What's in your mind when you conduct a funeral service? I asked a priest once. Pat came the reply from the priest, a veteran in theology, “it's worth attending a funeral service. It brings you down to the earth... to the reality of what's awaiting each person.”
The occasion was the funeral service of a senior member of a Catholic parish in Mumbai. The 64-year old man suffered a massive heart attack while travelling and died before reaching the hospital.
“It's like attending a Charismatic prayer service. The funeral prayers, hymns and the procedure... It makes your more humble and brings closer to God. For any person, there's no escape from the physical death of the body,” he says. In the Syro-Malabar rite of the Roman Catholic Church, the funeral songs can hit you hard, prick your conscience, the lyrics are punchy and strong quotations from the Bible will force people to rethink and revisit their spiritual journey.
What makes one more humble in life is the Rite of Committal, or the Catholic interment service – the time when the body is finally buried or interred. You might have made a pile of cash or huge real estate or plantations or you might be an influential person in the world, but it all ends in the graveyard with the Rite of Committal. It's a powerful moment when family and friends gather together with a priest to pray over the body one last time.
For me personally, it's a defining moment each time I attend a funeral service. The time when the priest blesses the place before the body is to be placed and the body is committed to the earth. The question I always ask myself is: Are you prepared for any eventuality? Nobody wants to end up in the hell, keeping company to devil, the master manipulator and liar.
Protestant-turned-Catholic theologian Paul Whitcomb says, “psychologists have long known that every human being, the atheist included-intuitively seeks God's help in times of great calamity, and instinctively pleads for God's mercy when death is imminent.” The renowned Voltaire, who was so eloquent in his denial of God while he enjoyed health and fortune, repudiated all of his atheistic writings on his deathbed and frantically sought the ministrations of a Catholic priest.
Russian Communist leader Vladimir Lenin, as he lay on his deathbed, looked around him and frantically asked pardon of the tables and chairs in the room. “For as hunger for food proclaims the existence of food, man's intuitive hunger for God proclaims the reality, the omnipotence and the justice of God. Catholic belief in God, therefore, is purely and simply an expression of intellectual sanity,” Whitcomb says.
Mathew 7:21 says, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” What's the will of Father? That's for us to find out and follow word by word. Our deeds and our relationship with Jesus will decide whether we will be on the right hand of God on the judgment day. Is He our Saviour and Redeemer?
