Singing for People She Barely Knows

They asked through somebody else, which is how these things usually happen.

A woman she knows slightly rang and said the family had asked, and would she, and the answer was obviously yes because there is no version of saying no to that.

He was twenty seven. She met him once, at a thing, for about ninety seconds, and cannot picture his face without the photograph they sent her.

The service is Friday. She has the song. It is the right song and the family chose it themselves and it is not a song she would have picked and that is fine and probably better.

What she cannot get past is a specific dread, and it took her until Tuesday to name it properly.

She is afraid of being decoration.

Of standing at the front of a room at the worst hour of these people's lives, doing something she is good at, and being a nice moment in a terrible day. Of the thing where somebody says afterward that the singing was beautiful, and everybody agrees, and none of it touches the family at all.

She has sung at eleven funerals. Nine of them she knew the person. Those were different and she knows exactly why.

Sit down. There is a verse about comfort traveling and it puts something in your hands that is not your voice.

The comfort that was given is the thing that travels

Here it is, and read the last clause because that is where the whole mechanism sits.

He comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.2 Corinthians 1:4

With the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted. That is what travels. Not skill, not eloquence, not an ability to move a room, and not proximity to the person who died.

What you carry into that building is what has been done for you.

You are bringing something that was given to you rather than something you can perform. 2 Corinthians 1:4 describes comfort as passing through a person from God rather than as being generated by one, and the Spirit inspired that as the mechanism rather than as an encouragement.

That is the answer to the decoration question, and it is worth being precise about it. Decoration is something added to an occasion from outside it. What that verse describes is not added from outside; it is passed on from somewhere the family cannot reach today, by somebody who has been there.

What the nine were different

Now the nine funerals where you knew the person, because you already understand this and have not applied it.

Those were different because there was no performance in them. You were grieving, and singing was the shape the grief took, and everybody in the room could tell, and that is why they worked, and nothing written anywhere makes acquaintance the qualification, and the Spirit was in all nine of them.

The two you did not know felt like a service being rendered. Competently, kindly, and from outside.

But the difference is not knowledge of the person. It is whether the singer is carrying something real into the room, and grief for the deceased is only one of the things that qualifies.

You have your own affliction to carry in there. That is what 2 Corinthians 1:4 says is transferable, and the Spirit is the one who moves it from one person to another, and it does not require you to have known a twenty seven year old man.

Whatever your worst year was, that is what makes you not decoration on Friday. Not because you will mention it. Because you will be singing out of it.

And nobody in that room will be able to name what the difference is. That is worth accepting in advance, because it means there is no feedback available afterward that will tell you whether it worked. Somebody will say the singing was beautiful, which they say either way. The measure of Friday is not what anybody tells you at the door, and 2 Corinthians 1:4 puts the transfer in the hands of God rather than in a review, and the Spirit is not going to be assessed by a hall full of people in coats.

What to do on Friday

Here is the practical part and there are three pieces.

Before you sing, sit with the family for a minute if you can get near them. Not to say anything. Just so that they meet a person rather than an item on the order of service.

While you sing, do not perform the grief. That is the failure mode in the other direction, and a room can tell instantly. Sing it straight and let it be what it is.

Afterward, stay. That is the whole of the third piece and it matters more than the first two, and nothing written anywhere excused the musician, and the Spirit is at work in whoever is still standing about at the end. Musicians leave. There is always a reason and everybody accepts it, and the family notices, at some level, who was still in the hall at the end.

You are permitted to be a person there rather than a performer. What is written puts comfort in the hands of somebody who has received it, and the Spirit does not require a professional relationship to the deceased before He will use somebody in a room.

And if you can, learn one specific thing about him before Friday. Ask the woman who rang you. One detail, and let it be in you while you sing.

That is not a trick for producing an emotion. It is the difference between singing at a funeral and singing at his funeral, and a room can hear the difference even though nobody in it could tell you what they heard. One detail is enough. What he was like at seven in the morning. What he was hopeless at. Something his mother would recognize.