A Monastic Funeral

Yesterday afternoon Mother Columba Guare, Mississippi Abbey’s first Abbess, died after a difficult illness. She was buried this morning. There was no undertaker, no embalming, no cosmetic prettiness, no satin lined casket and heavy vault to cover it, no artificial grass to disguise the mound of dirt at the burial site. Instead once Mother Columba had been pronounced dead, her sisters who had lovingly cared for her these past 14 days as she lay dying, proceeded to prepare her body for burial. They dressed her in the monastic habit and laid her on a simple wooden bier at the foot of the altar in the Abbey church where she had prayed day and night for over 40 years.

Those of us who stood to whisper our silent prayers at the side of the bier looked down at a face that had not been tampered with by a skilled mortician in order to create the illusion of health and vigor. There was no artificial glow on her cheeks. Instead her face was drawn and completely colorless. She did not look like she was sleeping peacefully. She looked like she was dead. The customs that surround a Cistercian death and burial can seem unusually severe to those whose attitudes and experiences have been formed by our own death-denying culture. In spite of a near-obsessive fascination with the blood, gore and graphic violence that pervades so much of what masquerades as entertainment these days, most people remain painfully unable to deal with the reality of death when faced with the need to confront it. But Cistercians have a completely different approach. And what else would you expect from people who take seriously St. Benedict’s admonishment about “keeping death daily before your eyes?”

And what they are keeping before their eyes is their utter conviction, born of their deep faith, that death is not an ending but rather an amazing and awesome entry into what life has been leading up to all along. And so the sisters are able to balance their deep sorrow at losing someone who was dear to them, with a genuine sense of joy because they truly believe she has just begun to live.

It is that conviction that comes through in such a profound way all throughout the funeral liturgy, culminating at the gravesite in the burial itself. For the sisters, the procession from the church to the cemetery is one of the most important elements in the funeral liturgy because it symbolizes the passage from this world into the next. And so at the end of the funeral Mass, after the sisters had sung their last song of farewell, Sister Columba’s funeral bier was carried out of the church, preceded by the large white Paschal Candle, a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. The rest of the monastic community fell into the procession, followed by family and friends, each of us having stopped first to take a flower from the large arrangement at the foot of the altar.

To the tolling of the monastery bell, the procession made its solemn way the short distance to the little cemetery surrounded by trees on the side of a hill overlooking one of the Mississippi River’s bluffs. The grave had been dug by hand by teams of sisters working in shifts all yesterday afternoon, and two sturdy planks had been laid across it in order to support the bier until it was time to be lowered into the ground. Following a final blessing, two sisters covered Mother Columba’s body with a white cloth. Then the planks were removed and the pallbearers gently lowered the bier into the ground while one of the sisters sang the Suscipe (Receive me, O lord, as you have promised, that I may live. Do not disappoint me in my hope.)


At the conclusion of the hymn, Mother Nettie stepped forward and dropped a rose into the grave and then one by one the other sisters, followed by the rest of us, stepped to the edge of the grave and did the same thing. Slowly, silently, we each tossed a single flower onto the shrouded figure that lay at the bottom of the grave until it was almost completely covered with roses, dianthus, chrysanthemums, miniature sunflowers, and delphinium. Wiping away tears, but speaking calmly and steadily, Mother Nettie recited a last blessing and Sister Gail, the former Abbess, led us all in final prayers of intercession. We then said the Lord’s prayer and joined the sisters in singing the Salve, the beautiful hymn to Mary that is sung each night in the monastery. Then Sister Nettie took a shovel, scooped up a generous portion of dirt and cast it into the open grave. As the rest of us took our turns with shovel and spade, the enormity of what we were experiencing could not be ignored or denied. Death, like birth, is one of the most profound of all realities. And as I stood watching Columba’s grave fill back up with the soil the sisters had so painstakingly dug up yesterday, I kept thinking about the words of the Hymn we had sung during Communion: “Now the green blade rises from the buried grain….”

For those who believe that Columba’s death is after all simply another birth into another life, she is like a seed that has been planted deep in the soil, to rise again like a green and living blade of wheat.