For the past ten years, I have been serving families who request a ‘ceremony’, that is, a time of prayer before the burial or cremation of a deceased loved one.
I chose to meet these families first at the municipal funeral home in Marseille for nine years, and for the past year, since I have been in Paris, at a crematorium. These families ask the Church to ‘celebrate’ with them this unavoidable moment in life, in this final stage before burial or cremation. They do not turn to parishes, as they are no longer in contact with a Christian community. They request this ‘ceremony’ in this ‘secular’ place to honour the deceased and experience the moment of their departure with respect and gratitude. Generally, the deceased was baptised but did not ‘practise’ their faith; or the people making the request were themselves baptised but have no or no longer have any connection to the Christian faith. Religion is part of their culture, allowing them to take this final step of respectful recognition, but many no longer have an explicit Christian life. It seems to me that this is one of those peripheries that Pope Francis urged us to reach out to with a certain urgency.
This mission brings me into contact with families at a particularly intense and emotional time for them. It is a time of great emotion, when memories bring back journeys of personal and family life, long or short: moments of gratitude for the richness of the deceased person’s life; moments when trials, conflicts and unresolved family tensions resurface, often making it very difficult to cope; or moments of truth when everyone is confronted with very existential questions about the meaning of life and death, for which we often have no answers.
In the life stories I hear, there is usually a foundation of humanity that cannot fail to remind me of the Gospel. As I reread all these stories, searching through the words, the experiences recounted, the convictions expressed, I feel and contemplate the presence and living action of our God, ‘Friend of men’ (cf. Wisdom 11:26), who recognizes his Spirit alive and at work in many commitments, gestures and expressions of a humanity ‘in the pains of childbirth’, certainly, but in search of fraternity, justice and peace.
My vocation as a helper is enriched not by confining it to fixed certainties, but by giving it the opportunity to constantly deepen this nagging question of the meaning of life, of its future beyond death. I am then able to humbly share these same questions with these families, to seek with them how the Word of God opens up new horizons for us, without confining us to dogmas that are inaudible today. Each time, I experience the power of the faith received from the Church and from the Word of God, which sustains the promised hope day after day: we are saved, but in hope, St Paul tells us (Rom. 8:24).
“Our consecration is lived in faith in the mysterious solidarity
that unites the living and the dead,
in the hope that God will be all in all.”
(Constitutions N° 12)