Service No. 4 -- Jimmy Graham's funeral

James D. Graham died about a week ago, alone in his Fishtown home. He's the son of my father in law's older brother, and one of the most welcoming members of my wife's family. The Christmas after we got married, for instance, we sent out cards with our wedding photo on it, and Jimmy got me in the family pollyanna. In addition to the gift, he included a holiday photo of his own: it was him, passed out on the sidewalk with a bottle of Jack, one pant leg soaked in urine. On the card, he wrote, "What kind of people are you hooked up with now?" Apparently, he did a whole series of what he called "the bum pictures" and gave them out to everybody that year. That sense of humor made me feel right at home. It's something somebody in my own family might do.

Though the urine wasn't urine, and he was just pretending to be passed out, Jimmy did not take care of himself. He was unabashedly corpulent, a smoker, a drinker. To be honest, when my wife called me to tell me he'd been found in his house in Fishtown, dead at the age of 44, I was thrown but not at all surprised. It's like we borrowed some money from a friend, who said, "I'll just ask for it back when I need it." You're grateful for the help -- or for the time you had with this person -- but you know the end is going to come too soon.

There were tears, nonetheless, but I think the way Jimmy lived infused a more jovial tone to his wake and his funeral. I found out lots of things I didn't know about him, heard lots of stories about his days as a Korean translator in the Army and his life since. Jimmy was what I like to call "a good Democrat." A ward leader, he was very active in local politics and he worked for the City of Philadelphia, facilitating the welfare-to-work transition. Though his section of the city, Fishtown, is known as one of Philly's most racist corners, I was happy to note that his mourners were incredibly diverse, and great in number.

The wake was Friday night in Port Richmond, and the funeral very early Saturday morning, 10 minutes away by car in Fishtown. His father, my wife's Uncle Jimmy, asked me and a bunch of other people to be pallbearers, and I kind of wondered why he needed so many until I thought about it for a second. I've been a pallbearer a couple of times before, and usually it's taken six. There were 10 of us this time, and the casket was so huge that it was still dicey at a couple moments. I was glad to be able to help, of course. Honored even. The more I learned about Jimmy the more I liked him, and mourned him.

And then the eeriest thing happpened.

Kristen and I were in the car, in the procession, and listening to WXPN. As we drove through this close-knit section of this city, guys stood at attention on corners, hat in hands, watching the caravan roll past. And as we rolled up to the church the radio played a song called, of all things, "My name is James," by Randy Newman. Here are the lyrics I remember hearing:

There's a city that I dreamed of, very far from here
Very very far away from here, Very far away
There are people in the city, and they're kind to me
But it's very very far away you know, very far
They'll say James, James, James how are ya?
Isn't it a lovely day, James, James, James,
Were so glad you came here where we are, from so very very very far.

And it was a lovely day, and we were there to say goodbye to James, and to celebrate the fact that he came around for a while. Sometimes I think funerals are the truest thing human beings do.

The service was the first Catholic mass I'd been to in a quite a long time. I actually can't remember the one before this, but it might have been the funeral of my great uncle, Monsignor Richard Callahan, whom we all called "Unky." That was about nine months ago. In many ways, the last strings of my Catholic self were cut with his death. I long considered myself Catholic by ethnicity instead of belief, but he was a great and gentle man, and when he died I and many of the other members of my family found that our feeling of Catholic obligation died as well.

I sat near the front of the church, with my fellow pallbearers. Since I wasn't sitting with my wife, it was harder to take notes. She puts up with my scribblings as an extention of myself, but the other members of her family might not appreciate it, so I didn't have the freedom I usually do to make sure I remembered everything possible. So here are some things I do remember:

As a former altar boy and way-practicing Catholic, the mass is ingrained in me. If I just stand there, unthinking, the words of affirmation and worship will just leave my mouth of their own will. So I had to practice active non-participation. By this I mean I listened carefully to everything, and added my "Amen," or whatever proscribed response, only when I actually felt it. And I didn't say the prayers, or sing the hyms, or recite the Nicene Creed, and I did not take communion. That's the only moment of the experience that was at all awkward, because as I stayed silent through the liturgy, I looked around and was shocked at how few of the Catholic devotees actually did say the prayers and recite the creed. But they all took communion. Maybe they were just really hungry.

The altar boys in this particular church, Holy Name, had to kneel on bare marble. Ouch. I hope they were getting paid well to be there on a Saturday morning.

There was a co-celebrant, a deacon from South Philly who also happened to be Juan Ramos, a high-ranking member of City Council. Jimmy was not a personally powerful guy, but he was very close to power, which is almost the same thing.

I was amused to see way the priest sat in his chair, with his legs crossed neatly at the ankles underneath the seat just like we all did back in my days at St. Patrick's School.

The singer was what I call "a warbler," with that too-high wavering voice that old folks seem to find so beautiful. And another thing that was funny about the priest was that he wore a microphone and only chimed in on the singing when he knew the words by heart, which was seldom and sporadic. So the warbler would be warbling, the mourners murmuring, and every once in a while, the priest would broadcast one booming line and then go silent again. Nobody laughed, but I thought it was a riot.

