Guestsplaining 010: Victor Sweeney and Dying as a Catholic

[Music] welcome to godsplaining contemplative preachers contemporary age each week join the dominican friars as they consider all things catholic welcome to godsplaining in this episode of guest planning this is father jacob richard and today i have father gregory here with me uh still in dc not yet off back to switzerland uh just sitting in like a white-washed room it's really great how you doing father gregory i'm doing well thanks yeah i um i would talk at greater length and expatiate upon the whiteness of my wall or the otherwise uninteresting nature of my surroundings but in so doing i would be taking time from our guest so i will now lapse into silence great to be with you perfect excellent all right today we have with us uh mr victor sweeney who is a funeral director in warren minnesota you may be wondering why i being from dc in the east coast why i know someone from warren minnesota and why we're talking to a funeral director and i will answer those questions right now well i don't know victor but for meeting him online uh through email and then through a phone call um but found him i guess we can say found you i don't know if that's the right way to say like found you like you were lost and we found him uh on uh on youtube actually on the wired channel on youtube where you were um i guess doing like a q a thing on um on that channel on wired like three months ago and uh it said like questions like a mortician answers questions about death or whatever it was like interesting yeah and then i saw when i clicked on that a mug of benedict the 16th and i was like that's our guy here he is so welcome yeah welcome to god's planning it's great to have you thank you thank you fathers no yeah the the mug there was kind of horse all sign i was i was hoping somebody would pick up on it so good work here i am yeah it was me out of all the people in the world for better or for worse it was me so yeah it's great to have you on the show and i'm really excited to talk about some uh like end-of-life death things from a catholic funeral director is mortician still a word that would you describe yourself as a petition is that like passe or you know it my license says mortician um but most people call it funeral directors it sounds nicer um it's less like that's true settling and scientific so funeral director is good but either one's fine yeah yeah you know i guess you want to get this mission yeah yeah that's that's probably that's probably what got it and you know we're going to give wired a run for tomorrow i checked the video the other day it sounds like 3 million hits we'll usually get like three and a half million views on our godsplaining youtube videos so we're gonna give them a run for their money but before we talk about death things um why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself uh how who you are where you from how you got it how you got into funeral directing these these sort of things just get us up to spirit i guess yeah um so uh i uh yeah i'm i'm a father of three uh soon to be four in a small town in minnesota i live in a town of fewer than 2 000 people um i grew up outside of the suburb of detroit and moved to bismarck north dakota when i was around 13. and that was like a huge culture shock that was a big deal moving out to the middle of nowhere um and i've since moved to the even closer to the middle of nowhere um but uh no i i'll tell you the truth i i always really wanted to be a priest from the time i was a little kid um actually my parents moved a couple years ago and in their move they found all my old grade school things and i have a paper from when i was in kindergarten that says when i grew up i want to be a priest um and that's kind of always what i want to do and um in high school i i was discerning that and um a bunch of my friends were likewise discerning and they all went off to seminary i kind of discerned out before i got that far um so then i wasn't really sure what i wanted to do i didn't like business i didn't really like science um you know i'm not a big math guy um and then god really laughed at me and uh put me put me in a funeral business with a mortuary science degree um but it's it's good it's like a nice kind of middle ground in some ways between um something that's pastoral um but something that can also you know put bread on the table for your little kids so it it works out well and um yeah i married my high school girlfriend we've married for eight years now and uh like i said we have three little kids and one more on the way so it's it's good life is good it's it's different than i ever thought it would be um i always thought i'd like move on to bigger and better things and you know run a funeral home in a city or something uh and i i just i like small town life i've really found it's it's got some benefits yeah that's awesome um so thinking about the work that you do then uh i guess perhaps we can start by i don't know talking a little bit about um catholic teaching catholic teachings on the importance of the body the importance of the body particularly at death um father gregory do you want to lead us into that a little bit sure yeah i think maybe just a motivate the question when we think about the saints in heaven we talk about them as separated souls and we think about them as awaiting the resurrection of the body and yet they're wholly happy so is the body necessary to be holy happy in the presence of god is the body kind of like an appendage but before you get to super lofty theological questions the answer of which kind of defy us all um maybe how do how do you focus the question of yeah like the place of the body the role of the body and human happiness just more basically more generally and specifically as they come to you when they are no longer joined body and soul yeah well i i think the big thing that i always come back to is that there's really no human experience on this side of things that