Scenes from a Papal Funeral
My schedule, for the last 15-odd hours:
10:10pm - go to bed
10:30pm (ish) - go to sleep
3:31am - wake up, five minutes before alarm goes off. convince self I can sneak five more minutes of sleep
3:36am - alarm goes off. am incredibly groggy
3:42am - out the door, headed for law school
3:52am - arrive at law school. mysteriously, there are students there at that hour who aren't going to watch the papal funeral. who studies that hard?
4:00am - begin watching funeral on big screen tv in law school lounge, with small cadre (interestingly, all male*) of dedicated JPII fans.
7:00am - end papal funeral, head home
7:15am - arrive home. check and write emails. check and attempt to write blogs, but are blocked by Blogger server problems. mutter to self.
7:45am - back to sleep
12:00pm - awake for last time, refreshed, having had the dream where someone is squirting ketchup at me through the ventilation system. finally catch the wascally wabbit.
*Women: insufficiently dedicated? or insufficiently dumb?
The funeral itself was lovely, although I could have done with less gabby commentary from the ABC News crew. Every time they thought they could cut in, they did, which meant I largely missed the Agnus Dei and the Litany of the Saints. The former wasn't so bad - I know how the Agnus Dei goes - but the latter really bugged me, 'cause just before they'd said that the Litany was going to (specially) include some of the 400-odd saints that John Paul II canonized. That, I wanted to hear. But instead, I got to hear Charlie Gibson gabbing about what the cardinals are looking for in the next pope. They did treat us to some lovely gaffes: speaking of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, Gibson said "which we in the Protestant tradition call Communion", apparently in the expectation that the term was completely alien to Catholic practice. There were also humorous misuses of theologically loaded terms: Cokie Roberts talked about the various "incarnations" of the Blessed Virgin Mary; either Roberts or Gibson referred to the Pope's "ascension" into Heaven. And then there was the moment when Gibson pronounced the whole proceedings "cool", which indeed they were.
All joking (and kvetching) aside, I really liked the ceremony, and was glad I got up for it. Cardinal Ratzinger's homily, available here, was theologically and biographically astute, and was, I thought, lyrical even in the English, though it had already been translated through Italian from the German. It was also nice to see the catholicity of the Church, the cardinals and lay people from every continent, the patriarchs of the east, the service conducted in about a dozen languages. (Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, German, Tagalog, Swahili, Greek, I counted. I imagine there were others, including Polish.) And to see John Paul II one last time, winning over such a massive crowd. What a gift the man had, and was.
10:10pm - go to bed
10:30pm (ish) - go to sleep
3:31am - wake up, five minutes before alarm goes off. convince self I can sneak five more minutes of sleep
3:36am - alarm goes off. am incredibly groggy
3:42am - out the door, headed for law school
3:52am - arrive at law school. mysteriously, there are students there at that hour who aren't going to watch the papal funeral. who studies that hard?
4:00am - begin watching funeral on big screen tv in law school lounge, with small cadre (interestingly, all male*) of dedicated JPII fans.
7:00am - end papal funeral, head home
7:15am - arrive home. check and write emails. check and attempt to write blogs, but are blocked by Blogger server problems. mutter to self.
7:45am - back to sleep
12:00pm - awake for last time, refreshed, having had the dream where someone is squirting ketchup at me through the ventilation system. finally catch the wascally wabbit.
*Women: insufficiently dedicated? or insufficiently dumb?
The funeral itself was lovely, although I could have done with less gabby commentary from the ABC News crew. Every time they thought they could cut in, they did, which meant I largely missed the Agnus Dei and the Litany of the Saints. The former wasn't so bad - I know how the Agnus Dei goes - but the latter really bugged me, 'cause just before they'd said that the Litany was going to (specially) include some of the 400-odd saints that John Paul II canonized. That, I wanted to hear. But instead, I got to hear Charlie Gibson gabbing about what the cardinals are looking for in the next pope. They did treat us to some lovely gaffes: speaking of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, Gibson said "which we in the Protestant tradition call Communion", apparently in the expectation that the term was completely alien to Catholic practice. There were also humorous misuses of theologically loaded terms: Cokie Roberts talked about the various "incarnations" of the Blessed Virgin Mary; either Roberts or Gibson referred to the Pope's "ascension" into Heaven. And then there was the moment when Gibson pronounced the whole proceedings "cool", which indeed they were.
All joking (and kvetching) aside, I really liked the ceremony, and was glad I got up for it. Cardinal Ratzinger's homily, available here, was theologically and biographically astute, and was, I thought, lyrical even in the English, though it had already been translated through Italian from the German. It was also nice to see the catholicity of the Church, the cardinals and lay people from every continent, the patriarchs of the east, the service conducted in about a dozen languages. (Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, German, Tagalog, Swahili, Greek, I counted. I imagine there were others, including Polish.) And to see John Paul II one last time, winning over such a massive crowd. What a gift the man had, and was.
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