By Steven Norris
As I write these words, I am mentally and emotionally preparing for my sixth funeral in two weeks. Some seasons are just like that. We know from experience around the church that deaths tend to come in groups of two or three at a time.
As I’ve participated in these memorials over the past few weeks, I have been struck by a Southern tradition that never seems to get old for me — that of stopping for a funeral procession. As a child, my parents explained to me that this is what you were supposed to do when you saw a funeral procession from the church to the cemetery. You pulled your car over to the side of the road and waited for the procession to go by.
For most of us, the experience of riding in a funeral procession is a once-in-a-while experience. As a pastor, I have now ridden in more processions than I care to count. However, I am always touched by the gesture of pulling over to the side of the road and allowing a procession to have the right-of-way. Even when I am on the other side of the procession, I pull my car to the side of the road.
In doing so, I am saying to the family: “I see you. I want to pause to give witness to your grief. I acknowledge your loss. I will pause for a minute or two out of my day to affirm that all life is sacred — that each person has been created in the image of God; that each loss of life impacts us all.”
In pausing for a moment on the side of the road, I am affirming the truth of scripture: “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body…If one part suffers, every part suffers with it…” (1 Corinthians 12:12-13, 26). We are all part of an interconnected whole and the pain of one becomes the pain of all.
In days past, the bells of the local church would ring to announce the death of a member of the community. Reflecting on this, the pastor and poet, John Donne, wrote the following:
“No man is an island, entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less as well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thine own or of thine friend’s were. Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
So, when the procession comes your way, I encourage you to stop for a minute. Give witness. Join those in pain. Connect, if only for a moment — if only at a distance — to your neighbor who is walking through the valley of the shadow of death.