1920

I went to the funeral of Mrs. T. at St. Cecilia’s church. It must be a grateful task to deal as a priest with the definite symbols which the Catholic church uses and to dispense the absolute certainties with which she assures the faithful. Of course the requiem mass contains nothing that would be of obvious comfort to the sorrowing heart. But the implication of the whole transaction is that the soul is now taken up in another world in which the heartaches of this life are overcome.

I don’t think the mass is so satisfying as a well conducted Protestant funeral service in which some cognizance is taken of the peculiar circumstances of a great sorrow and of the unique characteristics of the deceased. But it is certainly immeasurably superior to the average Protestant service with its banalities and sentimentalities. Religion is poetry. The truth in the poetry is vivified by adequate poetic symbols and is therefore more convincing than the poor prose with which the average preacher must attempt to grasp the ineffable.

Yet one must not forget that the truth is not only vivified but also corrupted by the poetic symbol, for it is only one step from a vivid symbol to the touch of magic. The priest does, after all, deal with magic. When religion renounces magic it finds itself in the poor workaday world trying to discover the glimpses of the eternal in the common scene. That is not an easy task, but it is not an impossible one. Wherefore let us envy the priest, but pity him too, meanwhile. He has been betrayed by his magic. He has gained too easy a victory over life’s difficulties and he helps his people to find a premature peace. The rivers of life in Protestant religion are easily lost in the sand, but if they really run they carry more life than holy water.