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The Curry lecturer this year is Mr. Thomas Lynch, a funeral director and poet who has written extensively and illuminatingly about the quick and the dead. The author of five collections of poems and four books of essays, Mr.

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Lynch has also co-authored with Tom Long, a book entitled The Good Funeral, a text much read and appreciated by seminary students, pastors, theologians, and others. His written work has been noticed, and he has received much acclaim with one of his books, The Undertaking, receiving the Heartland Award, the American Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. That book was later turned into a film, which aired on PBS, winning an Emmy in 2008.

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An Irish Catholic by heritage, Mr. Lynch practices the mortuary and literary arts in Milford, Michigan, and in County Clare, Ireland. His stories and poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Paris Review. He has taught courses at Wayne State University in Detroit, and in graduate programs at the University of Michigan, and at Candler School of Theology at Emory.

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Mr. Lynch has written that a funeral director who writes poetry is the occupational equivalent of a proctologist with a sideline and root canals. Folks are glad to see us coming when there is pain or trouble, and gladder still to see us gone with good riddance in tow. Whether it is his Irish Catholic upbringing or the life studies he has garnered from what he calls the dismal trade, Mr.

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Lynch has shown a deeper understanding of the incarnate nature of God's grace than many more spiritual Protestants. The image of God he deals with in his poetry and in his undertaking is an embodied reality, a gift which he honors with his trade and his writing, never forgetting that the grief and the gratitude that belong to the living are theirs because the loss they have sustained is not an abstraction, but is for an embodied soul with a history and a place. Shortly after 9/11, Mr.

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Lynch was asked to write a poem in honor of the undertakers who answered the call to care for the many victims of that attack. Here are a few lines from that poem: Some days all that can be done is to salvage one's sadness from the mass of sadnesses, to bear one body home, to lay the dead out among the people, organize the flowers and the casseroles, write the abits, meet the mourners at the door, drive the dark procession down through town, Toll the bell, dig the hole, tin the pyre.

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It's what we do. The day-long news is dire, bold talk of holy war and photo ops. But here brave men and women pick the pieces up. They serve the living, caring for the dead.

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Here the distant battle is waged in homes, like politics, All funerals are local. Please welcome Mr. Thomas Lynch, the Thomas White Curry Lecturer for 2016.

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How nice it is to hear such fine things said about you in the present tense. And I want to thank you, Tom, for that tastefully hyperbolic and vaguely obituarial introduction to cover the highlights like that. as a real gift, and thanks to all of you too for outnumbering me, which for poets qualifies as a success because we're accustomed to having to pay people to attend poetry readings and things. If we are outnumbered by dozens, it's obituary class, and if we're out dozens as I can form the sentence in the file I keep back in the office in Michigan,

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about standing, thank you for standing, standing room only crowd in the chapel at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas. You can be sure that a text will be going forth to Michigan this afternoon in case something should happen in the interim. And to have the light coming into this room and that music uh and the goodwill after the worship last night even for a devoutly lapsed man as myself you'd have to say um it would put you in mind of a loving God this is the beginning almost anything can happen this is where you find the creation of light

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A fish wriggling. onto land, the first word of paradise lost on an empty page. Think of an egg, the letter A, a woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises. This is the very beginning.

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The first person narrator introduces himself, tells us about his lineage. The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings. Here The climbers are studying a map or pulling on their long woolen socks.

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This is early on, years before the ark, dawn. The profile of an animal is being smeared on the wall of a cave and you have not yet learned to crawl. This is the opening, the gambit, the pawn moving forward an inch. This is your first night with her.

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your first night without her. This is the first part where the wheels begin to turn, where the elevator begins its ascent before the doors lurch open. These lines I'm after reading you are from the opening of Billy Collins's poem, Aristotle, named for that Greek who believed that a whole is that which has a beginning. a middle and an end, the structure of journeys and stories, flights and lives from nestling to fledgling to fully aloft.

