o1mnikent

This morning I checked Language Log and was pleased to find an article that discusses possible origins of the phrase butt naked, as in “he was accosted for running around butt naked in downtown Lynden.”

If you have a few spare minutes, take a read.

If you don’t, stop what you’re doing. It’s probably less important.

I came across this article in the Seattle Times yesterday that documents changing the name ‘Christmas tree’ to ‘holiday tree.’ The article says:

City leaders in Boston on Thursday night lighted what until a few days ago had been called a “holiday tree.” Under pressure from conservative groups and after the Canadian logger who has long donated a tree to Boston said he would have thrown the tree into a wood chipper if he had known the city would relabel his gift, Mayor Thomas Menino changed the evergreen to a Christmas tree.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., this week ordered the Capitol Holiday Tree, so called since the 1990s, be renamed the Capitol Christmas Tree.

And Lowe’s home-improvement stores took down “Holiday Trees” banners at its locations this week after receiving more than 1,000 complaints. A spokeswoman said Lowe’s has “proudly sold Christmas trees in our stores for decades.”

The word ‘Christmas’ obviously contains the word ‘Christ’, which indicates that whatever business or organization (or the government, for that matter) that uses the word is endorsing a particular religion – namely Christianity. In an attempt to secularize the season, trees are now instead referred to has holiday trees, and students in public schools are encouraged to say ‘Happy Holidays.” The article goes on to say:

The Supreme Court has ruled that recognizing religious holidays is fine in some instances but not in others. For instance, the court has ruled a creche in a courthouse unconstitutional because that would make it appear government was endorsing a particular religion.

But the inclusion of symbols from different religions in a display would be legal, as would a government-provided display that mixed religious and secular symbols such as reindeer.

Without getting into a debate over church and state, it seems that everybody is forgetting that etymology is not an indicator of present meaning. What a word meant in the past – two hundred or two thousand years ago – cannot fully describe its present meaning. For example, the present word ‘grammar’ meant something very different two thousand years ago. It comes from the Greek ‘gramma’ and its related verb ‘graphein’, which means ‘to write.’ Before the invention of writing in Greek, the word meant ‘to scratch.’ As soon as writing was invented, the meaning changed to refer to the scratching on a surface that rendered something legible and readable. Soon, the old meaning of scratching was dropped, and today when we say ‘to scratch’, there is no connotation of writing.

Need another example? I just read this etymology of ‘consul’ on Inflections:

consul, n., one of two officials, chosen by the Senate, who ruled the Roman Republic. From con- together + sal walk, literally those who walk together. The title, without the attendant power, was maintained during the Empire. Starting in 1601 it began to be used in English to mean a representative of the foreign merchants in a port or city who negotiates with the government and promotes commercial relationships. This grew into the current sense of a diplomat who assists citizens abroad and promotes commerce with his home nation.

On etymological grounds, the word ‘holiday’ ought to be banned on the same grounds that ‘Christmas’ is banned and for the same reasons that ‘grammar’ no longer has anything to do with scratching. Geoffrey Pullman writes on languagelog.org:

You can’t expunge religion by switching to “holiday”: the etymology of holiday has “holy” in it! And the etymology of the word “Saturday” has the name of the Roman god Saturn in it, but that doesn’t mean we should rename Saturday to avoid offending those who honor it as their sabbath, by implying that we honor the pagan gods of ancient Rome. We don’t call it that to honor Saturn. Nor do we honor the Norse goddess Freya (who rides into battle on a boar called Hildisvin the battle-swine, by the way) when we call Islam’s holy day “Friday”.

Lesson learned? The meaning of a word is not determined by its etymology. The term ‘Christmas’ has very different meaning from the original ‘Christ’ + ‘mass’. While etymology is important (and extremely interesting), countless other factors indicate the full meaning of a particular word – the community, the context, the relationships of the surrounding words, and even the ‘transcendental signified’, according to Derrida. But that, along with the church and state debate, is another topic for another day.

[EDIT: see this post on Bob Keeley's blog and this post on Nathan Hart's blog.]

Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaker: Life and Studies from the Dismal Trade, spoke at Calvin Seminary on Friday morning. Lynch is a poet, writer, adjunct professor of writing at the University of Michigan, and undertaker from southeast Michigan. “I embalm and I do sonnets,” he remarked. “Anywhere in between I’m willing to talk about.”

