Thoughts From My Father's Funeral

Yesterday, John Sherck wrote about how people choose to remember their loved ones at funerals. As I read his entry, I thought of my father’s funeral.

Though my father was raised in a southern Baptist family, by the time I knew him he was largely non-religious. Not anti-religious, but basically indifferent to it. During my childhood, he rarely attended church.

This changed when he married for the second time. His new wife was an active churchgoing Baptist, so he attended with her for the duration of their married life. However, I always understood him doing this mainly as a way to please her; it wasn’t something he would have done on his own.

Indeed, I can remember him telling me about the unctuous, self-righteous preacher at their church many times. “I always feel like breaking into a chorus of ‘How Great Thou Art’ every time I see that man,” my father told me on several occasions.

So, after he died, I wasn’t thrilled when his widow chose this same preacher to deliver my father’s eulogy. But as I was surrounded by my fundamentalist relatives and because I didn’t want to make a scene that would detract from the dignity of my father’s funeral service, I decided to grit my teeth and bear it.

I was calm during the service, until the preacher mentioned how my father had “finally accepted Christ” and how glad he was that my father would not be going to hell, after all.

I saw red and it took every bit of my self control not to jump up and tell the preacher off. My father was a good man who cared about others and always helped those less fortunate. Those who have been reading my blog for any length of time know this.

Surely, if there is a heaven, my father was always destined to go there, and not because of a particular set of words mumbled late in life, mainly to please his wife.

But as I nearly lost it at that point in the funeral, I suddenly heard my father’s voice in my head singing, “How Great Thou Art”. I nearly laughed out loud, knowing that this was my father’s parting private joke he’d just shared with me.

Thoughts?