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The narrative arc of rise and round and eventual fall, that sense that we all sometimes have of the structure of our lives and times that organize themselves into a starting point, a middle and an end if Not entirely linear, it suggests a point at the beginning of a line that may do circles and loops, but will eventually resolve itself into a final point sometime in the perilous possible future. And it strikes me as a kind of blessing on the setting forth that I sense myself making here along with you this first week of February, this Groundhog Day still shallow into the new year wondering whether we'll see our shadows or whether as I've come to expect we'll have six more weeks of winter maybe a blizzard for Saint Patrick's Day.

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Either way I'm eager to fulfill this happy indenture and I want to thank you for the invitation to be here to make some sense or at least to do no harm along the way of working your expectations into the invitation to be here. And look at you all, bright-faced and teachable still at any age. More lovely in the flesh than I imagined you back in the Midwestern autumn and early winter when these thoughts began to take some shape in my brain box whilst I was living mostly at the south end of a lake, at the north end of

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Michigan's lower peninsula. Last month for me, the yearly new beginning of January was all embarkation and oh bad, more lark than nightingale, as birders say, winding out the daily increasing light and the festivals of light and the good things that we are promised, the three minutes every day increasing light, January hauls us all into the prospect that we can, though old, begin again, though young, begin again. With new resolves to rid ourselves of our errant ways and beer bellies, our tendencies to burn the bridges ahead of us and behind us, January for me is all circumcision and epiphany and

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I always ask myself about that chapter in Genesis 3 when they're describing that first deal that was made between God and Abram then. Was that when they started changing names? Why not like a tattoo, or a secret handshake, or maybe a secret sign? I try to imagine those tribesmen out there in the morning standing at their reverie and the old man coming out of whatever squalid tent he occupied and saying, I've got some good news and some bad news.

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And I try to get a count of those running off into the desert saying, He's gone mad entirely now. We're just not standing still for that. January is when we celebrate that feast, at least in the tradition I'm lapsed from. It's named for the two-faced, double-gazing god of beginnings and transitions, doorways and gates, comings and goings.

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Janus bids us, as we consider where we're going, to have a look back at where we've been, how we got into this moment we're in, and how we came to be the ones we are. Think of an egg, the letter A. A woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises.

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This is the very beginning. The first person narrator introduces himself, tells us about his lineage. I was raised by Irish Catholics. When I say that, it sounds like wolves.

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I mean, in the feral sense of feuds and begrudgements and long evenings of song and bewilderment. The first person narrator has been amply introduced, but maybe some notes on my lineage to be introduced as I most often am as a funeral director and poet is a mixed blessing. I have a friend, a young Lutheran pastor who has written a book on the subject of whiskey.

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Seems to me something better suited to you Scots or Irish and bootlegging sorts. And while oddity and celebrity are near enough cousins that the former often passes for the latter, how else to account for Donald Trump? Still, As my wife is fond of reminding me, neither poets nor undertakers, sonnets nor obsequies are on most people's lists of favorite things.

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We are not the raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens sorts of things, bright copper kettles, warm woolen mittens. It is exactly as Tom said, a choice between root canal and proctology, the cop who sings opera, the disappointing blind date about whom, it is later said, He was not exactly handsome, but he had a lousy personality. So, seeking to establish some sort of bona fides with you, I want to start with the lesser of evils.

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Unless one of you wants to volunteer as a corpse, I thought I'd begin with a poem. one of my own, a sort of grace before spiel to tune my voice and your ears to one another. It will allow you to tell your spouses or housemates or teenage children or grandchildren the disagreeable in-laws. Among the several things you did this morning at the seminary was that you attended a poetry reading.

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This will make them fear you in ways they haven't formerly, and it checks that that box on, I'm sure, many of your lists. Attend poetry reading. Once you have been read a poem, you can check the box.

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It's like being the president of the Rotary Club. Do it once, it's done. You need to return to it. The poem I chose is called Euclid, another Greek, another person concerned with beginnings and middles.