After an introduction by Neil Plantinga, Lynch asked for the essentials. “I’ve tried to wrestle with this – what are the essential elements of a good funeral? You’ll do a few! The numbers are convincing – 100% of people die. We will not all have sex and pay taxes, but we will all cease to be. So, you tell me – what are some of the essentials of a good funeral? Can you think of any one thing?”

One woman remarked that the community is essential. Lynch agreed, but then stated the obvious. “If you’re going to have a funeral, isn’t an essential element a dead guy? It’s the thing we seem to be missing a lot of.” He called it an existential event. “It’s about being and ceasing to be. If what we are affirming is the next life, is it not our obligation to move the dead and the living in that direction?”

Lynch continued, “It’s the commemorative equivalent of a wedding without the bride and groom, or a baptism without the baby, or Job without the sores, or Genesis without the frogs… If you are talking about Christ resurrected, or some downsized version of your hope that something else is out there, bring the evidence that something else is out there in front, and say, ‘behold, I show you a mystery.’”

Lynch also emphasized the need to “go the distance,” to go to the graveside and see the body into the ground, or watch the cremation – see the light, feel the heat, and warm your hands over it. “It’s like not seeing a football play because of rain… ‘we’ll give you a DVD of the Ohio State game.’ It’s our religious obligation to say the prayers at graveside, not curbside, not the chapel. We have to go the distance.”

He commented on the mediating role of the pastor at the funeral, standing between life and death, between the living and the dead, between the grieving family and the corpse. “The corpse is doing what the corpse is doing, the community is saying, ‘What just happened here? He’s quiet! He smells in a bigger way than usual! Why is it cold? Can it happen to me? What comes next?’ You, the pastor, bring some take on those questions – you will not have the answers – and they can ask those questions and God will hear them and God will care for them. You have brought them the best they can do. You have allowed them to deal with it and you will give them the hope that God hears them and God weeps with them and God will dry their tears.”

He closed by saying, “You have to know when to say nothing and stand with them, and say something that affirms their right to ask the hardest questions and shake a fist at God’s faith, and go the distance. Go to the oblivion, let them ask their questions, and the best you can do it put your arm around them and say, “I wonder, too” and in this you have given them an article of faith. It is uncertainty, it is doubt, it is wonder. Like that guy in the Bible – ‘I gotta touch, I gotta see him!’ Thanks be to God.”

I just heard a lecture/conversation with Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking. I managed to get most of the text. I’ll post some thoughts later. Here it is:

—-

Conversation with Thomas Lynch

Neil Plantinga introduced

“Thanks for that generous and vaguely obituarial introduction. And to hear that in the present tense is a joy.”

In front of clergy: scary proposition

“I used to sit and say, ‘I could do better than that.’ He said, ‘why don’t you give the homily,’ and I have never been as frightened in my life. I’ll never do that again. Preaching to bishops is like farting at skunks. You’re going to lose that war.”

“I embalm and I do sonnets. Anywhere in between I’m willing to talk about. And if I don’t have an aswer, I’ll make something up.”

“If you don’t talk, I’ll do a two or three hour poetry reading that any poet is waiting for. Proper audience being any group that outnumbers him or her.”

Guy from Iowa asks about the discontent of funeral directors, how we deal so poorly with death. Jay Jacobson and Todd VanBeck

