NOTE: This is helpful only in terms of detail, tone, consistent point of view, approximate length, and connection to a larger theme or idea. This piece has many weaknesses. As a narrative for this assignment it is light on dialogue and presents the speaker as directly addressing the deceased.
Prayer for the Faithful Departed
------To Mary Margaret Herlihy Garland
When I walked with you to church that day, like so many times before preparing myself to watch you in faith, I had not made the decision yet. Only when the Father had broken the bread and poured the wine did the seed begin to sprout. Today would be my first communion. Thinking back now, I often wonder how you took my asking. Your faith so essential to you, your faith in the Lord, your faith in the goodness of people, your faith in your family. Every time a new friend entered, your greeting put them at ease, put your loved ones who were hosting them at ease; you seem to express your faith by saying “I trust you. If you trust this person to be here with your family, then I trust them as well, for my trust in you is complete. My love in you is complete.”
Perhaps that is why when you quickly and quietly informed me of the proper rituals and sent me with your blessing ahead of you to receive communion, I viewed this as a gift. It was your act of trust. You saw my request neither as secular curiosity nor light-hearted whim, but received my request with the faith that I was worthy, that my motivations, while perhaps unknown to me, so young and naïve, were to be trusted. You had faith in me. I have thought much about you lately. My initial feelings were of how little I knew you. Your youth, your friends, your long life before me laid out like a blank canvas with splotches of retold memories sprinkled here and there. But none of these missing details matter, like the facts behind a story of truth, they are meaningless and arbitrary. The dates and times, the names and places, are all pale to the shining brightness of your love and faith. For I knew you, I knew you through those mysterious and difficult ideals which most struggle with: love and faith.
At today’s mass where your absence hung in the air like the mist and smoke of muir and incense, I thought to receive communion again, but the time and place for that seemed to be lost. Now here without you, things seemed false. The altars boys were now bearded, bald men without costume or the air of apprenticeship. They wore earth-toned sweaters, black sneakers, and khakis. The church, too, was foreign. In my memory, your church was stone and marble with figurines and artifacts which spoke of a different time and a different place. Although here the space is still airy, the peak still high, the mysterious and timeless tenor is replaced with a modern chord. The altar, where the father said at most two words in Latin, is wide and inviting. His sermon full of references to pop culture and television is too sharply focused and, like the altar, too approachable. Gone are the mystery and obscurity of the large passages of Latin, the antechambers behind the altar, and the power of the service. Seeing the father’s slacks and shoes from beneath his outfit, seeing his toupee off kilter in the back, the mysteries of your faith and my youth were absent or at best casually and minimally draped around something else. That church, your faith, your passing. It is all connected. With my father to my right and my son to my left, the Lord’s Prayer swept across the three generations losing volume and meaning as it moved across us. The faith in the church so strong in you, attending Mass and being an active parishioner all those years, passed to my father, whose schooling and youth were dominated by that faith, and who himself had deep faith but lacked your commitment to the church, passing to me, who while baptized and instilled with the ability to recite the Lord’s prayer from my youth, kept silent, apart from the proceedings, and finally on to my son, never baptized, probably never even hearing the Lord’s Prayer and surely unable to recite it. Your passing is a loss of faith. It is an irrevocable loss. Often at times of difficulty or loss, even the most devout will do away with faith, they will curse the Lord’s name, they will question His motives, their faith will crumble around them, however, this is not akin to that. It is not my faith which is rocked; it is not my faith which is lost. It is yours. In losing you, I have lost my sole connection to a faith full of sustenance and truth. I have lost what it means to be loved by someone of faith. I have lost what it means to be trusted by someone of faith. I have lost the mystery and power of your faith and your God. This loss leaves a void, which I fear will not be filled. During all the future times of your absence my memories and thoughts of you can sustain me and fill my heart’s desire to be with you; they will help me keep you alive. However, I feel the loss of your faith cannot be replaced so easily. The source of that spring has dried up. The stream, which rushed so clearly and so faithfully poured forth, is now not even a trickle. So while I remain silent during the Lord’s Prayer at your final mass, I am saddened that my sons will never drink from your faith, and fear they may never even have a thirst for it.