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And And it owes its being to a long-standing habit I've had in Milford, Michigan of meeting for coffee with the same group of, forgive me, old farts in the morning for coffee and chatter. Chatter which we always think is very important. These are the movers and shakers in town, as you might well imagine.

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We sleep in on Sunday mornings or some go golfing. But every other day of the week we meet to talk about really important things like sleep apnea and rotor cup surgery and election years give us some relief from those scary topics. All of us belonged in our day and presided in our day with the Rotary Club or the Chamber of Commerce. We were superintendents of schools, elders at the church.

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There's always one member of the reverend clergy who attends because they think they need to make a mission to the old bums that we are. I think they draw straws at their ministerial meetings to see whose job it will be to shepherd us out of our blasphemies to be an apostle to the old farts we drink coffee mostly and talk for about an hour and um then we go to the barber shop or the blood draw or home to the missus or the orderly abyss left in the house if the missus is gone East to visit the grandkids or West to visit her sister or as happens now to her grave or permanent repose we used to talk about school millage votes, foreign wars, local and national sports and politics and golf.

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Now we are mostly on to prostate exams and things of that sort. It's passing through life and I pray that every one of you lives long enough to endure it. Anyway, I called this first poem in my last book, or as Seamus Heaney said, my most current book of poems. I called it Euclid Comes to Coffee with the Old Farts, and...

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My editor, a brilliant woman in New York, Jill Bialosky, said, Possibly, Tom, we could just call that Euclid. So, Euclid. What sort of morning was Euclid having when he first considered parallel lines? Or that business about how things equal to the same thing are equal to each other?

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Who's to know what a day has in it? This morning, Bert took it into his mind to make a longbow out of Osage orange and went on eBay to find the cow horns from which to fashion the tips of the thing. You'd better have something to pass the time, he says, stirring his coffee, smiling. And Murray is carving a model truck from a block of walnut he found downstairs.

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Whittling away, he thinks, of the years he drove between Detroit and Buffalo, delivering parts for General Motors. Might he have nursed theorems on lines and dots, or the properties of triangles, or the congruence of adjacent angles, or Clearing customs at Niagara Falls arrived at some insight on wholes and parts or an axiom involving radii in the making of circles. How distance from a center point can be both increased endlessly and endlessly split.

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A mystery whereby the local and the global share the same vexations and geometry. Possibly this is where God comes into it. who breathed the common notion of coincidence into the brain of that Alexandrian over breakfast 23 centuries back, who glimpsed for a moment that morning the sense it all made, life, killing time, the elements, the dots and lines and angles of connection. An egg's shell opened with a spoon,

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the sun's connivance with the moon's decline Sophia the maidservant pouring juice everything everything coincides the arc of memory her fine parabolas the bend of a bow the curve of the earth a turn in the road I hope you get from that my intention to make some sense of the different lives that I have breakfast with every morning and the sense that we are all, despite our divided politics and habits, in this together. And the sense that I sense when I'm with you and among you that we are all the same but different, too. And that we have parallel lives.

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things that will happen to me will happen to you and one of the things that I would like you to examine as you make your way through these midwinters is how you came to be the ones you are because I think an examination of that will tell you about where you might be bound where you ought to go next or whom you ought to speak with next like Caesar like Aristotle, our lives are divided into parts. The adventure, if not always trinitarian, is at least triadic. Not only a beginning, a middle, and an end, but the enterprise and the endeavor always seems to change.

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We are, as our homilists told us last night, much divided in duties. some spectacularly beautiful some mundane as the grass growing but all of our callings and all of yours I presume are to preach and teach a priesthood of the holy the voices you've heard like those heard by the apostles come follow me or words to that effect or maybe like most of the men and women of the reverend clergy that I've asked this mostly what they heard was silence mostly what they heard was nothing a silence beyond silence listen for as Heaney called the loss of his mother's voice after she had died maybe that's what we hear in the voice of God a silence beyond any silence listened for.

