I went to a funeral Mass yesterday,

I went to the cemetery in my black dress, where we waited thirty or forty minutes for the family to arrive. Horrible traffic from the church to the burial grounds. Scorching sun. Sweat running down my back.

A husband and wife with adorable girls showed up dragging a cooler. I thought, “what an odd thing to bring”. Then they opened it and started handing out bottles of ice cold water to all the mourners as we waited. Amazing!

Since my husband and I are retired we can keep going, when others have to attend their own daily work, so we also went to the reception. This gave me an opportunity to pass on to the family a message I had been entrusted with, from someone who could not attend. Said person had also loaned me her black veil. It wasn’t necessary but it was very sweet.

I got to visit with some friends I hadn’t seen for years. It was the kind of occasion where people say how lovely it is to see each other, and how terrible that it takes a tragedy to make it happen.

I had an old Latin/English missal and noticed an interesting translation twist. The Sanctus prayer was the same in Latin as always, but in English it was rendered as

OLD Latin Missal: Holy, holy, holy art thou, Lord God of hosts. Thy glory fills all heaven and earth. Hosanna in high heaven! Blessed be he who is coming in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in high Heaven!

Contrast this with

Current: Heaven and earth are filled with thy glory…

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord…

The old translation has a much more immediate and active idea of the present. I don’t know enough Latin to even guess if the slight change in the tense is the true translation. I can see that “Glory is filling heaven and earth right now and he is coming right now” hit my brain in a slightly different way. Quite interesting.

We were given a program for the Mass. In one case the program notes said that the choir would chant Domine Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae while the priest said other prayers. This drove me nuts. I could find the prayers the priest was saying (though I couldn’t hear him, I could see what he was doing and follow along), but what the program had was the English of what the choir was chanting in Latin. It took me three tries through the Missal, hunting madly, to find the Latin version of the Domine, so I could keep up with what was being sung. Every word of all that was going on was lovely and there was too much (two things going on at the same time?) and it was too hard to keep track. I won’t say more than that.

Eternal rest grant unto my friend, O Lord, And let perpetual light shine upon him.