“I do think that those of us who do spend a lot of time in proximity to the living and the dead… are on the one hand grateful for how good the species can be to one another, and on another hand disappoint on how we can miss the boat so often. … One of the great gifts after the publication was that the audience that I intended it for never got it, but the audience I never aspired to did [get it]. … I had been listening to every clergyman in my town try to make sense of these situations, and I think that’s when they bring their best. … I do think we have very often missed the boat as funeral directors and clergy, and I think the culture at large is … adrift when it comes to mortality. We are constantly caught up between the virtual and the real, and I think we have advocated our responsibilities to embolden our fellow humans to deal with death… we’re eager to do whatever they want – and I do think it’s important to meet people where they are… and I have to meet people where they are – but the wheel that worked the space between the living and the dead has gone off track. …In each case we knew what was going to be done – the religious framework for death had been well-constructed: you knew you’d dress in black, take off work, the men would stand around, the woman would be cooking, everything was done because all of the ethnic and religious identities would be brought to bear. But now as those identities have loosened their grip on our culture, we are adrift. I’m not longer burying Methodists and Catholics but bowlers and golfer. We are not defined by our faith, but by what we do in our spare time. The metaphors seem to be lightweight… Both of us have begun to see death as custom and convenience and cost-efficiency. So I’m told by the mortuary marketplaces that as soon as I provide a good box with the proper knick-knacks that I’m doing my box – as long as I provide the proper retail event. And you are sort of brought in as an extra – not as an ultimate concern. I wrote about Peter Pain – that not his real name – who died of a brain tumor. He was a golfer, he was cremated without prayer, his ashes place in a golf bag and placed on a shelf in our parlor, and people would come in and say things – doesn’t he look natural? – doesn’t he look like a golf bag? To me, this is the ridiculous amid the sublime. Instead of bringing people near to the real mystery of mortality and faith, we are always willing to settle for the knick knacks – the stuff over the substance, the accessory over the essential. And I’ve tried to wrestle with this – what are the essential elements of a good funeral? You’ll do a few! The numbers are convincing – 100% of people die. We will not all have sex and pay taxes, but we will all cease to be. So, you tell me – what are some of the essentials of a good funeral? Can you think of any one thing?

Woman: “…an essential element… is bringing together of a community… we’ve become so individualistic. [I read an article…] wanting to make a funeral so personal. What does a particular person in the family want? … The language of community seems to be disappearing. … To face [death] is faced best in community. Maybe that’s why we’re paying more attention to the periphery.”

Thomas Lynch: “I’ve been to funerals where there was no real community. I mean, community in the sense of the more the merrier. There seems to be a relationship between each one’s load of grief and the people who show up to help bear it. I’m looking for the essentials here.”

Man: “I make a distinction between a funeral and a memorial service.”

Thomas Lynch: “I do too. If you’re going to have a funeral, isn’t an essential element a dead guy? It’s the thing we seem to be missing a lot of. I mean, do you know that there is a direct relationship between the likelihood of a corpse being in its own funeral and the body count on team. The number of bodies… prime time… is related to the likelihood that you’ll see your grandmother’s corpse.”

Man: “I can barely breathe.”

Thomas Lynch: “Maybe you’ll be the guy!”

Man: “I go to a memorial service, and if we call it a dead body, we call it a funeral. … Memorial services: let’s celebrate the life of so and so… I go there because I want to be sad. … When you go to a funeral, there’s more room for sadness, and it relates directly to lament. We’re swimming upstream in this culture, inviting people to be sad.”

Thomas Lynch: “Thank you… not only does it resonate with my own experience, but it brings up this essential element of the dead guy, the corpse. It is true that we are in a culture that approves of a good laugh rather than a good cry, and has missed the intuition that the good humor only takes place in proximity to [the bad stuff]. I had the good fortune of growing up [in a funeral parlor] and I noticed that [with the dead guy in the room] they would give themselves these time outs – “I don’t know what to say” – and that would lead to a narrative that would end in a small laugh. … There’s no sense in a good laugh unless you know it redeems a good cry. [The director of a show on HBO – I didn’t get the name of the show – about death said the] formula [was] straightforward… he wrote to me, “once you put a dead guy in the room, you can talk about anything.” It is exactly the kernel of wisdom by which the corpse of Christ gets into our liturgies. Are we only talking about the dead? What sense would it make if he didn’t die and rise? This is a man who is slaughtered and has risen. This is the thing that no one else has done. And yet we are constantly trying to organize these celebrations of life. … Ours is a species that deals with death by dealing with our dead. The idea of dismissing the dead guy and then arranging these life affirming, positively uplifting events where the finger food is good and… we declare closure just before the Merlot runs out, and one of me has happily downsized the dead guy so we can all fit it easily into our schedule – because a corpse does trouble with our schedule, the day care, the meetings… death undoes our best wishes to plan and get it done right and efficiently. As clergy, we go for the knick-knacks and convenience. For clergy of a certain generation it was the only book they ever read about death and dying [don’t know name of book… in 70s]. It was about getting a good deal on the box. Now, we’re still looking for ways around the mortality issue, there are still people who view it solely as a market event, and there are people in your line of work that see it just as a religious occasion. …But it’s an existential event, it’s about being and ceasing to be. The essential element is the dead guy. If what we are affirming is the next life, is it not our obligation to move the dead and the living in that direction? …and get the living to the edge of a life…. But we allow people to arrange these celebrations of life, and then we schedule a memorial that is convenient and cost-efficient… and lovely, and the essential element is missing. It’s the commemorative equivalent of a wedding without the bride and groom, or a baptism without the baby, or Job without the sores, or Genesis without the frogs. It misses the value of humor and pathos. If you are talking about Christ resurrected, or some downsized version of your hope that something else is out there, bring the evidence that something else is out there in front, and say, ‘behold, I show you a mystery.’ …The dead don’t care. Ask them! I have, and- nothing. I take this as a sign. They don’t care! But, for some reason to their brother-in-law, it makes a real difference. The dead matter, but they don’t care. So the people are essential, and the person, whoever it is – pastor, rabbi, etc. – whoever stands between the quick and the dead and says, “I know what you’re thinking,’ but then says ‘let me tell you a mystery, how you can laugh and cry in the same moment,’ Some crazy person has to stand between the nature and the natural and explain it. … Jake Andrews said, ‘they can cremate, but not before they bring them by me so I can do what I have to do. My job is to see that person into the next life… prayers, book of common prayer…’ That’s what I have to do. They have these nice chapel services… ‘I have to see them into the ground’ To go the distance with them. Practically speaking, his job was to go with them religiously, and it emboldened people to go with us. I never had people say, ‘ I wish I hadn’t done that.’ And they’d thank you, too, if you said, ‘Wait, I can embolden you, too.’

