While I appreciate the role that religious leaders play during bereavement, I have always found myself aggrieved with some of their teachings concerning crossing over to the other world. I have attended many funerals and lately I find myself increasingly biting my tongue and rolling my eyes whenever the anointed ones take to the podium to deliver eulogies to the departed, or is it to the living? My mother always takes offence whenever she’s at a funeral and such messages are read. All things being regular and normal, condolence messages are meant to ‘console’ the bereaved and not console the departed. But with us, 99% of the messages are often directed to the departed person.
Then there is the issue of Abraham and his legendary bottomless bosom. You cannot miss those, you just can’t! I always mean to check out this part on the Bible, there must be something I am missing here. For one thing, death just terrifies me. Even at my lowest moments (and they have been many), I have never once thought I would be better off at some graveyard. Yet I know I am not immortal, no one is. But it cracks me every time I am at a funeral and the ‘huba saga Abrahama message is read out. One preacher who shares my beliefs concerning death once asked whether even after a thousand plus years, this poor saint’s bosom is not full yet? Will some of us find any space left at all? I am never the one to challenge the holy book and its teachings, but throughout my church going days (which is all my life), not once had I ever heard any preacher in my church making any reference to Abraham’s allegedly gigantic bosom, especially at funerals. It’s a little consolation, because I would have been tempted to differ with my church’s ideology on that one.
