The Bee Sting: A Book About Christ

The Funeral
by Rosamond Bailey
p. 8

A year and a half ago a friend of mine died of cancer. The last time I saw her I held her in my arms but I could not cry. I was filled with anger at the certainty of her death and I could not submit to my grief. I could not accept the necessity of her death and cry with her. I knew many of her friends had been able to grieve with her in this way, but something in me refused to cry. Perhaps my anger was preventing me from feeling my sadness. But something else was keeping me from tears.

It seemed to me that her fidelity to her faith, her acceptance of her illness and her bravery in the face of death, all of which showed what a courageous person she truly was, had blinded people to her. They idealized her. I felt that some of those who wept for her wept for the ideal that she had come to represent to them. At the funeral, the way several people spoke about her made her into someone I did not recognize and I felt further and further from the person I loved while listening to them. Idealizing her meant that she was not like the rest of us. In their eyes she was not our equal but better than us. She was exalted and that put her in a category where I could not follow. How could I love this ideal image of her that did not represent the person that I knew?

There is something pleasurable about idealization because it is a value held in common with others. And it is a self-congratulatory process. Idealizing someone turns the person into something better than she really is. All her faults are erased. In this process of making her better, which is a process of making her conform to some idea we have of her, we come to love the ideal person and hold her in our memory, erasing the person who was actually alive. In loving this ideal person we too participate in the ideal and we are made to feel we are better people by association. And so I have come to realize, while thinking about the funeral, that you cannot really love someone you idealize. The two emotions cancel each other out.

Listening to other mourners talk I saw that I did not share in the ocean of sentimentality that held them together. I realized my feeling for my friend separated me from them and this fact made me uncomfortable. I did not want them to see that I did not feel as they did, for I was afraid my judgement against them would provoke their anger. An ideal shared by a group has tremendous power and I feared that power would be turned against me.

Traditionally, Jesus Christ has been seen as the ideal of goodness, the template from which all goodness is copied. Christians are urged to be like him. But after thinking about the fact that idealization and love are opposed, I feel a moral revulsion at the idea that I should try to emulate this perfect Christ. For just as I cannot love the ideal image of my friend that was described at the funeral, so I cannot love a perfect god. When all my spiritual ambition tempts me to be ideal, in what ever way I understand that role, ideal wife, ideal mother, ideal daughter, I cannot express love nor feel it. I cannot love myself or anyone else.
And so my fear at speaking against the idealization that I saw at the funeral was a much bigger fear than speaking out in that small circle. At the funeral I had an intuition that my judgement was setting me against a teaching honoured by the whole of the Christian tradition. That judgement is that the doctrine of Christ's perfection kills our love for ourselves, our neighbours and for him. •

I Am An Old Dog
Marjorie Cluett Seguin, 2011