Man: “You said that faith is the only cure for fear.’ What are the best metaphors that crazy people have shared?”

Thomas Lynch: “A Christian metaphor for suffering, death, and resurrection… you have to give it to them, and you know… when someone doesn’t really believe it. I remember Bishop [I didn’t get his name] testifying in front of Congress [in the Jack Kevorkian case]… he sat with the cross of Christ on his chest and said, “I can see no good reason for meaningless suffering…” and I wanted to break the TV over his head. Don’t you get it?! That cross… sign that no suffering is without meaning. All suffering has meaning to the extent that it links us to the suffering of Christ. I think the Christian metaphors work, but every culture has brought it’s own metaphors to bear. The doing it, not the going around it. We should acknowledge that we have a problem with fire… [don’t like to be cremated]… we’re nearing about 40% [cremation rate]. Depending on where you are… depending on how rooted you are… [this determines your] problem of fire… [after all, you] go to hell where you’re not freeze dried but you burn. … In Calcutta the dead are burned publicly with ritual song and breath. All this ritual movement of the dead and the living to their final stations, and yet here we are in a culture that wants to cremate 40-50% and nobody wants to do fire. …It’s like wanting a moral society and no churches. We have this bad idea, and I keep saying, “come with me, and you’ll see that it’s warm, and light, and releasing, and restores the spirit to the spirit’s maker.” Isn’t that what we’re after? And yet we send off our dead to be burned without witness. What metaphors work? The cold, the stamping, the wordlessness, the community gathered to do this thing. Bear it, carry it, dig it, bury it, burn it. And only then will that other version make sense to them, because at a memorial service, it’s just another accessory, like another version of ‘I did it my way.’

Man: “[I’d like to] return to the comment about the need for the community to come along. I couldn’t help but think… Jackson’s quantity of cremation… concerned about profit because there wasn’t as much money… I smirked… we ought to have more funerals so ‘Lynch & Sons’ [sarcasm] can make more money.”

Thomas Lynch: “Do I have a self-interest? I suppose I do. …When someone calls you in the middle of the night, they’ll pay whatever you ask. But we don’t sell that. We sell knick-knacks. …If cremation makes more sense –and I think it does, we’re less grounded, rooted, mobile, and divisible – but not when it’s at odds with the religious metaphors and practice. I’m saying enrich it ceremonially. It would be fine if I went out of business. My parish priest says, ‘Tom, why do they call you first?’ I say, ‘because I answer the phone.’ I was talking to hospice people… and there was this intersection… cathedral on one corner, bank on another, Jackson life on another, and funeral home on another. They all try to get in each other’s pockets…. If you call any at three in the morning, the only one that will answer is the funeral home. So I have an interest in people doing funerals, I don’t care [how they do it]. My father used to say, ‘Take care of the service, the sales will take care of themselves.’ This is why most of us are told, ‘we don’t want to be a burden to our children.’ But I do want to be a burden to my children. They have all been a burden to me. And if bearing that burden doesn’t occasionally become vexatious, then what to they need me for? If they can’t figure out with their cell phones and blackberries and mp3 players how to deal with the likes of me, then how should some 80-year-old figure it out?”