His homily was unmemorable, and he's probably given it 100 times or more. He had it down pretty good, with no digressions or pregnant pauses. He did say one thing that struck a chord, and since I was pretty much indisposed to the entire message, I remember it without any of its context. Here's the line I stole a moment to write down: "God made us all to do the impossible." I thought about it and decided it's doctrine-free and worth believing in, no matter what the source. I'd like to think our job is to fire up as many small miracles as possible. The miracles of creation, reproduction, compassion, they all contribute to the collective, connecting godness that I usually believe runs through and binds us all.

And so, when a rousing rendition of Amazing Grace sent us back out into the cold, bright city morning behind this huge casket, I could feel the words in my heart. I was grateful to Jimmy for that, and when my wife came to me, sobbing, I cried too. It felt good, a justice done.

Service No. 3 -- Feb. 5 at Philly UU

It's taken me a long time to get around to this post because my feelings about the service were of a particularly low wattage. And I still don't know how much I can say about it.

As it was Super Bowl Sunday, it was fitting that the guest homilist was from Detroit. Her name was Diana Heath. Maybe she was renting out her home to some visiting Pittsburghers or Seattlites, and took the opportunity to get away from the craziness that descends regularly on the Super Bowl host city. She had good intentions, and I imagine her sermon has worked well on other days, in other years, but I wasn't feeling it.

A week and a half before Valentines Day, the sermon -- entitled "Love and Other Aggravations" -- was about love, and the true nature of love. It was the basic stuff, as I recall these many days later: Love is hard work, and it's often not that lovely, but it's the only thing that really heals us. It was just the wrong sermon on the wrong day for me, because I felt like the romantic I used to be is gone, bled pale and dry. Even the sound of the word -- love, l-o-v-e -- was so insipid, I was getting nauseous.

Ms. Heath's talk was constructed of a series of seveal stories, vignettes, depicted people made whole by love. It went on for a while, and I confess I stopped listening, and retreated into my own thought about the people I love and certainly my marriage. I don't feel like this is the time and place to delve there, but my sister attended this service with me and the post-church talk we had gave me a release that I didn't expect.

So I guess is was good, because we certainly wouldn't have come to that place together without the sermon. I hope my sister got as much out of it as I did.

The service itself was beautiful, as always, and the choir continues to be worth the five bucks I customarily put in the collection plate. I was grateful to my sister that she didn't ask to stay for coffee/tea afterwards, because I didn't really want to mingle. It was cold enough feeling like I was beyond the healing reach of love, but to be reminded of my own insecurities, and the fact that I'm stuck in this anteroom of a welcoming community with no clear way in... that wouldn't have been fun, and I might have abandoned the entire exercise right there.

As it is, I'm coasting along on less than inspired wings. If it weren't for the goal -- the 30-service resolution and the knowledge of the pace that I need to maintain to get there -- I might not still be looking for a spiritual space within myself right now. It's work, and more work is something I don't need. But my leap of faith for the time being is that I won't always feel this way. Breakthroughs will be made, with love or without.

Prayer I

This is the first in what I anticipate to be series of prayers. For further explanation, I refer you back to this post on prayer. I don't know what I expect to happen, but anyway:

During the UU service in Philly two Sundays ago, I occasionally glanced over to my right, across to my father, who was sitting a few feet away. I realized that my dad is good at praying. His eyes were closed, he leaned slightly foward. His hands were clasped not in a pious or overly serious pose, but as if he were trying of consolidate his energy, to focus. Anyone who looked at him whould have instantly known that he was in some kind of prayer.

It made me feel good that he can still pray, because it takes some scrap of faith. He's always been one of the most faithful people I've ever met. He's always had faith on both god and people, which I always thought was a beautiful thing. I have no idea where his faith in god is right now -- both my parents have been part of the recent exodus from the Catholic church, not so much for the sex scandals (although those didn't help) but there just got to be too many qualifiers attached. It's hard to be a pro-choice, pro-tolerance, post-feminist Catholic these days. Anyway, I was more worried about that faith in people that was so unique.

I remember a time, more than 10 years ago now, when I was at college in Missouri and fell into the most abject depression I've ever felt. I was suicidal. I was mercifully hospitalized, but I was also 1,000 miles from the family that was really the only reason I was still alive; I could not bear the guilt of having caused them pain. I spent a couple weeks in the hospital, among strangers, without shoelaces or pens or pencils or metal utensils or anything that I might use to kill myself. And my only daily contact with the outside world was a couple of phone calls, including a few with my mom. I can remember her saying to me, "Your dad's really in bad shape. He's losing his faith."

Now, in hindsight, that probably wasn't the ideal thing for her to say to someone in my particular situation, but I was effectively in a big old padded room with no way to hurt myself, so I guess any and all honesty is fair game. But it hurt me more than any hypothetical pain I might have caused by jumping off the eighth-floor balcony. Here was this irrepresible faith that I had always been able to count on, and I was breaking it.

This is what I thought about when I saw my dad praying so hard. He lost his job in a most humiliating and unjust way a couple months ago; it was a job he'd given a lot of his life to, and now -- understandably -- he's adrift. In his mid-50's, it's hard to start over, and none of us know exactly how to help him. The worst possible thing would be to watch him see all that he's worked for disappear, and that seemingly unshakable, almost childlike faith in the goodness of people with it.

So I guess this is my prayer: that his prayers, which I saw him offering to whomever, still have that faith behind them. I believe we'll all get through this time of crisis no matter what, but I want that quality of his to survive as well, because I rely on it more than either of us can truly know.