funeral

  • Life Well Lived – Raised Catholic 161

    Life Well Lived – Raised Catholic 161

    The following is a transcript of a Raised Catholic podcast episode.  To listen to the episode, click here. Today is episode 161: Life Well Lived Hi friends. This week I’ve been thinking a lot about well, death and funerals and legacy, but honestly, that’s really nothing new for me.  I actually don’t mind talking about death…

  • What’s Your Story? – Raised Catholic episode 14

    What’s Your Story? – Raised Catholic episode 14

    The following is a transcript from the Raised Catholic podcast. To listen to the podcast, click here. Today is episode 14: What’s Your Story? In our next few episodes, we’ll continue re-building our faith with topics like sin, grace, and ecumenism, just to name a few, and these episodes will bring us straight through the…

  • Cradle

    Cradle

    I’m a Catholic music minister, and I’m wearing gray as I stand at the front of the church and sing the opening notes of the entrance song.  A gentleman from the funeral home leads pallbearers with the casket down the aisle, and following them are a group of tearful mourners, wearing black and clinging to…

  • Veil

    Veil

    My friend Deacon Jerry came to mass today and that doesn’t seem all that weird except for the fact that he died a couple of weeks ago. During the Eucharistic prayers, several of my friends who art in Heaven gather around the altar and I acknowledge them there and pray for their families and their…

  • Flowers

    On Wednesday, I sang at the funeral for Arlene, a longtime member of our community. I watched with awe as the flowers came in, one huge arrangement after another. Made of coordinated fall colors, they were perfect for Thanksgiving and I thought to myself: in their grief, this family is giving their beloved chapel a…

  • Unsung

    Attending the funeral of someone who lived life well is like completing a masters-level course in an hour and a half. Lesson after lesson flies at you and you can’t quite catch each one, but you want to hold on to all of it if you can. I attended a funeral like this today for…

  • Christmas, Death, Birth revisited

    Earlier, I wrote about a pattern in my life that keeps coming up, and it’s modeled after three days in November of 2012 in which we celebrated my Mom’s last Christmas, mourned her death, and focused on her new life in Heaven. Now I find I go through these seasons over and over; times of…

  • Eulogy

    “You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story… “ Hamilton Yesterday, I embarrassed my daughter in the checkout line of the grocery store in which she works, and I left there thinking surely, here is yet another story to tell at my funeral. This is not a rare occurrence. Through the…

  • Tapestry

    “Not everything is a metaphor, Mom…not everything has to mean something,” my sixteen year old daughter says sometimes when I look too deeply at some small thing. And, I get it. Mothers can be annoying, and our quirky habits can be fodder for teasing and the very best eulogies. My ability to find a metaphor…

  • Obituary

    My Dad and his brother Franny are part of a generation, or maybe just a neighborhood, that is all about honor. Doing the right thing when no one is watching and paying respect are lost arts these days, but it’s part of how they grew up in South Boston in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s…