Comforting?

Following the death of a long-time neighbor who was a long-time sufferer of diseases, too many and too illusive to name, there was a memorial service.  These gatherings are events I typically circumvent whenever possible.  I long ago paid my dues to those traditional superstitions that force people into church pews.  But due to my concern for the widower and how he might view a friend who will live next-door for perhaps decades yet ahead, I went to the service.  And of course, I hated being there.  It was held in an ostensibly non-denominational church, though the speaker slipped up and mentioned they were Baptist.

The same speaker, perhaps a lay minister, certainly not a trained orator, repeatedly used the objective pronoun him as half of the compound subject of sentences.  "Him and Marie were happy together."  "She and him always helped others."  "It was where him and Marie first met."  "Marie and him invited folks into their home."  Drove me a bit to distraction, which was really helpful to me.  Distraction was a welcome relief against the droning of the obligatory service.

The second speaker, the important one who intimated that he was the one tapped to bring the message, was more polished but no less offensive.  His nice dark suit, the only suit in the room where we had all been told to dress casually, probably gave him cool confidence.  His shop-worn scriptural references naturally gave him that solid ground for sounding confident and smooth in his comforting of the bereaved.  Personally I felt somewhat fortunate that much of his text was from the old testament book of Isaiah, and while he droned on, I was hearing in my mind a beautiful musical score by George Frideric Handel.  Most of those biblical passages being read in a hushed monotone were utilized in Handel's oratorio, The Messiah, which I had learned and performed back in college.

Comfort ye my people was part of one of the biblical phrases and this comfort became the minister's key point.  He was sure that we all were comforted by hearing (for the umpteenth time) about the travails of the Hebrews in captivity in Babylon.  Surely many in the crowd were quite comforted in those few moments to not actually be thinking about the recent death of their friend.  It's much less discomforting to dwell on a whole culture being conquered and abused by another.

He did surprise me at one point, however, by making an emphatic statement that everyone will face death and all will stand in the judgment day.  His confident emphasis carried further in stating that it is so good that we all know we will not merely disappear into nothingness, that we will not become one with everything.  And that we know we are not going to be reincarnated.  He then offered that it is such a comfort to know we will be brought back to life to stand before our  judge after we die.

Naturally I felt much better for having been there to hear this.  Boy-howdy, was that judgment stuff comforting!  And it was so good to find out what we know!

After opening that crock, he continued to unimpress me (and now the Handel music was absent), so I began to occupy my mind by thinking of things I would rather be doing than sitting there in hell.  To be a good neighbor and a friend, being there was what I simply had to do, but it would have been far more comfortable for me to show my devotion to a neighbor in so many better ways.  It would have been preferable to perhaps crawl under his house to look for a dead animal that was causing an odor.  Or to help him weed his flower garden.  Or repair his golf cart.  Or scrub down his driveway.  Or maybe clean up his vomit if he got sick.

There are many ways in which I can be comfortable assisting a neighbor; sitting in a church of any kind and hearing poorly spewed traditional ignorance is far from comforting to me.

The real comfort is simply that Marie is no longer feeling pain.  Knowing the suffering she did and the years of worry her husband endured, I'm sure him feels that way too.