Legacy MattersHow not to conduct a funeral mass for a priest.
Father Harry Meyer tried to imagine God’s reaction when St. Susanna pastor Dan Schuh appeared in heaven.
Probably, he said, it was the same as the teenaged skier who witnessed the 50-something priest tumble head over skis down the slopes one winter night at Perfect North Slopes.
"Awesome, dude!" Meyer told the 1,500-plus parishioners and priests who gathered for Schuh’s funeral Mass Wednesday morning.
Father Z comments sadly:
We can’t avoid death. We cannot control death. We don’t understand death and we fear what we don’t understand. Fear, at its root, is a result of the Fall. Death and fear are inseparable, as cause to its effect.
This is why, I think, so many funerals today are as described above.
Death’s mystery is supremely confronted in Holy Mass, and in its deepest way during the Requiem. Perhaps this is why funerals tend to reveal the worst of our tendencies toward illicit liturgical creativity and bad taste. Corruptio optimi pessima.
Holy Mass must be celebrated in such a way that it leads us into the mystery of Christ’s death, and our death. Mass is therefore like the Cross. It is a mystery. It thus will allure and repel, reveal that things are hidden and demand faith in what is unseen, or rather seen only darkly as if through a glass.
We mustn’t dodge the reality of death. We shove death aside, or paint it over with bright colors and candy music, at our peril. So many funerals are arrange so that people can get through another hour or so without having confronted anything either frightening or meaningful. We avert our gaze from what Christ did for us and from what we must yet experience.
If Holy Mass is reduced to the banal it becomes merely another worldly distraction. It becomes a show.
But Mass is a sacrament, in the sense of its being a mystery. It prepares us for death, Christ’s and our own.