doesn't involve your body like i've asked the question to groups that have come into the funeral home like what have you experienced without your body and they'll say something like oh i had a dream like okay but your dream is still coming through your active brain you're going through rem like you're even that which is you know in some ways it's not physical at least you know tangibly like with your hands or something but even that is still through the lens of your body and how utterly important your body is you can't experience anything if you don't have a body you know um like like certain you know certain saints and writings have talked about how you know in some ways uh the angels you know as magnificent as they are lacking the body they're still something that we kind of have over there in some ways and uh so yeah i i'm really that's always that's always the the challenge though is to get people to understand that the body isn't this kind of um mannequin throwaway thing you know we're not buddhists where we're just trying to separate ourselves from our bodies or experience um but to be a christian we have to embrace that tension that happens where the soul is in the body and we have to reverence the body i mean i feel like in the same way we'd reverence the soul at least you know in so much as it's due does that sound reasonable yeah yeah that makes yeah i think that makes that makes sense and we see this like throughout uh i mean throughout history throughout christian history the the the i guess at least re reiterating the importance of of the of the body through you know from creation through the incarnation and this is kind of where dominicans come on the scene especially with the first heresies that the order was combating the albigensians who were duelists who thought the body was bad and you see this throughout even even in our contemporary you know current culture that there there's often like this idea that like what we do with or in our bodies doesn't always affect who we are as people or there's some sort of like disjointed reality that really just isn't true so i i guess with respect to like end of life death sort of the reality of death you know what what is that quote that something like death is the great equalizer is that right did i quote that right i don't know if not it's my quote now um but you know this is something that's something that everybody will experience yeah exactly um so how do you see like as a catholic funeral director how do you how is there a difference does that does that lens the catholic our catholic faith does that lens um make make for a difference in the work that you do and dealing with families but then also dealing with with the the deceased i think so i i think so um you know i i know a number of funeral directors and the ones that are that are more devout or have more you know formal religiosity um tend to i'm not going to say they treat the bodies differently or treat them better but there's certainly the aspect of like humanizing them that i think runs alongside someone who believes that the soul is important as well as the body um you always run the risk i think as someone who works with the deceased of turning the person who's there or at least their their body i'm turning them into just like this object you know we always talk about you know objectification and i think that's real risk that you run you know when you work in a in a business that deals with the dead you it's a challenge to all you know to always tell yourself that like this is somebody's loved one this person is important their body is important therefore i can't just treat it like an object or you know a way to i don't know make money on a casket or something like that does that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah for sure yeah um just to jump in with a small thought um with respect to that i guess um yeah just to hear you mention the kind of balance to be struck between referencing the body and reverencing the soul or like the body with reference to the soul um do you find there was a new york times article maybe six seven years ago about people waking the bodies of their loved ones and and kind of um true to life poses you know like somebody like seated in the driver's seat of a car or like somebody in their favorite ches launch and it makes you think of evelyn wah's book the loved one yeah the way in which it can it can kind of bridge on the ridiculous like like what's what are some of the principles of humanizing that experience without it becoming strange silly tortured bizarre you know i i think really the the crux of it is that you have to you have to reverence the body in a way that's going to make the family heal right so one of the things that that we always say at my business and i think it's true i mean and it's not just because we say it a lot but it's that the the funeral is about the deceased but it's for the living and so in that way you know as interesting as an i of an idea as it might be to embalm someone sitting in their favorite gaming chair with an xbox controller in their hand like does that does that does that sort of thing provide peace to a family or does it continue to kind of perpetrate this idea that um i don't know a person is boiled down to just the things they liked or um that you know any minute now they're gonna sit up out of this gaming chair you know i i don't know so i think there's something about the body being in a position that that i hate to say it looks dead but also looks peaceful i think can be healing and i don't know if uh propping someone up in a corner is gonna have that same effect you know maybe there's showmanship in it but i don't know if if um if peace comes from that yeah this might this might seem weird but i'm going to say it anyways it seems that like the distinction there or or the difference is is and especially in what you said making them look like they are dead but peaceful not in a gruesome way but in a peaceful