Funeral directors have a knack for helping people work their way through sudden, often tragic loss — and for Catholics in the profession, this truly is a “ministry of consolation.”

Our Sunday Visitor explores this special vocation:

In his poem, “Calling,” author and funeral director Thomas Lynch wrote about listening for the call from the voice of God, waiting as an altar boy for the thunder and enlightenment that, for him, did not come as he knelt before the Eucharist.

As he listened quietly, and as his pastor urged, his calling was not to the priesthood, but to follow his father into funeral service. That calling came for his father when he was 12 and saw “two men in shirtsleeves” lift the body of an uncle – a young priest – from a table and place him into a casket

The symbolism of his father’s calling stayed with Lynch.

“You have to understand, that for most Catholics, the elevation of the dead body is the central metaphor of our liturgy,” he said.

“For my father, watching this dead priest being elevated into a coffin was not unlike watching a priest raise the host. There is more here than you can see. Isn’t that what our faith presses our noses up against – that there is more [to death] than this corpse in front of you?”

Lynch is part of Lynch & Sons Funeral Directors, a family owned service with six locations in southeast Michigan. He also is a poet, essayist and author of several books, including the award-winning The Undertaking, a heartfelt look at people who grieve and the profession that serves them.

Funeral directors see faith challenged on a regular basis, and that sometimes means their own. Lynch likened it to the Book of Job. “It is the ancient problem of evil, why bad things happen to good people – the death of children, for example,” he told Our Sunday Visitor. “Sometimes the things that happen around funeral homes make me wonder about God, and then I pray. I keep prayer handy because faith for me is an exercise in doubt and wonder as well.”

Lynch provides a space in his funeral home where people can honestly grieve and that may include, he said, shaking their fists at God and demanding, “What did you have in mind?”

“They can say, with certainty, that God knows our hearts and will forgive our anger and hopelessness and our hurt and outrage, and he will be there in the long run to comfort us,” he said.

Because of his Catholic faith, Lynch said he is outspoken about the need for the bereaved to experience grief. The generation today bringing loved ones to funeral homes is the first generation, he said, that tries to get past grieving by not having a body at a funeral. He believes this carries the risk of spiritual and emotional peril.

“They have the body disappear by immediate burial or cremation, then they have a memorial service where the finger food is good, the talk is uplifting and the dead guy is not there,” he said.

“But ours is a faith based on the empty tomb. The real deal is taking the body to the tomb, or the grave or the [crematory] fire, which is a purification and a metaphor for our Catholic faith.”

Bob Biggins, former president of the National Funeral Directors Association, often calls on his faith when he ministers to clients at his funeral home in Rockland, Mass. His own convictions, he said, enable him to share with the bereaved the hope and consolation of the promised “heavenly hereafter.”

On the occasions when lapsed Catholics veto a funeral Mass, Biggins explains that the ritual and ceremony of the Mass can comfort.

He also tells them that taking the deceased back to church is an appropriate way to honor their life and their death.

“Our church is clear that baptisms take place in church and that weddings take place in church, too, because the church is the center of our faith community,” he said. “Most of the time, they will agree to have a funeral Mass.”

Being able to reach people in those ways is one of the most satisfying aspects of Biggins’ profession. “I think it’s unquestionably a vocation to walk with a family through their darkest days, through the ‘valley of the shadow of death,’ ” Biggins told Our Sunday Visitor. “It’s one of the most rewarding things that I can ever imagine doing.”

Check out the rest of the article for more on the amazing grace of those who bury the dead.