more from funerals

In my last post I chronicled the message of the preacher and some of the cultural dynamics at play in a funeral I attended recently.  Yet there are more insights I could share from such an experience.

1.  The event was actually a double-funeral.  The old man from the Bible School was buried alongside his twenty-something grandson. The deaths were said to be interrelated. The stress of hearing that his grandson had been stabbed to death by some of his gangster mates was too much for the old man.  Consequently, the other major dynamic at play in the preacher's message was the predicament of youth in modern South African culture.  This was not the first funeral we have attended for a young man who met a violent end; to my memory we have attended three other such funerals and have known of several other like incidents.  Youth violence among peers thus was the context for the preacher's admonition by way of the text not to look for Jesus "among one's relatives and friends".  "Friends may give you drugs," he said, referring to the known habit of the grandson to smoke dagga (marijuana) with his friends.

2.  The event also included a "tombstone unveiling" for a previously deceased member of the family.  Typically tombstone unveilings among the Xhosa are events separate from the burial of the dead, occurring perhaps a year or more later.  The tombstone unveiling on this day was quite literally an aside, performed in one corner of the large field where the funeral-goers were gathered for the burial, out of sight and earshot for many.  Still, I was able to get some explanation for the procedure.  The biblical justification for the tombstone unveiling was taken from Joshua 24:26-27, in which Joshua sets up a "large stone" as a witness against Israel should they forsake their pledge to "put away the gods that their ancestors served" and "serve the Lord" (24:14ff.).  Previously, I have seen church leaders base the practice on Genesis 35:20, in which Jacob "sets up a pillar" at the grave of his beloved Rachel, or 2 Samuel 18:18, in which Absalom sets up a pillar of remembrance prior to his own death because he had no son to do it for him.  What each of these texts has in common, it seems, is reference to a stone--and that in itself seemingly is enough to justify the practice of unveiling a stone for the dead in the name of being "biblical".

In my own cultural context for funerals, I don't ever recall the setting up of tombstones as something requiring special rationale; I suppose it is taken very much by the religious communities in which I grew up to be a stone of remembrance for the dead.  In the Xhosa context, however, it is clear that church leaders--if they have concerns that the event might be misconstrued by those attending--do feel pressure to explain the practice.  Thus, in this case, the attending bishop explained that "this is not a sin, we are not worshiping.  This is just a stone for remembrance."  He then proceeded by way of Joshua to locate the practice in the Bible, and also added the scriptural reference to Jesus Christ as the true "cornerstone."  I assume that the leader meant to guard against conceiving of the tombstone as a place where power could be conferred upon the dead person's living relatives, such as in the case of another pastor who once told the grandchildren at an unveiling for their grandfather that "now you have a place to come back to.  You can kneel here and be healed."  And so, while I still puzzle over how the stone of Israel's covenant with Yahweh is directly analogous to a stone of remembrance for a family's deceased, some rationale in the direction of memorial over magic is likely better than none.

3.  Xhosa funerals always include elaborate narratives from the person who most nearly attended or "nursed" the deceased in his or her last days or hours.  One of our students divulged to me that these narratives sometimes lend themselves to insinuating blame on others for the death of the person.  It has oft been noted that death in African traditional religion is not due to "natural causes"; there is a human agent of ill-will behind the death of a person.  Thus what in former times may have more commonly been ascribed to a witch (usually an old woman) plotting evil somewhere in the shadows (not that the days of fear of witchcraft have passed) has become in the present the fault of "some old woman who doesn't know how to drive" (my student's example), if the cause of death, for example, had been a car accident. The tendency to assign blame can easily drift into the call for vengeance (we found ourselves in the midst of such a situation at a funeral last year).  No such call was issued at this funeral, and the nearest blame for the death of the grandson was assigned to the grandson himself for not "listening to his parents"--a common complaint in the conflict between generations which deserves its own post.

Funerals are a treasure trove of cultural knowledge.  I am grateful to those African companions who enable me to reach some level of understanding.

-Joe

an interpretive stone

Another Bible conference. Another obscure reference to Absalom.

Last May, you might remember, one man had asked about the kiss of Absalom.http://joeannasawatzky.blogspot.com/2009/05/two-kisses.html On Saturday, in the reports of small groups to the general assembly, a young woman unveiled Absalom's stone (2 Sam 18:18).

If you don't get the pun, you don't live in this part of South Africa. The woman's "unveiling" of an obscure part of scripture for me came precisely in the context of her using that verse as a justification for her cultural practice of "unveiling tombstones" for deceased loved ones. Although I think it can happen at the same time as the funeral, tombstone unveilings commonly occur some months to a year after the person's death. As many families do not have enough money for both the funeral and the stone, the stone often follows at a later date. At that time, the family will again hold some kind of service (one of our Committee members in the Bible School assures me that an unveiling is strictly a family event, just a small event, and need not involve the broader community or the church. In reality, people often do make a big deal of it).

At any rate, the young woman's comment irritated me. The topic for the day was eschatology, or the theology of "last things." Because most of our students are fixated not on eschatology in its sense as the goal of history/creation but as the destiny of their dead loved ones, I too chose to focus the lesson on its personal dimensions, that is, on so-called "personal eschatology". Closing the first session leading into small group discussion, I had left students with the question, "What is our responsibility toward the dead?" Now I was getting the answers from this young woman. First, "we bury them." Then, "we unveil tombstones". Both answers, of course, came not on their own but with a scripture verse thrown in for support. And therein lies my irritation.

If there is a scriptural justification for tombstone unveilings, this was not it. First, Absalom was not setting up a stone for a loved one; he was setting it up for himself, worried that he would die without a son to remember him. Second, who is Absalom, and why should we follow him? The young woman's answer showed little concern for these considerations. In the end, Absalom's practice in this verse has no more to do with the woman's own than the stone. And that, it seems to me, is no rock on which to build the house of God.

-Joe