way kind of the distinction between being um you know preparing a human body with respect for the afterlife and for you know the second the second resurrection um versus like a taxidermist is that the right you know someone who just kind of puts something on display you know so yeah the other i guess a couple weeks ago someone i was talking with somebody and they said um something like you know we've lost in our culture uh like the the ability to um like face death uh or like you know we don't like funerals and stuff are not and mourning we're not good at mourning really so i imagine that a lot of your work has uh is centered around providing like a good setting and a good experience makes it sound kind of jargony but a good experience for mourning uh mourning the passing of someone who's loved by their you know by their family no you would you would be right um you know i i find that ritual is really important um obviously as a catholic i think like ritual is the most important part of it um as chesterton says right tradition is the democracy of the dead like we've been burying our bodies you know with their hands over their chest vertically you know for ages and ages and ages and and you have to believe that that started for a good reason and and it seemed to work right like the medievals had a pretty good handle on death you could say say what you will about hygiene or whatever they had to really handle on death and mourning and uh you know figuring that out whereas we seem to struggle with that um so no i don't know it that that's that's huge i think is tradition um the other thing that i think is important when providing an ability to mourn is something in school that we used to call grief work um so that would be not homework but it would be something more akin to something physical that you do either with the deceased or for the deceased right so like being a casket bearer is it's an action that you're you're helping you know kind of move the ritual along yes um but also there's that action that i think is really healing that you're actually doing something to get grandpa from point a to point b and um and likewise i think seeing the deceased is again it's in our bodies so it's a physical action um that seeing the deceased i think is really helpful too because it kind of puts everything in a frame in an area where you can uh understand it and and kind of have death hit home but like you say it doesn't have to be gruesome but it's this physical action that i think is important yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense um all right well we're coming up about halfway through the episode so we're going to take a quick break uh but when we come back we're going to continue our conversation on the relationship of the body and soul and death um and also talk a little bit about you know what we as catholics should know about care of the body funeral prep those sort of things with an expert in the field mr victor sweeney so sit tight and we will be right back you are listening to godsplaining visit us at godsplaining.org to listen to our episodes shop our store and donate to our podcast all gifts go to improving the podcast and bringing the gospel to more listeners thanks for your support welcome back to god's planning i'm father jacob bertrand i'm here with father gregory and victor sweeney uh funeral director from warren minnesota who's talking to us um about death and funeral directing and all of that so at the top of the episode we were talking a bit about uh catholic understanding of the relationship of the body and the soul and then preparing um the body uh i really liked how you said it victor the the that the funeral is um i'm gonna say it wrong is about the about the deceased but for the family is that right yeah is that the right putting it together okay yeah yeah so we've been talking about that how how that yeah perfect how that how that inter interplays the the you know the funeral with respect to the living and the dead um one of the things that uh that we started talking about at the top or at the first half of the episode that is is kind of sticking with me is this idea of of ritual and of um of the ritual of mourning but also you know obviously in in the mass and the funeral mass and that follows death um what are i guess what are some sort of you know rituals small r rituals things that are important um i guess in your work in in preparing um preparing a body for the funeral for the viewing these kind of things what like what goes from like somebody who you know practice at the faith and that sort of thing what i guess goes into that um and preparing somebody for for burial sure well there's there's certainly kind of the the scientific aspect of my job the actual you know practicalities of embalming someone um but i guess when i when i think of how my faith intersects with that it's not so much in the embalming side but it's really with um kind of the movement and the handling of the body before that and then following the embalming so for instance when someone passes away whether it's at home on hospice or maybe at a nursing home um you don't you don't like like we said before before the break you know you don't want to treat the body as an object you don't want to you know just shuck them from their hospital bed onto your cotton away you roll right like you're going to transfer them like you would transfer you know your own grandmother you know if they're if they're small you just pick them up and put them on the cot if they're larger you know you're gonna just use gentle movements um because really you know at that point you know a person's body is is a helpless thing and you need to treat it gently and it also is do you know do a certain amount of respect um and likewise you know after an embalming is completed which an embalming can get kind of rough at times to get proper results but you know after the embalming you know there's there's a matter of like getting somebody dressed