Funeral for a Homeless Vagrant

Funeral for a Homeless Vagrant? By Lucy Bregman. Presented at University of Bath Conference on “Death at the Margins of the State,” June 2017 Early in the 20th century and undoubtedly earlier, a sad scene would take place. A man was found dead, on the street of a city, with no personal idenfication, or way to contact any family members. He had no doubt been a “homeless vagrant,” someone who lived on the street. There were no modern biological tests for identification, and even if there had been, no one in authority would have thought it worth paying for them. The only job was to hold the body for a while in the city morgue, then bury the poor man in a municipal graveyard. But at the burial, a clergyman was called in, to preside at a funeral. Somehow, the city authorities thought it necessary to have a religious functionary present, to do something right before the burial. Was this even a funeral, with no mourners, and the only congregation the grave-diggers? What were the problems posed by this melancholy situation? In pastors’ manuals and in anthologies of funeral sermons from that era, lasting until mid-20th century, this situation of the homeless vagrant shows up. Alongside funerals for suicides, and for “fallen women,” these were challenges for religious leaders at the theological level as well as sociological. We may say that the case of the homeless vagrant was an instance of death at the margins of faith, as well as at the margins of the state. Since the source for these discussions is from pastoral resources, it represents only one perspective on the scene of the homeless, nameless deceased. The city records would be an alternative source, and we will close with a current radically different take on this situation. But for clergy, funerals were always occasions for worship; they saw themselves as the primary guide for what funerals were about, and who should be funeralized. Funeral directors were not players in the cases of homeless vagrants, and their tasks of preparing the body were sometimes viewed as “pagan.” But in this situation, we have neither morticians, nor mourning family members as actors in the drama. Just the dead man, the gravediggers and the pastor. Why did the homeless vagrant situation appear in the manuals for pastors, right up until mid-century? What made it a problem? Here, I may say, we are dealing with clergy from what are now called “mainline” American Protestant denominations: Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists – clergy known and respected in the city, or at least with a solid reputation for accommodating such requests. I am not including Roman Catholic priests here, nor members of minority denominations such as Assembly of God. Was the assumption that any dead person must most likely be Protestant? More likely, Protestant clergy, present at a variety of municipal functions, belonged as natural partners with civic authorities? In the words of Andrew Blackwood, “The Christian minister is the servant of his community, not merely of his parish.” (Blackwood, 183). Therefore the same manuals provide instructions for presiding at funerals and memorials for civic leaders, or at Memorial Day commemorations. Clergy from these branches of Christianity belonged at the center of the state, not at its margins. For these clergy, the most basic problem posed by the homeless vagrant’s funeral was theological: the unknown status of the man (and it was always a man!) before God. Had he been a believer in Christ? Had he once had faith, and lost this along with his home and possessions? If nothing was known about him – not even his name – how could the preacher claim to assure anyone of the man’s salvation? In answer to this, the manuals’ authors insist both on the omniscience and mercy of God. We do not presume to make judgments but the default is hope that God will welcome this poor abandoned soul into his kingdom. Also, the normal message of the funeral is not primarily psychological consolation, even when there are plenty of mourners. It is to remind everyone that we too will make the transition from this life to the next. We are, in short, the future dead. This is just as applicable to the gravediggers and to the preacher himself as to a normal congregation filled with grieving family. Funerals are about our relationship to God, a universal purpose. Clergy were not to assume that because the deceased’s human relationships had failed, God too had vanished. There was, I think, another theological reason why performing a funeral for a homeless vagrant was so difficult. The funeral draws on Biblical models, Biblical stories, in which faithful persons are shown facing death. Some of these may be problematic for other reasons, but the ideal might be the patriarchs who died surrounded by their sons, secure and ready to join their ancestors in hope of eventual resurrection (older understandings of the Hebrew Scriptures by Christians automatically assumed this was the case, although Biblical scholars might doubt that any firm hope for an afterlife was present at that early era). People in the Bible die surrounded by other people, no one dies absolutely alone. That is what makes the solitude of the homeless vagrant so unusual, and so unprecedented as a religious situation. He threatened some certainty about human connectedness, as indeed it does for us whether or not we invoke Biblical ideals to express this. No one should die that alone, that nameless, that unremembered. Note that the abandonment of Jesus by his Father and his friends might have been a model, but never was used or referred to in any of the sermons I have read. Jesus was portrayed as “homesick for Heaven,” but never as the one who approached the homeless vagrant in his dying aloneness. Nor was a more humanistic reason for holding a funeral invoked: that every human being, by virtue of being human, deserves a funeral and has a right to one. This was voiced by Paul Irion, in an interesting 1966 book The Funeral: Vestige or Value? (Irion, 134.189) This is an attempt to undercut all judgements about who belongs with the faithful and who doesn’t, but it also moves funerals from out of the umbrella of “worship.” Everyone deserves some commemorative rite to say “Someone was here,” but that is no longer worship. Earlier pastors could not have directly accommodated to this rationale, although some may have privately accepted it. For them, a funeral perfomed well away from a church building, right by the municipal graveyard, is still an act of worship, not solely an act of service or charity for a fellow human being. But it is also an act that reproaches. However mute the tone, there is in this treatment of the homeless vagrant situation a sense of injustice, of the failure of civic society to care for its own, and a failure of urban life to meet standards of humanity. Urban life de-personalized, making for anonymous existences not just for nameless vagrants. There is something threatening to all about urban environments, and the state is unable to overcome this. The gravediggers are symbols of incomplete and failed care, even as they perform a necessary but ugly task. Behind this lies an ethos which appears much more directly in the other sermons anthologized: the best environment, the most congenial to Christian faith, is rural or small town. Cities are risky and dangerous, you lose