison’s 23 Peka Peka Rd, Waikanae beach.
Invitation from Catherine

NEW PLYMOUTH
Wednesday 2 April, 10.00am,
Stumble Inn, 200 Mangorei Road New Plymouth
Invitation from Joan