Yesterday I attended a funeral.

I didn’t know the deceased, the father of a friend and colleague. I went to support my friend, to join with him and his family, many of whom I also don’t know, in paying attention, and in enacting the formal gestures by which we honor the end of a life.

All lives are significant. It’s not my purpose here to make any distinctions between persons. I was brought up to believe that one went to funerals, and I’m thinking here about what that may mean to me–now that I’m getting close enough to my own funeral that I can think about it as a palpable thing.

My companion on the 150 mile journey to Sikeston, Missouri, where the funeral was held in a Presbyterian church, was another colleague and friend, a member of the Society of Jesus who is more familiar with funerals than I am by virtue of his vocation as a priest. But we were both brought up to believe that you went to funerals, and as we talked about this shared experience, my friend remembered a little essay that he likes to use in classes sometimes. It’s called “Always go to the Funeral,” and it was written by Deirdre Sullivan as part of the This I Believe series on NPR.

I like the homeliness of Sullivan’s thoughts. Here’s the heart of it, perhaps:

Sounds simple — when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do. But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.

“Always go to the funeral” means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don’t feel like it. . . . In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

For me, there’s still more. I remember a funeral years ago, when the priest (a man I loved) read the great prayer that opens the prayerbook service, with it’s solemn quotation from Job, from the back of the church — taking us all in:

As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth.
After my awaking, he will raise me up;
and in my body I shall see God.
I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him
who is my friend and not a stranger.

Death is always inconvenient and sudden, even if expected. We who are not dead are called out of life to pay attention to a sudden absence. A certain one there was, and that one is no more. And so one goes the funeral–to bear witness and in the enactment know again and for the first time the age-old gestures of bereavement and consolation to the bereaved, who are also ourselves no matter we didn’t know the deceased.

The church was full for my friend’s father’s funeral. There was comfort in that beyond the familiar words from John’s gospel, “Let not your heart be troubled . . . ,” even for a stranger to the place and its community who were mostly to me just folks. Here’s how Sullivan describes a similar experience at her father’s funeral.

On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I’ve ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.

Not friends, not loved-ones, not the communion of saints, just “folks in the church” gathered together — knowing what we know.