A reader sent in this knockout 2011 piece from Books & Culture in response to the Auden piece I posted earlier today. There’s really no way to excerpt it meaningfully without spoiling the unfolding surprises. Here’s something from the beginning:

A little over a year ago, a one-time colleague of mine died, although I can’t say I knew him well. He was older than I am, much older, and his tenure at the college where I teach had ended many years earlier. The psalm he wanted read at his funeral was 121; had he been Lakota and not Dutch American, we might say he chose Psalm 121 as his death song.

The preacher was retired, a fill-in, he told us. Chicago born-and-reared, he spoke in a clipped, Windy City-slicker accent that seemed the wrong pitch for a vastly empty sanctuary out on the Plains. The church’s real pastor was in Hawaii, where the rest of us should have been, the temperature outside somewhere close to 20 below.

Because there was nowhere else to look, I felt like this pastor’s wife: I wanted to run up to the front, lick my fingers, and plaster down a rooster tail that, all funeral long, had him resembling Alfalfa from the old gray-tone movie vignettes. He seemed somehow wrong for the job, but then so much was. By his own admission, the preacher had only known the deceased for five years. I couldn’t help wondering how much he didn’t know.

What was most remarkable was what wasn’t said, what couldn’t be, or shouldn’t.

And then the author, James Calvin Schaap, goes and says it.

This world…