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In response to which vocation, most of you will have taken a course here at Austin Presbyterian Seminary called Homiletics, in which you were encouraged towards hermeneutics and exegesis and the deeper reading of sacred texts I love it when I talk like that I have to tell you and I love the preaching Meg gave about the duty of or the detail of asses or donkeys last night because I have a small home in Ireland that I inherited from my people and not having a lawnmower it's a farming section so I I bought a jackass some years ago I named him Charles after the prince on the neighboring island and whose ears resembled one another. He cut the lawn for me by going around the landscape, chomping at the green sword, and everything was going well until a certain bridge he crossed in his own life, he began to roar.

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in ways that kept the Carmody boys awake after nights of song and story and apparently drink that had been taken. And they asked me would I ever find a way to disabuse him of that yawp. And so I went searching for a mare ass whom I secured at some expense, a lovely two-year-old that swimmed like a little fish among the bunch of asses where she was kept on Michael Morgan's farm where I found her and I gave him a thousand euros and brought her, yes, she was expensive and worth every euro of it and it made Charles quiet in a way that some of you will understand and I named her Camilla for obvious reasons and

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Once when I was launching a book over there, they sent a photographer from the Irish Times to get a photo of the visiting yank in his home place in West Clare, and he said, Well, let's go outside here in the Haggard. I can take you on your own property. I said, Fine, fine. I got my best linen shirt on.

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I had the straw hat that I'd that I'd tested out before and I stood out in the yard and thinking perhaps that I had brought them a bucket of oats or some nuts or something. Charles and Camilla wandered their way to either side of me like a pair of... James and John I think is the name we're looking for.

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But it was Charles and Camilla and the man snapped the shot and I said, Wait, wait, we can get another. He said, No, no. I have just the one I want. And it appeared the next day in the Irish press.

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Myself betwixt two piebald asses in my home place and it appeared the picture was apparently silly enough that they ran it in the Scottish press and the English press and my editor from Aberdeen called and said maybe we should have called that last book of yours Angelo's asses and listen to your life see it for the fathom fathomless mystery it is in the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness touch taste smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments and life itself is grace you know the writer of this your man Fred Buechner who I had the good luck of meeting some years ago and the better luck of reading for a good few years now.

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And I dare say I've learned more from reading his memoirs than I've ever learned in writing mine. But listening to your life, that directive, is one that I've tried to take to heart. And I've experienced the lovely and instructive schism between what Barbara Brown Taylor calls belief and beholding between the way things ought to be in the way things are as we experience them as we live them in the beginning I was a boy the second son of a good man and a good woman long since gone now may their memories be eternal they made their family up after World War two in the image and likeness of the ones they'd known

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They'd met in the middle of the Great Depression, both students of the fifth grade at St. Francis de Sales, one of the dozen Nunnish parochial schools around that part of town for kids who were ghettoized by their race and faith. By the time they graduated from high school, the world was at war, and they were a couple having danced to Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey tunes under the stars at the Walled Lake Pavilion. Before Christmas of 1942, he joined the Marine Corps, trained his way to Southern California, and then boarded a boat bound for Melbourne, Australia.

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His letters home and hers following him through the island-hopping wars of the South Pacific. They courted by proxy and victory mail through the next three years, and when he came home from China in 1946, they planned their wedding for the coming June. They made nine of us.

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They used to say to my mother, You must love children. I love Eddie Lynch, she said, and no more about it. speaking for a generation of Catholic women. And I grew up in that orthodoxy, a strange pagan life surrounded by spinster aunts and uncles who pulled nickels from our ears and widowed grandmothers of men who never made it past their early 60s.

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And I'd like to tell you a little bit about my grandmothers because I think of them as sort of watershed events in my life as a writer. I remember it was my father's custom to bring them home from church on Sunday and get them a little liquored up and set them to arguing about religion or sex or politics, whatever, hadn't been covered by Father Kenny at the church. And

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The more they drank, the more they argued. They were, while both in their 80s, and both would make it till 90, they were absolute opposites. Perhaps that's where the attraction between my mother and father came, the opposite sensibilities of their mothers. My mother's mother's name was Marvel Grace.

