Is a call to a car crash a priest’s worst nightmare?
This September brought the kind of call most priests dread: “There’s been a terrible crash, can you come?” When details are sparse, the imagination goes into overdrive. Will it be a scene of absolute carnage? Will I know the people involved? What kind of injuries am I facing?
When a call comes at night, additional questions occur: ‘Will I be back home before dawn, or will I be able to sleep in any case? How will this affect my ministry tomorrow?’ Fortunately, this was a daytime call.
Priests, of course, realise that the other emergency services are our friends; they do everything in their power to protect us. Often by the time we arrive at an accident scene, the most severely injured have been taken to the nearest emergency room, there to be anointed by the local clergy or chaplain. The ones left will most likely be less severely injured — or deceased.
On this occasion, the first call was quickly followed by a more familiar voice, a parishioner whom I knew. His words were simple: “My brother has been in an accident. He is lying dead on the side of the road.” The words were still distressing and surrounded by tears, but the invitation seemed less alarming. And that is how it turned out. While I drove to the scene, dark possibilities still suggested themselves to me, but I made a simple prayer for the grace I might need to face what was before me. I brought holy water and a prayerbook; no oils were needed as everyone clearly realised the victim had died.
The emergency services had, as ever, done a great job. While the victim lay in a roadside field, they had made the place easily accessible. A tent surrounded the body, which was covered by a blanket. The victim’s family grieved in a discreet setting and were glad of the chance to pray with me for him. The blanket was pulled back for the final blessing, revealing that the victim’s passing to the new life had not been accompanied by any extreme pain or suffering.
After the prayers were said and words of sympathy exchanged, the time of waiting began. It was not a scene that I could leave before the family departed. And they were not going to leave till their loved one was carried away for a post-mortem, en route to a funeral home.
Several hours were spent in the company of the grieving, and much learned of the life now extinguished, lessons that informed a funeral homily later that week. It was a privilege to be there with them at that time, a grace sent by God who looks after his own.
We need the form!
In the parishes where I work, people ‘booking’ a baptism fill in a form. As well as providing the details for the baptismal register, it gives us permission to record this data in the register and also permits news of the baptism to be published in the newsletter.
In an ideal world, the form arrives in good time. But young couples with tiny babies do not live in ideal worlds, so sometimes getting the form filled in properly can be a challenge.
At a September baptism, there was no sign of the form even on the day of baptism, so in panic, details were hastily recorded and signed off on, with a promise to provide the civil cert number at a later (and hopefully not that much later) date. Such is the sometimes haphazard nature of parish life.
Too many tears at a funeral?
Funerals take many shapes in the rural parishes where I serve, and every one is different. Some are unexpected or tragic, others more expected. September brought one of the latter, where everything might be expected to go smoothly.
Strangely however, the funeral Mass unleashed a deep and unexpected grief in the close family members, which unfortunately overwhelmed the readers during the Liturgy of the Word at the funeral Mass. The person assigned the first reading was quickly reduced to floods of tears, making her words unintelligible and affecting the congregation too. Everyone who came to the lectern after her reacted in the same way. No one understood any sentence in the readings, nor in the prayer of the faithful either.
It is hard to know how to prepare for this. One could suggest that family members who are particularly close to the deceased participate in ways that do not involve speaking, eg by bringing gifts or mementoes, or by helping to place the pall on the coffin, but many think in advance they will be fine, but often then are not. The possibility of abundant tears underlies every funeral celebration, naturally, but it is unfortunate when it means the consoling words offered by the liturgy go unheard.
Pre-nupting means using a strange ‘churchified’ language
It’s been a while since I ‘pre-nupted’ anyone, but I got to do it in September. A young man getting married in a church not too far away was marrying within the month. (I presume he gave three months’ notice somewhere, if not to me!)
I had almost forgotten how bizarre some of the questions I was to ask this young man are. Here’s one that needs a bit of translation into English:
‘Does your wish for a Christian marriage indicate your adherence to the Catholic faith and your desire to practice it regularly?’
Two things strike me here. One is the strange sentence about ‘adhering’ to the Catholic faith. Wallpaper adheres to a wall by means of paste. It’s hard to transfer this image to faith, isn’t it? (I find it hard anyway.) And then there is the second part of the sentence about the ‘desire to practice the faith regularly’? I can only smile to myself when those pre-nupted, who for the most part are never inside a church, happily agree to having this desire.
Sometimes, if I am in an energetic mood, I negotiate a form of words that is more truthful than hypocritical. In this case, I have to admit that I couldn’t be bothered. He was going to marry in any case and would probably agree to any question that seemed to suggest a positive answer, no matter how little he expected to put it into practice.
All I can do is pray that at some stage the pre-nuptial enquiry form is revised and made more realistic in its expectations. Maybe if a priest in a parish was involved in its wording, rather than a canon lawyer, the result might be more suitable.
And another thing about pre-nuptial enquiry forms…
Who does one send these forms to? It used to be the case that the parish priest of the bride assembled the papers and sent them to the place of marriage. The advantage of this is that someone would look at the whole story of the couple (and spot problems). But now often each priest sends his completed form to the priest in the place of marriage, who usually doesn’t much care as long as all the paperwork is in order. Maybe something is being lost…