I went to the funeral of a former coworker’s mother today. I didn’t know her mother, and I hadn’t seen her in several years. But I have known her since I started to work in Huntsville in 1986, when she was a co-op and I had just finished grad school.
The funeral home chapel was full. Almost everyone seemed to be from the church her parents attended, which is a conservative Protestant denomination. Based on what I have read, and the little I remember from talking to my friend about it, they don’t use musical instruments in their services. All their singing in this service was a cappella. When I attended church, I got used to fairly pitiful, uncoordinated and scattered congregational singing during worship services, but these people could sing. They sounded like a well-trained choir and at times the voices blended and reverberated almost like an organ. I remember the hymns that were sung when I went to church, and I was surprised that I didn’t recognize any of the four songs that were sung in this service.
The pastor didn’t use the funeral as an opportunity to deliver a sermon, but there was obviously a lot of religion throughout. I was raised in a Southern Baptist church prior to that denomination’s decline into willful ignorance and bigoted fundamentalism. I have long since given up those and any other religious beliefs, but I know all about this stuff. And yet I felt like a visitor to a foreign country. It really is a world that I can’t feel at home in any more.
UPDATE: I added a link in case anyone is not familiar with this song. It was one of the four that were sung at the funeral service, and I was not familiar with it.
There is a ever-widening divide in our country between believers and non-believers. I am actually pretty surprised by how divisive it has become. I grew up in a non-religious Jewish family. Never stepped foot in a synagogue or temple, only celebrated the “high holy days” (Passover and Yom Kippur). It’s an interesting thing, having always been an outsider, because none of it makes sense.
PS– I wanted to respond to your comment about our garden. We have the whole thing fenced in with six-foot wire mesh fencing. The deer have not found their way in here yet.
Though born and raised in the south, my upbringing was for the most part secular. We did the church thing until I was about 15, but we did it with little enthusiasm. Some of my contemporary relatives caught fire during the course of their lives, and the occasional wedding has been a little shocker to me. I treated them as anthropological studies until the novelty wore off. I no longer go to any weddings involving someone with less than a 50% chromosomal resemblance.
LOL love this. I can’t say these things on my own blog without “upsetting my mother,” as my father puts it.
Robin – These things really do seem completely foreign to me now. It’s kind of like seeing the man behind the curtain while everyone else is still looking at the great wizard.
Wayne – It’s kind of funny about looking at weddings as an anthropological study, because that’s what I tried to do at the funeral service. I was almost afraid they would notice me as a stranger, and who knows what the natives would do with a stranger.
I was raised in a religious household: Cold War Catholics, I call them. But no more of that for me. As with you, when I do attend these kinds of events, I’m alarmed/astonished/depressed to realize that for many people this stuff is actually meaningful.