Friday was no different than any other weekday afternoon. It’s the third month now since I have been sick. I have good days and bad days, days when I get out of bed ready to face the world and some days I wish the earth under my feet would give way and I disappear… as soon as the thought barely surfaces in my pea sized brain I think of my 2 kids and I beg forgiveness from God lest he grant me my wish and my kids become orphans. I’ve been down with malaria, rat fever and typhoid all at the same time, I am now on a very long and slow road to recovery. But I’m just very thankful to be on that road…I feel very weak but I still make sure I make it to school every day to drop and pick my kids up.
I was on my way to pick up my kids from school…I watched a garbage dump truck knock a woman off her bike and run over her head and pop her brains out….There was not a lot of blood but she was gone in a moment. Im sure she didn’t feel no pain coz it happened in the blink of an eye. I called 108 the ambulance service and the cops and then passed out ….. I woke up in less than what-seemed-forever-30 seconds later with a head ache and some crazy thoughts. For starters I was shaking like a leaf, it was 5 min away from home, at the exact same spot that I stood and tried to cross the road almost everyday. What if it was me, was my first thought, I started to think of my kids and then I started to think of the lady who was lying dead with her face down, squished into the tar road… There were more people trying to beat the drunk- garbage truck driver than anybody trying to get her to a hospital….I guess it was all over in a few seconds and it didn’t matter to nobody, but I hoped against all hopes that she was alive. It took me back to when I was 6 and my dad met with an accident…. A memory etched in my head forever. I remember waiting for him to pick me from school from 2 pm to 5.My dad was always there 15 minutes early. The school aayah (cleaner) took me home only to find out from my grandmother that my dad had met with an accident. My heart broke that day into a million bits. I now, started to think of the lady and if she would have had kids waiting for her, at home or at school. It upset me so badly. I suddenly started to think about what would now happen to her soul, if she was Christian , if she had a chance to know the lord, to be forgiven and that psyched me out even more. I have never ever thought like that before. It felt strange to my own being. This life that we lead here has absolutely no value. Here one second gone the next. Im still trying to get over it. I know for a fact that I live today due to the sheer mercy of God that I absolutely don’t deserve. I am very grateful for the life I have and for the protection so far.
On a tangent, it was ironic that I had , just that morning started to write an article on how we send our dead packing to the next world if there exists one or just how we say our final goodbyes and let them return to dust… I personally think that by studying the way people treat their dead a great deal can be learnt about their culture.
Had I died, I would have gone to Heaven. My soul, I believe, would have been taken into the immediate presence of God. , Immediately, silently, invisibly and effortlessly, I would have been at once absent from the body and present with the Lord. This does not necessarily mean I had a reserved seat in heaven.
The disposal of my body, on the other hand, would not have been quite so swift, although by local tradition it wouldn’t have taken too long. Arrangements would have been made to place it in a casket and then in the earth, with all the rites of passage we associate with local CSI funerals.
My funeral would have been a very simple affair, attended by family, friends and members of the church. One of my brothers would have presided over the strictly non-laudatory event, and my passing would have been marked with the singing of a couple of my favorite songs, the reading of the Bible and the offering of prayer. And all this with the design of comforting the living, not praising me.
This may all sound very morbid, but reading the reports of Whitney Houston’s funeral, I couldn’t help reflect on the contrastbetween celebrity ‘homegoing’ ceremonies, as her’s was designed to be, and the simple worship service with which we mark the passing of our loved ones.
Whitney Houston like me, grew up in church and loved to sing. Maybe we had other things in common; if so, I can’t think of them right now. Instead, she was born a world away, and rose on a ladder of fame until she became, a few years back, the most-awarded female act of all time. Her voice was extremely powerful, and, notwithstanding its many repeated playings, her rendition of ‘I will always love you’ still makes the hairs on the back of my neck tingle.
Her descent into a bondage to alcohol and drugs will be cited as a footnote in her career; certainly, her New Jersey funeral, which resulted in every flag in the State being flown at half mast, spent little time dwelling on these failings. Instead, the funeral ceremony became a showcase in its own right, and the young lady was sent home in a blaze of glory. Everyone who was anyone was in attendance; a galaxy of stars on earth made Houston a star in Heaven.
But that is the point at which I realise that somewhere along the way we have lost our way when it comes to funerals. We have turned the most solemn event of all - the act of worship which marks the end of our lives - into a form of entertainment, in which we celebrate achievement, praise the departed, and generally entertain the audience. Celebration, praise and entertainment are good and fitting in their own place; but I doubt whether a funeral service is that place.
That runs so much against the grain of our secular view of life, however, that even to say it is to run the risk of verifying the Calvinistic caricature of our apparently joyless religion. Surely if our Christian funeral services are to be services at all, they are to be acts of worship? And if they are to be acts of worship, the praise should be of God, and the celebration should be of what Jesus did to overcome death and the grave.
By a remarkable coincidence, my studies last Sunday evening took me to Jesus’ intervention in a funeral in Nain, and his miracle of raising a dead man. I quoted Bishop J.C. Ryle’s magnificent commentary on that New Testament passage, in which he says that ‘From one end of the world to the other, the history of families is full of lamentation and weeping, and mourning and woe. And whence does it all come? Sin is the fountain and root to which all must be traced. There would neither have been tears, nor tares, nor illness, nor deaths, nor funerals in the earth, if there had been no sin.’
That reality is one we must not disguise. It may pander well to our flesh to give our heroes a fitting send-off, one which equals, in every way, the best performances of their careers. But it only disguises the reality that because of sin, we are all laid low, with death leveling the great and the good, the small and the bad. No amount of razzmatazz can hide the fact that death is not our friend but our enemy. We ought not to treat it as the occasion for a final concert.
Nor is this merely another example of American excess. Unless we are careful, our own funeral services will become nothing more than a gilding of the lily, the celebration of the person rather than the worship of God. From that kind of mockery may we be preserved. It matters little that I hear at a funeral service what the deceased achieved; but it matters much that I hear what Jesus achieved for us all in this world of the dying.
Had I been buried last week, there would have been little pomp and ceremony, little to celebrate, and little to praise. But with the reading of the Scriptures and the singing of the Psalms, there might have been something worthwhile for the small gathering to think about.
