A change in plans

I’ve changed my funeral plans. It used to be that I wanted to be buried in a Catholic cemetery near Dermont, Kentucky.

Bishop Francis Cotton, the first Bishop of Owensboro (my hometown), was the first person buried in that cemetery. Both my parents are buried there along with several relatives.

Thank goodness I didn’t go ahead and buy a plot, though. I want to find another place.

The reason I’ve changed my mind about the Owensboro cemetery is because it’s one of those places where everybody has to have the same kind of tombstone.

These cemeteries came into vogue several years ago. They seemed to make sense. Everything was nice and even and Romanesque and easy to mow. Then I visited an old-fashioned, cluttered cemetery over Memorial Day weekend, and something snapped inside me.

This was the old kind of cemetery where there are a million different tombstones. No ugly, forbidding signs said: No artificial flowers allowed! There was no list of rules at the entrance telling all the things you couldn’t do. In fact, at this cemetery, you could do whatever you wanted. People had planted every kind of flower there, and marvelous trees of every description. Graves were adorned with shrubs.

The place was busy, owing to the holiday of course. But here were people expending tender loving care upon the final place for those they loved, instead of being forbidden to touch a thing.

As we visited, I became touched with the idea that graveyards are very much for the living. To visit a gravesite and to plant a rose bush, or trim a hedge or put in perennials – these things are purgative and helpful for those who so dearly miss the ones they have lost. These activities help the living spend time with the dead in a way somehow deeper than just putting down a bouquet.

I’ll not soon forget seeing one heavy-set man in his T-shirt as he stepped back from his gardening at the grave of his loved one. He had just stepped back and looked, his hands out from his sides and covered with dirt, like all people do when they have just planted something. The look on his face, however, went way beyond the flowers. His eyes were full of great love and great sorrow. He was an ordinary man, a simple man; but he was at a point of contact with all the meaning any life ever holds: the point at which one person loves another.

So give me one of those kinds of cemeteries, please, when I die – one construed for the benefit of the bereaved and not for the convenience of the caretakers.

Also, I’ve decided I don’t want the Dies Irae sung at my funeral. You remember that, don’t you? “O Day of Wrath, that dreadful day. The sins of man before the Maker lay – As David and the Sybil say.” I thought I wanted that, but now I’ve decided differently.

I don’t want to offend anybody, but now I want a funeral procession headed up by a New Orleans street band playing a little Dixieland jazz. I just pray I’ve made enough black friends by then to join the procession and help my stiff white friends let go a little and dance. Nothing puts me in a happier frame of mind than Dixieland, and I plan to be one happy dude the day I die.

What more glorious, happy, joyous, exciting thing could ever happen to a person than to go be with Jesus? –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on June 14th, 1987

An unlikely partner to goings-on in Purgatory

I sat in the city room at the daily newspaper doing what we call in the trade: “moving copy.” A routine obituary came to me for editing and typesetting; but my job, of course, was to look for errors and to see that they were corrected before the information was published in the paper.

In this particular case, I noted that the woman had been a member of a purgatorial society at our local cloistered monastery. Trying to resurrect from my memory the exact wording of those arcane old words has proved impossible. Nevertheless, from the context of the group’s name, it was apparent that the members promised to pray for one another promptly upon death.

Arcane then as now, I felt it necessary to call the monastery to verify the name of the group, the spelling of the words: routine procedure for a routine obit.

Somehow I was also reluctant to make the call. The usual press of deadline bore down, the hour of the night was not early; and the picture showed in my brain of a gruff, officious editor rushing to get the facts from a meek little nun. However, with the reluctance was also a sense of urgency. I dialed the number.

After identifying myself, I said, “Uh, we’ve received an obituary notice, Sister, on a Mrs. ______ I just want to check the name of a group. I note here she was associated with the monastery. From the context, Sister, it seems she was in a society, the members promise to pray for one another promptly at death…”

The meek Sister cut me short, “Oh,” she said, “has she died?”

At the time I made this call, I was not exactly your lockstep, practicing Catholic – more the gadfly exterior with the lukewarm interior. But the experience was surely mystical for me. I felt used, like the Lord wanted to get the word to the deceased’s comrades quickly, so he tapped this joker.

Now I don’t want to make more of this situation than was there, but what was there for me has held a special place in my recollection each November as we pray for the Poor Souls.

I know some people have trouble with the concept of Purgatory, an article of our Faith we accept on faith, the Scripture reference in 2 Maccabees notwithstanding. My faith, though, has been reinforced in a very practical way.

As with so many things about faith: logic, reason, documentation and argument don’t hold a candle to a personal peek in the door of something profound and holy.

The cigarette-smoking editor and the gentle nun became involved in the ongoing life of a woman who had died, two people at least one of whom was an unlikely partner to goings-on in Purgatory. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 16, 1986

To change the world, begin with yourself

People who go around smiling and happy all the time really get to me. The way I’ve got it figured, a little worry is healthy.

My friend Brenda gets after me for glooming and dooming about the mess the world’s in. I have got to make some suggestion for fixing things, she says. By golly, folks, I don’t know what to do, do you?

There’s a “be positive” ethic going around that troubles me. It’s like there’s some kind of holy responsibility to be positive about everything. I’ll be honest. I think being positive all the time is part of what’s wrong with the world.

We get so busy being positive we lose sight of the proper alarm we should feel about some of the horrors abounding about us. Oh, there’s always hope, but hope exists because there’s a need for it.

We’ve been told a lot lately by a variety of media means that the Western world is partying, mindless of our heinous and evil circumstances. We’re drunk on decadence, we’re told, thinking we’re invincible, that the day of reckoning is too far off to be bothered with.

One commentator on the social mores of Americans said we lack but one perversion which was rampant in the days of the fall of Rome. I’ll not mention this particularly disgusting thing. God forbid that I should give anybody any ideas.

I wonder if they smoked pot and jumped to acid rock.

Jesus warned us about complacency. Watch out! He said. You don’t know the hour when the Master will return.

Sometimes I sit on my front porch smoking a cigarette and I look up and see the billowing clouds in the sky. I think to myself, I could look up there a couple of minutes from now and see the Son of Man coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

I see myself quickly flicking away my cigarette and fanning the smoke. Gracious. Caught in the act. Doomed. Accountable. He’s not going to be concerned about whether I planned to do His will. He won’t be counting the times I said Lord, Lord. He’s interested in him who does the will of His Father.

Then I figure, though – nah, He’s not coming right now. So far, I’ve been right.

I’ve lived in this community for about eight years. However, not being a native, I don’t know a lot of people in the obituaries. Just the same, I skim them each day, looking at the ages. Do you do that?

Seems like a lot more people my age are in there than there used to be.

So the world’s in a mess and we’re complacent about it. But we really don’t know what to do about it anyway. There’s hope, but we’ve got these character defects we can’t seem to let go of. We’re hoping we have more time to get straightened out, but we keep seeing people our age in the obits.

All in all, there’s a yearning inside us that’s roughly akin to the old bluegrass song lyric: “Everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

Somebody said about the speed of light: “186,000 miles a second: It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.” So it is with the law governing this vapor of a life we live here: We may think it won’t end, but it will.

The problems I can fix are the ones inside me. At least I can try. I think being worried that I ought to be getting started is a good negative emotion.

God has given us a great gift. It’s called a conscience. It lets me know pretty clearly what to do. I may not be able to fix the world, but by changing me – being obedient to God’s law which He has written in my heart – at least one smidgen of a smidgen of the world will be a better place.

Lord, don’t let me be caught red-handed.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor in August of 1986