When you sing in a church choir and Christmas falls mid-week, you know you’re going to be spending a lot of time in church: Christmas Eve and/or Day (possibly multiple services); then Saturday and/or Sunday; and then—if you’re Catholic—the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God. That’s right: on New Year’s Eve/Day, we have a holy day of obligation honoring the woman who convinced her son to make more wine for a party. (And people say the Church doesn’t have a sense of humor.) This pitches us into another weekend, after which even people who’ve had the whole two weeks off are firmly back at work and you’ve been to church like 72 times.
Not that I’m complaining. Really! These liturgies celebrate things that are profound and powerful and—if you’ll pardon the bumper sticker wisdom—the reason for the season. But that’s not the only thing we’re doing in church these days. Christmas, as it turns out, is also a season for funerals.
Sometimes that’s because people go “home for Christmas” (in the words of a Steven Curtis Chapman song that should come with a pack of tissues) or hold on for one last holiday before letting go. Other times, a loved one has died weeks or even months earlier, and family is spread across the country, and this is the best time to bring everyone together.
We had two funerals at St. Vincent’s this week. The first was for the matriarch of a large family, whose husband we buried earlier this year. With a full church and two pews’ worth of grandchildren looking on, her three handsome sons stood at the ambo and wept their way through the eulogy. It was beautiful.
The second was for a woman who had been living in a nursing home for many years, who died two weeks shy of her 100th birthday. She had one mourner: a niece in her eighties. And yet we cut no corners. The five-person bereavement ministry team and other parish staff were there; two of them sat with the niece and found each song in the hymnal for her. We did all the music. Our pastor gave a full-blown homily. It was beautiful.
It’s like eternity in a snow globe.
There is something deeply poignant about a Christmas funeral. It’s like eternity in a snow globe. The light of the paschal candle glows in the twinkle of hundreds of tree lights in the sanctuary. The casket or urn rests just a few steps from the babe in the hay. And above it all looms the crucifix—which at St. Vincent’s is a mural that includes the Blessed Mother reaching for her son, as she does in the manger tableaux below. Birth and death and the promise of new life, all together in that one holy space.
There’s nowhere I’d rather be.
Christine Marie Eberle 