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So not a woman given to self-esteem issues. And she was born in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. She was a yooper. We never call them uppers for reasons that should be clear to us by now, but I don't have a clue.

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But she came downstate to go to school at Ann Arbor because she had some talents with music and administration. She later became the superintendent of music in the Detroit school system all through the 1940s and 50s. Ahead of her time, she would remind us more or less on the hour.

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And she was... As she was punctilious and stern and would always say things like, Enunciate Tom, articulate, don't swallow your words. I still hear her voice telling me that as I speak to you. She was a rabid Democrat, a union organizer.

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She didn't cook. And I couldn't understand any woman who did. And I'm sure of her 30 grandchildren, I was her favorite. Whereas my father's mother was a quiet Methodist woman who wore her hair in a bun and print dresses and sensible shoes and made lovely breads and homemade stews and monitored my

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grandfather's salt intake by a beaker of crackers she kept on the kitchen counter and counted every night like it was the toll booth. It was for him. Ah, you can have three more, Edward. He'd laugh and go get them and follow her.

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Shut up, Geraldine, he'd say, and then run for the garage, you know. But she was an Eisenhower Republican. I think she voted for him well into the 1980s. She never did anything of any kind of scandal or beyond the fact that she fell in love with an Irish Catholic man, which didn't excite her Methodist kinspeople.

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And did you know, as was the style of her generation, she converted to what was ever after called the one true faith, Tom. And she would explain the conversion experience to us. by saying, Ah, the priest splashed a little water on me and said, Geraldine, you were born a Methodist, raised a Methodist. Thanks be to God, now you're Catholic.

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And some weeks after the eventual nuptials, she was out in the backyard on the first Friday of Lent, grilling steaks for my grandfather on the barbecue when one of the brother knights from the KFC leapt over the back fence to upbraid her for the smell of beef rising over a Catholic household however converted in the holy season and she nodded and smiled in her formerly United Methodist ways and then went over to the garden hose splashed water on the grill and said you were born cows raised cows thanks be to God now you're fish and sent the and sent the nosy neighbor on his way this was my first experience of authority the power of the word to transform and transfigure and transubstantiate and she knew that the church had been trading on such magic for a long time and she wanted a part of that and to be sure after last night's service if the old boys in charge of the church I'm devoutly lapsed from had more preachers like Meg, I'd go back immediately, but they won't do that in my lifetime I'm afraid.

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I still hear these women's voices, my grandmother's. And it's like that poem of Cavafy's where he says, Sometimes we hear them in our dreams. They are lost to us like the dead, but we still hear their voices. I still hear them.

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I'm approaching the age at which they were when they began to fade. Let me read you a poem about them. 160 years of lucid memory sits under a plump umbrella on the patio. Two widows nursing whiskey sours argue politics.

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My grandmothers, when they turned 80, we began to mark their changes as we might a child's in terms of sight, mobility and appetite, teeth and toilet habits, clarity of speech, a thousand calibers of round flight by which my children make their distance now from me. Sometimes I think of them as parts of me. I think their ageless quarrels come to roost like odd birds with an awkward plumage in my blood. The one says, Tend your own twigs, peep and preen.

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The other, wings beyond the kindly orbits here and sings and sings and sings. I'd like you to take in your own time an inventory of the voices that still haunt you. your cloud of witnesses, those ones who taught you the way things are and the way things ought to be, the ones who taught you to believe, the ones who taught you to behold. Because those watersheds, those moments when it first seemed clear to you,

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usually at the knee or the foot or in earshot of one of the people who loved you the most for no apparent reason they are part of how you come to be the ones you are and what you bring to the table the Eucharist you share with your fellow humans the rest of us and for people who have committed themselves to an open heart an open table an open moment between you and any stranger. You ought to know exactly who you are and how you came to be. Listen to your life is what I want to say.

