A different kind of 'Happy Thought'...

...one that occurred to me while attending a funeral over the weekend.

The Baroness and I chatted before the service began about the tradition in Taiwan (and other cultures) to have 'professional mourners'--people who are paid to come and cry loudly at funerals.

(This, as with all things, was also satirized brilliantly on the Simpsons in the episode where Homer looks into burial arrangements for Grandpa...)

No, our service didn't have a professional crier show up, but we did have something that struck me as being remarkably similar: the professional minister.

You know the type: strong voice, word choices that are more 'flowery' than normal, dramatic pauses during and after sentences for effect, exaggerated movements of hands and head...all the tools of professional speakers.

He was effective in serving his purpose in the service (i.e. saying things that sound good about the deceased and comforting his family members) but I couldn't help feel a certain...fakeness to the service. Just like the crier who's paid to come to funerals, this guy wasn't there out of the goodness of his heart--he's there to do a job. He does it well, naturally, and certainly I believe he's a good person who would genuinely care about the feelings of others, but the fact remains he's a professional who had never met the deceased and who is paid to say things that sound nice but are essentially hollow underneath.

Why do I bring this up? In recent times, I had been feeling a little disheartened sometimes at the quality of talks (or lack of) in sacrament meetings: you know, people who mumble indistinctly, are disorganized, ramble aimlessly, talk about inappropriate things, are boastful, etc. (I'm not alone in this, I know...) Yet, even then there's a certain purity to it--that, for better or worse, you're getting what that person really thinks and not something that someone else paid him/her to stand up and say.

When I was investigating churches in high school, I attended a Presbyterian service with a guest minister whom, we were told, was under consideration for the full-time position in that church. His talk was well written and organized and he delivered it well. The problem was it was also obvious that he was 'auditioning': he overemphasized the dramatic pauses, the exaggerated hand movement--the little things--essentially in an effort to impress the audience, to give them the message that 'yes, I'm a good speaker and you should hire me for your church." I have no doubt he believed in what he was preaching, but the situation he was in introduced impurities (for lack of a better word) into the sermon--ulterior issues that distracted from the point of the sermon, the gospel of Jesus Christ. Having professional clergy in any church adds some inherent impurities into the mix--no different than listening to a salesman give his sales pitch: you know what he's saying is probably true, but you also know he's paid to do so and has an inherent bias.

So...I guess the point is after the experience over the weekend I became more thankful for the Church I'm in and its lack of a professional clergy. Even with the rambling and the occasional lack of preparation, it's pure and I'm thankful for that. I know I'll be paying more attention to sacrament talks this week no matter who's speaking...