Man: “I think I learned about the community part when [a prisoner] died. He was 55 at the Jackson prison and his family couldn’t afford to come to Jackson from Detroit, and the funeral homes took turns being the morgue of the month… they called me and said I’ve got this guy, can you bury him. Phil and I rolled out the casket together, Phil went back to the Hearst. It was just me and Franky. I had this sermon with me, but it wasn’t right. I thought about Franky. Was he ever loved? What did Franky think of his life? What gave him meaning? Once I realized I was talking to myself…”

Thomas Lynch: “This is the tree talking in the forest business. It is true that there are those services in which there is only the dead guy, the people who got him there, and the crazy person in the middle. These are the most necessary funerals. This is the basic deal among humans: God is watching.

Man: “In regards to community… I’ve noticed a lack of presence of children. Can you comment?”

Thomas Lynch: “I don’t know. In church, do you mean?

Man: “Yes. Why are we afraid?”

Thomas Lynch: “Good question. Pastoral care: ask if the kids will be coming, because if so, I’d like to make some of my remarks to them. This is a learning experience, when the curve is very steep. Kids get this. They walk in and say, ‘where are his feet?’ They don’t want to know… where’d they come from. We’re thinking ‘this is mystery’, they just want the facts. Where are the feet? We think in heaven… earth. They want us to say, ‘right there.’

John Bolt: “As someone who read Jessica [last name]’s book in seminary… our own experience in my family, with the death of both my father and father-in-law… experience has been wonderful. But the one thing with my father’s and my mother in law’s funeral… one of the local cemeteries in the area… we were told that because of county regulations, the graveside attendance was no longer possible. We managed to sneak the family into the service. Is this becoming common because of liability? Is this a pattern? Because I think it’s really sad.”

Thomas Lynch: “Here’s how you fix it. Wasn’t it easier after Johnny and Susan got born… nothing but the staff was there… wasn’t it easier for them? Didn’t they just love it? Then men of my generation said, ‘I want to be there.’ And wasn’t it helpful, moms, for us to be there for things like us saying, ‘breath.’ Our being there imprinted us with something that we recognized as deeply human. …Intensive care, for all its science, was not as good as people really being there. And the hospice movement was brought to us because women of my generation insisted on it, just like the men of my generation insisted on being there. Do you think a [who?] could stand up to the moral power of half a dozen clergymen? It’s not about getting in the gate, it’s about getting in the ground. It’s like not seeing a football play… ‘we’ll give you a DVD of the Ohio State game.’ It’s our religious obligation to say the prayers at graveside, not curbside, not the chapel. We have to go the distance.”

Man: “With regards to essentials, one of the essentials that I’m thinking is that there has to be hope presented. We have been hit over the head that we need to get to lament, but can you have a service with grief and lament, do we get to the hope?”

Thomas: “The corpse is doing what the corpse is doing, the community is asking, ‘What the hell just happened here? He’s quiet! He smells in a bigger way than usual! Why is it cold? Can it happen to me? Why is it cold? What comes next?’ You bring some take on those questions – you will not have the answers – and they can ask those questions and God will hear them and God will care for them. You have brought them the best they can do. You have allowed them to deal with [it] and you will give them the hope that God hears them and God weeps with them and God will dry their tears. None of you heard a call, you heard silence. No one spoke to you the way they spoke to Abraham, there was no voice. It was the silence that made you think, “maybe.” You have to know when to say nothing and stand with them, and say something that affirms their right to ask the hardest questions and shake a fist at God’s faith, and go the distance. Go to the oblivion, let them ask their questions, and the best you can do it put your arm around them and say, “I wonder, too” and in this you have given them an article of faith. It is uncertainty, it is doubt, it is wonder. Like that guy in the Bible – “I gotta touch, I gotta see him, too.” Thanks be to God. The casket is like a church, none will get you into heaven, none will keep you out. It is not about the accessories. Do the essentials right, and the rest will take care of itself.”