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Stealing that as poets do from Beatner. It was a January many years ago when a crowd of A crowd of Victorians in Washington, D.C. met in the Congressional Cemetery on a rainy January morning to bury a child.

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The preacher on the day was not a preacher at all. He was the son of a manse. He was Robert Ingersoll, the great apostate, the great agnostic, the Christopher Hitchens of that century, and he was the presiding speaker at the graveside on the morning.

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As everyone gathered the mother's sobs of this little boy, Harry Miller, a victim of that year's diphtheria, that winter's cold, her sobs and sobs made everyone uncomfortable. The undertaker in his own time nodded to Ingersoll, injure soul they called him because he was such a disbeliever and he said does Mrs. Miller desire it Mrs.

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Miller's husband started nodding faster because he knew that to cover grief with words might help I'd like to read you a little bit of what Ingersoll said that morning that drizzly Monday when the son of a man's his father had been a congregationalist minister who'd been hunted out of churches all over the Northeast because of his abolitionist politics that could happen to you Ingersoll was nine when his father was tried by the church for prevarication and unministerial conduct by which no doubt was meant that he preached against race-based chattel slavery. And it was after that treatment by the church that Robert decided that he would turn first on Calvinism, then on Christianity, and by the time he stepped to the head of that boy's grave, he was the chief infidel of our nation, an orator and lecturer who

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who had traveled the country upholding humanism, free thinking, and honest talk. An Episcopal priest friend of mine used to say, Preaching to bishops, Tom, is like farting at skunks. You'll win the battle, but you'll lose the war. I think he probably stole that from Robert Greene Ingersoll, who at the graveside of a little boy being buried in the mud, he said,

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I know how vain it is to gild a grief with words, and yet I wish to take from every grave its fear. Here in this world where life and death are equal kings, all should be brave enough to meet what all the dead have met. The future has been filled with fear, stained and polluted by the heartless past. from the wondrous tree of life the buds and blossoms fall with ripened fruit and in the common bed of Earth patriarchs and babes sleep side by side every cradle asks us whence and every coffin wither the poor barbarian weeping above his dead can answer these questions just as well as the robed priest of the most authentic Creed the

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The tearful ignorance of the one is as consoling as the learned and unmeaning words of the other. No man standing where the horizon of a life has touched a grave has any right to prophesy a future filled with pain and tears. They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave need have no fear. the larger and the nobler faith in all that is and is to be tells us that death even at its worst is only perfect rest we know that through the common wants of life the needs and duties of each hour their grief will lessen day by day until at last this grave will be to them a place of rest and peace almost of joy this is for them

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consolation the dead do not suffer if they live again their lives will surely be as good as ours we have no fear we are all children of the one mother and the same fate awaits us all we too have our religion and it is this help for the living hope for the dead help for the living Hope for the dead. If there's a brief or bromide to describe your mission and purpose, your calling, see me this evening and tell me what it is because help for the living, hope for the dead sounds exactly like what my father used to say when he said of funeral directors, we serve the living by caring for the dead. And so we could measure the worth of our doing it by how we served.

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How we served, not what we sold. Perhaps Ingersaul's rhetoric seems an incarnation. His words made flesh of the fist that we humans are constantly shaking in the face of God when the worst that happens, happens. especially at the death of innocence theodicy gets its foot in the door of our theologies and faith help for the living hope for the dead what good is this I remember asking any God in earshot while dressing the body of a dead baby or toddler is this the toll then for the glory of God

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I do not think I am alone in this. It happened when I called to condole with the undertaker, Dan Honan of Newtown, Connecticut, who took care of many of the slaughtered six-year-olds that December, three years ago. Why wasn't God watching? Tom Waits wails in his song Georgia Lee on the death of a 12-year-old kidnapped, raped, and murdered

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in Santa Rosa, California in the summer of 1997. Why wasn't God listening? Thus are the fists we shake in the face of whomever's in charge here. Where were you on the morning it happened?

