Hesitating at the sanctuary door in funeral times
by Julie A. Wortman

A friend recently told me of the funeral of her brother, a man who had led a ragged life. The service, she said, was one of the best spiritual experiences she’d ever had. No one glossed over the painful times – or forgot the good. The meaning of life and death reflectively considered in real terms. "If church were more often like this," my friend’s deeply moved, religiously raised, adult children told her, "we’d come more often."

My partner, a priest, nods at this tale. She has always preferred funerals to weddings. People arrive at funerals in possession of their deepest questions. Weddings too often tend to be filled with fantasy and overconfident pretense. At a funeral, people are alive to the stark reality that life is fragile and caught up in mystery, that faithfulness is a difficult daily walk. They are eager for a word of truth that can help them know life while living it.

Since September 11, many of us have been contemplating life in this heightened life-is-real-life-is-earnest funeral way. Media reports say that in the first weeks after the attacks people flocked to houses of worship in greatly increased numbers, presumably in open-hearted quest of how best to put the dead to rest, of how best, now, to serve life.

Today, several months into this War on Terrorism, reports say the numbers have ebbed. I don’t think the funeral atmosphere is over, but I’m inclined to believe people were disappointed. Speaking for myself, I have been, too.

Like so many others, I came on September 12 for the prayers. I wept for the dead. And then I began listening for the words that would suggest a corporate path of faithful solidarity grounded in the unfolding word of God.

I read the Episcopal Church bishops’ post-September 11th call for "waging reconciliation" with anticipation. "This radical act of peace-making," they wrote, will be "nothing less than the right ordering of all things according to God’s passionate desire for justness, for the full flourishing of humankind and all creation."

Justness? The word jarred, but I read on: "God’s project, in which we participate by virtue of our baptism, is the ongoing work of reordering and transforming our common life so they may reveal God’s justness ..."

A further letdown. What, I wondered, had become of justice? The baptismal covenant asks that we "strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being." I squirmed over the switch. I don’t believe God is necessarily a boy’s name, but I do think the traditional "justice" stands for something deep, true and real. Striving for "justness" sounds like something less: something pleasant and measured, something which might justify, just this once, cheap grace.

Let justness roll? If I were the innocent, racially profiled person sitting on death row, I’d want more than white America’s sense of justness over my fate. If I were the teenage woman from the Congo imprisoned in an INS detention center for four months with family waiting in Canada, I’d want justice’s concern for my rights despite an immigration officer’s suspicion that there is a justness to a punitive treatment of strangers from the global South. If I were a Palestinian, I’d want justice over a ruling power’s sense that my people’s denial of landed autonomy had a certain justness to it.

My confusion and distress increased when, our War on Terrorism now in full throttle, I read our Presiding Bishop’s November Episcopal Life column."This is a war that must be fought, not simply because we have been attacked," he wrote, "but because terrorism is so all-pervasive in this world and touches so many lives and so many countries."

Terrorism may be pervasive, but is participating in "God’s work in the world" – the very mission of the church, as our bishops proclaimed in their September statement – about war-making? To me, the Gospel call is to a new sort of citizenship that summons even our political leaders to repentance for creating a global climate in which fundamentalism can so horrifically command the loyalties of people who yearn for something better. As Lutheran theologian Martin Marty points out in a recent Witness interview, "If there were alternatives in the Islamic world, fewer people would join fundamentalist movements. By alternatives, I don’t just mean alternative ideas. I mean that we should reduce poverty. We should look at American foreign policy and see how this contributes to poverty. Alternatives that removed people from poverty and gave people more options would keep the fundamentalists from being alluring and would minimize the damage that they can do."

And so, I find myself in sad company with those who, in these funereal times, hesitate at the sanctuary door. I continue to hope for corporate signs of life grounded in the unfolding word of God. And I do see signs. A faxed message from four upstate New York dioceses announces an April "Church Voices in the Public Square" gathering to help church people "desiring to better understand how to integrate their faith with an active concern for public policy." Two Episcopal priests in this part of coastal Maine have put their bodies on the line by helping to launch a weekly Women in Black vigil to offer somber, reflective witness that citizens here hold the deep suffering of terrorism in ways more nuanced than can be adequately conveyed by the display of God Bless America flags.

Such local signs are beginning to abound. But I want more. Especially from my church’s national leadership. We get reports from a special church task force that "Christianity is no longer dominant in our culture," a fact that researchers like Diana Eck have been making cogently clear. We’re told the committee’s dream is of an Episcopal Church entering into the religious pluralism of these times in a spirit of aggressive competition.

To me, competing for market share of our country’s pluralistic population sounds more like a nightmare.

These are ragged times, to be sure. But, as the bombs drop, legislation to enforce a trickle-down economy passes, demands for oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge increase and "patriotic" security measures abridge civil freedoms, the moment is alive with possibility. I crave a church that recognizes the very good news this represents – the chance for people of faith to dig deeper. The chance to become radically new. Radically of the creator. Radically prophetic.

To be part of a body committed to such a life-serving future, even in the face of tragic death, I, too, would more often show up.

Julie A. Wortman is editor/publisher of The Witness magazine, <www.thewitness.org>.