funeral
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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A Wake
When I was a kid, my Dad was always going to wakes. With a stressful day job, three-and-then-four baby girls at home, two sick parents, and an overall busy life, he would frequently drive an hour to attend a wake for five minutes and then drive home. I never understood all of the effort, until…