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Or the drowned Syrian refugees, the collateral damage of a gun sick culture Why wasn't God there as He was for Lazarus and for Jesus? It's Job's old query shared by the bereaved forever and ever. It is kin to the case made in that 11th chapter of the Gospel of John where Jesus deliberately tarries.

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in Capernaum so that Lazarus will be dead beyond any quibble, dead with a stench of death on him by the time Jesus shows up, tardy in Bethany to call the dead man, putrefying in his winding sheet from the tomb. The sickness will not end in death, Jesus tells his apostles. No, no, it's for the glory of God's son may be glorified through it. If you had been here, my brother would not have died, says Martha.

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speaking for the rest of us heartbroken pilgrims this is Job's Imbroblio how can God be both all good and all powerful and let's let such sadnesses come to pass it's the foot of theodicy's doubt insinuated in the door of faith and you live with it and you rise to the occasions I grew up in a culture where the men were expected to grow up and become priests or alcoholics. And I always feel like adding to any introduction, My name is Tom and I am not a priest. But I was named for one.

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The Irish have no imagination about names. So the Dan's, Tom's, Pat's, Tim's, Bridget's, Mary's, Julie's, they repeat themselves generation after generation after generation back to the boggy parish we all came from. The fact that I have the hovel they came out of is a sign to me of a loving God. Or the practical joker, I think, must be in charge of much of what goes on in the way of glory these days.

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There's a picture in my office back in Milford. It's a picture taken in 1934, that first June in the middle of the Great Depression. That's June the 10th, actually, 1934. It turns out to be the anniversary of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, a thing that if I were a priest, I probably wouldn't care about.

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I then later worked in a home for alcoholic priests thinking, There's the practical joker at work again. But the picture is a bunch of Irish Americans, immigrant Irish, sensible hats, bowlers, straw bowlers for the men. There's only one child... Oh, the picture, by the way, is the first solemn high mass by the Reverend Father Thomas Patrick Lynch.

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It's at St. John's Church in Jackson, Michigan. He had been ordained out west where he had gone to seminary. He had survived the Spanish flu as a boy, and possibly because he survived it, his mother whispered in his ear, as Jackie Wesley's mother whispered in hers, Perhaps you were saved for a purpose.

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Hence the vocation, the calling to the priesthood. Or maybe he was gay, or who knows, maybe he just wanted a pension, and in those days the priesthood was as good as any. even though it did not have a car allowance. Anyway, he was a priest and he was ordained and he came back to do this sacrifice of the mass in front of all his people.

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The peasant Irish who had made it to Jackson, Michigan because they were building a huge prison there and needed unskilled labor. So a whole generation of West Clare people made it to southeastern, southwestern Michigan. When I see that picture, I think of the little boy, he's 10 years old, he's wearing saddle shoes and knee britches, it's my father.

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He's the only child in the picture. And I think how it turned out that two years later, after the priest had gone back to Taos, New Mexico to work among the Pueblo people and hopefully to keep him his chesty sickly side free in the Sangre de Cristo mountains that high dry mountain air would get the bishop's money back out of him because he had paid for his education and travel and it worked for two years when Father Tom died of pneumonia and the Native American women wound him up in something right and put him on the back of a buckboard and took him down the watershed of the Rio Grande into the city of the true faiths, Holy Faith Santa Fe, where the bishop, disturbed from his tea and paperwork, said some prayers, then put him on a train bound back to Jackson, collect, as bishops do.

