From: Ginger
This was interesting considering the writer...
February 7, 2008
How to Bury a Prophet
-by Kathleen Flake
Sightings (Martin Marty Center)
University of Chicago Divinity School.
(http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/sightings/archive_2008/0207.shtml)
The Latter-day Saints buried their prophet on Saturday. Thousands
attended the service in person and millions more faithful watched in
chapels around the globe, as well as on the internet. What they saw was
an unusually personal ceremony for a very public man who led and to
large degree defined the contemporary Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints. Notwithstanding the numbers and titles of
participants, Gordon Hinckley's funeral was a family affair both in
word and sacrament. It was an extraordinary display of what makes
Mormonism tick.
Gordon Hinckley died at the age of ninety-seven, having been in the
church's leading councils since 1958 and serving as its fifteenth
president since 1995. He shaped the church through a half century of
growth in one hundred and seventy countries. A third of its present
membership joined during his tenure as president. Displaying remarkable
vigor late in life, he met with church members on every continent,
responding to their needs with curricular, welfare, and building
programs whose costs are impossible to imagine and no one will admit.
He met the press to a degree unequaled and with an openness heretofore
unknown among Mormonism's leadership. This effort too was largely
successful. No less a cynic than CBS's Mike Wallace admitted that
Hinckley "fully deserves the almost universal admiration that he gets."
He was, as Newsweek's Jon Meacham said, "a charming and engaging man,
an unlikely prelate - and all the more impressiv e for that." The same
could be said of his funeral.
Hinckley's funeral was an unlikely but impressive mix of the
sacramental and the mundane, in large part because it observed
Mormonism's custom that families bury their dead. The family designs
the memorial program, participates actively in it, and performs the
ordinances that send their loved ones off to the next life. Yes, the
chapel in this case was the LDS Conference center that held 21,000
mourners; the lay pastor who conducted the meeting was Thomas Monson,
Hinckley's presumptive successor as "prophet, seer, and revelator;" and
the music was provided by the three-hundred-plus member Mormon
Tabernacle Choir. But, in all other essentials, the service was
performed by the family. A son gave the invocation. Monson conducted at
the request of the family, he said, not by ecclesiastical right. The
eulogy was given by a daughter who described her father's life as
half-way point in a now seven-generation story of sacrifice, death, and
survival that is the Mormon saga. Explicitly gathering the millions
watching into that story, she declared "we are one family sharing an
inheritance of faith." Friends with high titles spoke next. Though the
requisite list of Hinckley's ecclesiastical accomplishments was given,
it was subordinated to his success as a courageous and amusing friend
and a successful husband and father. Another daughter gave the
benediction: "We are buoyed by the knowledge that we will see him again
as family, as friends."
Hinckley's sons and daughters with their spouses led the casket out of
the hall and between an honor guard of church authorities. Cameras
followed the mourners, focusing on his five children, twenty-five
grandchildren and sixty-two great-grandchildren who formed the cortege
to the cemetery. There, possibly most surprisingly, the eldest son
dedicated the grave without fanfare. Notwithstanding the presence of
the entire church hierarchy, the son stepped forward to pronounce: "By
the authority of the Melchizedek priesthood, I dedicate this grave for
the remains of Gordon B. Hinckley, until such time as thou shall call
him forth." Then, church leaders were "dismissed," as Monson put it. As
the church teaches is the case in the afterlife, only the family remained.
Families are, as Latter-day Saints like to say, forever. What they
don't say is that the church is not forever. It is only the instrument
for endowing families with the right and duty to mediate the gifts of
the gospel to their members, thereby sealing the willing among them as
families in the life to come. This was Hinckley's message as a prophet.
As he would have it and as the best Mormon funerals do, his message was
embodied and enacted by his family who blessed him in death, no less
than in life. Thi s is how the Latter-day Saints, at least, bury a prophet.
Kathleen Flake is an associate professor of American Religious History
at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion.
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