A corporal mercy
Wood, Geoffrey
THE LAST WORD A CORPORAL MERCY Geoffrey Wood Iwas curious that I felt so little emotion as I knelt in a front pew, close to my mother's casket, while a strange priest recited the prayers...
...Wonder about what...
...Then will the saying of Scripture be fulfilled: Death is swallowed up in victory...
...Humor her till it's over...
...a waitress at Abe's Oyster House, whose tips got us through the Depression...
...THE LAST WORD A CORPORAL MERCY Geoffrey Wood Iwas curious that I felt so little emotion as I knelt in a front pew, close to my mother's casket, while a strange priest recited the prayers of her funeral Mass...
...The individual should possess excellent writing and analytical skills and plenty of opinions (the more well-reasoned the better...
...And I say, "Yes—this and not the fatalism of Mulligan is what speaks to my heart and therefore tells me the whole truth and nothing short of the truth...
...You saw only your mother die...
...In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound of the last trumpet...the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed...
...Oblivion awaits us all...
...Responsibilities will include manuscript reading and editing, copy and proof editing, editorial and straight newswriting...
...What did you expect...
...Its initial impact seems to bring us up short, to cancel all thought of business as usual...
...A grave—is a restricted breadth Yet ampler than the sun And all the seas he populates And lands he looks upon...
...It's a beastly thing and nothing else....Her cerebral lobes are not functioning...
...But isn't that the way it is with death...
...Some previous newspaper or magazine experience is desirable, as is knowledge about the range of issues -religious, political, literary, and cultural—that the magazine covers...
...I mean, here was a life worthy of a novel...
...I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissecting room...
...and what's it all about...
...Now I am going to tell you a mystery," he says...
...This is a rewarding but demanding job...
...He recently retired from Sonoma County Health Services and now devotes his time to religious education in the diocese of Santa Rosa, California...
...says the cynic within my breast...
...Yet while I kneel there, gazing unseeing at the sanctuary floor, the celebrant's voice begins to infiltrate my benumbed brain...
...And I think: Here is the great gift of my Catholic tradition, this defiance, this refusal to remain numb in the face of death, this power of imagination to envision realities that lie beyond the evidence of our senses—to take events like birth, marriage, sickness, and death and turn them into sacramental moments, embroidering them with ritual and poetry and prayers that reveal them to be so much more than ultimately meaningless biological or physical or economic phenomena...
...A sad-faced three-year-old girl in a 1912 photo...
...and so on and so on and then— erased from the chalk board of human history...
...And again: "Lord of mercy, may our sister Mary, whom you called your daughter on earth, enter the kingdom of peace and light where your saints live in glory...
...a 1920s flapper, complete with Louise Brooks hair style...
...Actually I felt numb, too weary to think or say anything by way of a eulogy, to fabricate pleasant thoughts or wade through memories or in any way fill the void while my own soul felt so empty...
...Geoffrey Wood holds degrees in theology and in Scripture...
...Or to allow that more classic materialist Buck Mulligan, the swaggering medical intern in Joyce's Ulysses, to express it in his terms: "And what is death, your mother's or my own...
...She calls doctor Sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the quilt...
...To him who on its low repose Bestows a single friend— Circumference without relief, Or estimate, or end...
...And I thank the celebrant in my heart and the lady in the choir and the people on their knees around me who testify to that traditional vision, and I turn once more to look at my mother's casket next to me, remembering another fragment of verse of that New England saint, Emily Dickinson: A coffin—is a small domain Yet able to contain A rudiment of paradise In its diminished plane...
...It makes one pause and wonder...
...and who's next...
...His words become clearer...
...Suddenly the absolute absence of someone we took for granted makes us absent-minded, wondering why...
...The salary is modest, but the benefits are good, including a 4-day work week...
...then playing Rosie the Riveter circa 1943...
...We'll no more be remembered within this silent universe than last week's headlines...
...Commonweal 1 I October 22,1999 Wanted: Catholic Intellectual Commonweal is looking for a journalist/writer to join its staff as an assistant or associate editor...
...Send resume and writing samples to: liditor, Commonweal, 475 Riverside Drive, Room 405, \ew York, \'Y 10115 or e-mail: commonweal@msn.com...
...still bowling while practically blind in her eighties...
Vol. 126 • October 1999 • No. 18