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And on the day that my grandfather, his brother, went in to make the funeral arrangements, for reasons we'll never know, he took my father, who was 12 years old now, two years later, he took him to the funeral home, the De Noyer Funeral Home. And while the men talked about mum plants and requiems and pallbearers and cars, my father wandered through the old house in Jackson, Michigan, until he came to a room. And stood in the doorway and looked inside and saw two men in white shirts and wingtip shoes and striped. formal pants dressing the body of the dead priest in his liturgical vestments and then without speaking they reached beneath the body curled the mass of him towards themselves and sidestepped their way over to a box and lay him in it in preparation for the wake that would take place that night and it is to that moment that

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that moment that my father would ever after trace his intention to be a funeral director. Why didn't you want to be a priest? I often ask him. Ah, he said, the priest was dead, Tom.

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My father, not given to metaphor, knew that the men coming out of the room were better than the one staying in it. So, I'll finish with this. It's called calling.

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Because when I think of the generations that have followed my father into funeral service, the fact that now we bury or burn 14 or 1500 pilgrims a year and all of my sons and my daughter and nieces and nephews have one way or another found their way into that kind of work, my sisters and Brothers for the most part did too. It seems as if whatever it was, it is contagious. I suppose it's the same for you as you see your sons and daughters finding their way into the calling you heard or didn't.

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We Catholic boys all listen for the call. the voice of God exquisite in our ears come follow me or as it was with Paul thunder enlightening the bang and whimper by which God makes his will known to us all be fruitful but not apples is that clear or as it was with Noah build an ark or Abram prove your faith man kill your boy or Moses so you're thirsty smite the rock or Job out of the whirlwind, gird your loins, or that fervent girl child, Joan of Arc, who burned but never renounced her voices. Belief is easy when God speaks to us.

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The ordinary silence, there's the thing, the soul consuming quiet, the heaven's hush that sets, even the pious wondering. Lord, spare us all, we doubting Thomases, who even with a trembling finger in the wound still ask aloud, My Lord, my God, ever curious, too inquisitive. I was named after a father, Tom, my father's uncle, Thomas Patrick Lynch, a sickly boy who died before his time, 1904, 1936 saving Apaches at Rancho de Taos breathing some easier that rarefied air of the Sangre de Cristo mountains the blood of Christ when he was done ran clear once in the basement of my grandparents house I found his cassock and Roman collar hanging from a rafter blessed and bodiless and under it a trunk of

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priestly things, surplus and beretta, bright chalices, a sick call kit and leather brewery, I tried them all, and nothing seemed to fit. All the same. I kept on listening. And I served at altar with our parish priest, the Reverend Thomas Kenny, never Tom, never wavering, never doubtful in the least, a holy Roman Irish Catholic man who lost his bearings when they English everything like Barry Fitzgerald or Father Flanagan.

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After morning masses, he'd make me sit, he'd make me kneel for half an hour in the back of church to offer Thanksgiving for the holy meal I was after having in the Eucharist be stingy with the Lord boy oh and he'll be stingy in return he kept a list of Saints and shortcomings shalts and shal nots mortal venial Cardinal deadly sins contrary virtues Graces gifts from God the glorious and sorrowful Mysteries holy days first Fridays stations of the cross corporal and spiritual works of Mercy it was a language that I learned to speak lovely and Latin a sort of second tongue my parents and peoples the nuns and priests that rose in the air like incense or song ghostly and Gregorian like memories first gushing then going but never gone and I am listening listening still, We're given two ears and one mouth for good reason.

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Pray to know God's purpose, and you will. So said that old priest, and I believed him. Carpe momentum boy, each minute is a gift, and though I wonder still, sometimes I seize it. Sometimes I see that dead priest in my dreams.

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in the basement of De Noyer's funeral home in Jackson, Michigan. He's on the table. The train has brought him home from Santa Fe. Two men in shirtsleeves vest and casket him while my father, just gone 12, stands in the door unnoticed, watching, watching everything.

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Upstairs, his father's organizing things, the flowers, mass, and burial, a stone the 5th of August 1936 that Wednesday morning when our dad was called or so he always told us after that to this life's work between the quick and dead and so we do these generations since my brothers sisters sons and daughter all carry on as if we'd heard it too That silence or that someone's who's to know whether faith moves mountains or if mountains move. Thank you.