yourself and other people lose you when you end up in them. Endless evocations of home back on the farm, and of pious mothers presiding over well-ordered if frugal households, are central to these older Protestant sermons. Heaven was, of course, the ultimate Home, and these associations were used to build up that message. While it was not literally the case that a move to an urban environment led to a disconnection from church or family, the risk was perceived as always there. (I’m reminded that in other national contexts, this risk was far greater. One cynical theory about “secularization” in France was that the pavement stones of the Paris train stations invariably turned believers into atheists!) The homeless vagrant was the man who had crossed into chaos from order, who had abandoned home, mother and a secure place in a structured community. Or, to put this in the language of this Conference’s title, while God knows no margins nor boundaries, the nameless vagrant has stepped or fallen beyond the margins of all that we hold dear. The state is what remains to pick up the pieces, but without offering love or belonging. The city gravediggers are not mourners, and the municipal cemetery is not the local churchyard or village resting place for the dead. The problem of the homeless urban dead remains, as a sociological fact. But it no longer appears in more recent pastoral guides to funerals the way it once did. Probably one reason is much better identification of dead bodies, and more ability and will to trace possible relatives. Another reason is the diminished reach of the clergy. They are no longer so securely partners with civil authority. The problem situations addressed in recent pastoral manuals are all private: infighting among family members, for example. While police and firefighter funerals are an obvious exception, these have become such well-planned and managaged large-scale events that special clergy are resource persons. The average Protestant pastor will not be dealing with these. He and now she will have good relations with local funeral directors, will be invited to perform funerals even when the deceased was not a regular church member, and will become bereavement counselor to the family. Sometimes, clergy will be spokesperson to the media, on behalf of the family who are too traumatized by a death. But the role of clergy in ongoing civic life and memorial occasions has become minimal compared to the past. They do not need to be instructed in manuals. In striking contrast to this account of the homeless vagrant funeral as portrayed by clergy, I will introduce a radically alternative version of death rituals for the homeless. In Philadelphia and other American cities, Project Home is an advocacy and service organization for homeless persons. (“No one is home until everyone is home”) Their workers go out in cold weather to persuade or cajole street-dwellers to come indoors to shelters. Or, occasionally, to cajole police to let the homeless stay in the public area of train stations from which they are normally ousted at night (I am indebted to my one-time student Russell Efferson for information about their ordinary operation). Once a year, toward the end of December, Project Home holds a memorial service for all those who died on the street during the past year. The most recent total for Philadelphia is 200, including both homeless and formerly homeless. (This extremely high number is due to the rise in drug overdoses from opiods) These persons are remembered by name, they are not anonymous. They are remembered as persons with stories, even if these are mostly unhappy. And as “the homeless,” they are part of a community, a kind of at-the-margins neighborhood within the city (for example, a group live under the interstate highway as its elevated section passes over city neighborhoods). Even when one dies alone, they did not survive entirely alone. They had buddies, they had fellow-homeless who shared space with them, they did drugs or drank together (and sometimes murdered eachother). And, ironically, this Homeless Memorial Day commemoration did not take place “at the margins of the state.” In the most recent of the Homeless Memorial Service, the Mayor and other city officials were present, and it was held right outside the Municipal Services Building, across the street from City Hall! Not only Mayor Kenney, but agency representatives along with clergy and musicians were present, as well as the media. So in this sense, it resembles those civic occasions in the past where religious leaders were present. By now, however, like the musicians they were participants in a program focused on other concerns, not directly on worship. Of course, these days, the clergy were multi-religious: a rabbi and an imam as well as a Protestant pastor were there. The Homeless Memorial Service is an occasion for mourning. But the websites and publicity make it clear: their other purpose is reproach. The kind of homelessness and destitution that leads to street deaths should not be tolerated, and the state (represented by the City of Philadelphia) has appeased and accommodated rather than solved the problem, although the individual city officials were commended for their support. There is no mistaking the tone of agonized and angry denunciation of the way the richest country in the world has learned to ignore or tolerate the existence of homeless citizens. Nor is there any trace of reliance on a nostalgic ideal of peaceful smaller communities either; urban life is taken as a given. But it should not be as negligent and dangerous as it has become. Another paradox is that the local co-founder and executive director of Project Home is a nun, Sr. Mary Scullion, of the Sisters of Mercy -although the voices from Project Home do not invoke explicitly religious themes. Were they to do so, I suspect that the Biblical parallel they would find closest to their work would be that of the lepers in Jesus’ time. Those were viewed as dangerous, defiling, and formed a counter-community at the edges of normal human places. Jesus took pity on them. As someone with a longterm interest in shifting ideas on death and religion in society, and who takes theological ideas and images seriously, I am not sure how the term “marginal” can be used here, except paradoxically. God has no margins, God’s center is everywhere: probably even the stodgiest and most conservative of those older clergymen would have accepted that. Their role was to witness to that in situations where state and family had centers, boundaries and margins. The nameless individuals who fell outside these borders nevertheless belonged to God, and to those who could represent God at the crucial transition out of this life. They did this without expecting attention from anyone, let alone the heavy media presence that marks Homeless Memorial Day. Yes, the minister should not hesitate to perform a funeral for a homeless vagrant. His role and its duties required this, however abnormal the circumstances may have been. Sources Blackwood, Andrew, The Funeral: A Sourcebook for Ministers. Phila: Westminster Press, 1942. Bregman, Lucy Preaching Death: The Transformation of Protestant Funeral Sermons. Waco TX: Baylor University Press, 2011. Efferson, Russell- personal communication Irion, Paul, The Funeral: Vestige or Value? Nashville: Abingdon, 1966. Project HOME. www.projecthome.org.