poetree

When I was a kid, holy cards felt like the boring religious version of baseball cards. If you answered a question particularly well in Sunday school, you would win one as a prize. They depicted saccharine images, sometimes promised indulgences in exchange for reciting dull prayers, and were universally made of the flimsiest cardstock in existence.

But.

Somewhere in the stacks of paper memorials I keep—letters, certificates, ticket stubs, interesting receipts—there are in memoriam holy cards for the funerals I have attended.

It is good to hold something in your hands when you remember the dead.

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I love liturgy. Specifically, I love the words and actions of formalized, widespread ritual, repeated so often that they have become rote. The words die in routine, decompose into a verbal vehicle for meditation, resurrect when you are caught short by what you are saying and consider anew whether you mean these words, and if so, how.

Liturgy is poetry repeated until all that remains is its rhythm.

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When my grandfather died, we used the following verses from Judeo-Christian poetic/prophetic literature in his funeral Mass and on his in memoriam card.

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary,
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.
(Isaiah 40:28-31)

I will hear these words proclaimed in Christian liturgy, on a Sunday near the beginning of February, once every three years for the rest of my life. I will hear them sung at nearly every funeral of a relative I will ever attend.

It is good sometimes to remember the dead when you hold something familiar.

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The pomegranate is a symbol of fertility and abundance in many cultures. In some cultures, it is also the fruit of the dead. It is the fruit Persephone ate that tied her to the underworld for half of each year. It is a likely candidate for the “fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil” in the Judeo-Christian origin myth.

There is an icon that I love that combines these two motifs:

Icon of Eve, Mother of All

In it, Eve is depicted holding an open pomegranate. The artist’s explanation suggests that the pomegranate represents a womb with many offspring: Eve, Mother of All, Bearer of Life. But the pomegranate also looks to me like a forbidden fruit with a bite out of it: Eve, Bringer of Death.

These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Biologists and mystics know life is a cycle; Osiris, God of the underworld, causes vegetation to sprout and the Nile to flood. We are made of star-stuff. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

It is good to have a little life in our death, a little death in our life.

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When I die, they will sing “On Eagle’s Wings” at my funeral, just as they did at my grandfather’s.

When I die, they will give out holy cards with some words from the liturgy on the back.

When I die, my body will be food for worms and bacteria and fungi, which themselves will be food in turn.

Today, I will eat a pomegranate.

It is good to eat something difficult and sweet, and remember the dead.