or maybe doing their hair or putting on their makeup and there is like a certain ritual to that in that you know it's all done with care and precision right so it's it's not like you're just um you know yanking on somebody's shirt you know you're buttoning it up just like you would button your own shirt you know you're gonna tie someone's tie and tie it so it looks nice you're gonna shave someone's face let's say the way that you'd wanna have your face shaved um you know all these things have to be done with care so um again for whatever reason well i know the reason for which i just read the loved one by evelyn awa uh not not not knowing what it was about but then coming to discover that it was super apropos for this for this episode yeah and the book you know insofar as it's evil and wah and it's not brideshead revisited the sword of honor trilogy it's just kind of sneering and satirical and he had this visit to the united states and he hates the united states and all of its inhabitants and then he just makes fun of us and specifically the funeral business as like a kind of excrescence of hollywood uh but in that there's man there's just like a bunch of devastating things but one of them is you just see everything from an economic perspective so they're just trying to sell you a casket they're trying to sell you an urn they're trying to sell you uh you know like a a service as it were or a funeral right and then you know the one character he works for a pet cemetery the other main character she works for a human cemetery and you see their different perspectives but it's meant to kind of collapse it all into so much meat marquetry i guess you know like a lot of these types of situations don't necessarily confront us until such time as someone whom we love dies and then we have to make these very concrete decisions often time from a perspective of like loss grief bewilderment sadness right so we're not going to be relied upon to think especially closely but maybe maybe one kind of concrete example of a decision to be made would be you know do you bury the whole body or do you have a per you know do you have your your loved one cremated um maybe could you just walk us through the type of thought that goes into that the type of deliberation that goes into that from your end sure sure so what the studies have told us is that there has been a rise in cremation no doubt but that it's not entirely driven by economics which is strange because that's that's like where i think people's knee-jerk reaction comes in but generally cremation is just driven uh by personal preference and so that could be anything i in my experience what i see at least boots on the ground in my little area so this is just anecdotal but what i see is that generally people gravitate towards cremation when they want to make things easy right and the reality is death is just not easy it almost doesn't matter what you do death is going to be hard and so i think people try to do that because they say well you know we don't have to see the body and that's gonna be easier for us or um i don't have to try to explain to my grandkids you know why grandpa is laying up in the front of our you know front of our church in a in a box i don't have to explain that to them um so i think there is you know kind of this this um hesitancy to talk about death that i think is spilling over into our cremation rate into our cremation rate sometimes um at least that's what i see you know of course every every area of the country that's different you know some places it's just become tradition at this point um but one thing that that i try to do and this is a it's a catholic thing um that i think spills over into the rest of my job but as you gentlemen probably know the catholic church has a preference on how a funeral is done and what we do with the body so the churches if we were to do it in order from kind of greatest preference to least the church always has a preference that the body is at the body itself is intact and at the end is at the funeral and then the church's preference then would be that after the funeral the body is buried intact in the ground right um and i suppose there are good you know there are good theological reasons for this the resurrection jesus christ himself laid in the tomb you know i think these things are important um and then the church's next preference would be that again the body is at the funeral and then cremation may be used as what we call a method of final disposition so rather than burying the body we'll cremate it and then we will bury the cremated remains intact in a fitting vessel in a catholic cemetery and then our your third option in order of preference would be that the body is cremated it is intact in a fitting vessel and is in its entirety in the urn at the funeral and then again buried in the ground so it's interesting i think the church has a preference the body is there um but one thing to note that that i always especially catholic families there's been this increase in people wanting to keep cremated remains as like a memento or have it made into a piece of jewelry or a paper weight or something and uh and that is not permissible from a catholic viewpoint because you're not treating those cremated remains like you would the body right there has to be kind of a one-to-one comparison you have to treat the body well you have to treat the cremated remains well um and kind of divvying them up as keepsakes i think you know and the church would teach that that's not permissible um likewise it's not permitted to scatter ashes right they have to be buried intact in a in a suitable and fitting manner yeah it's interesting i was after i was ordained i was in uh catholic or campus ministry i was an assistant chaplain and then i've been vocation director so my like pastoral experience in a proper parish is is quite limited as a priest but we did have a parish also that we ran in in new hampshire alongside the campus ministry so there were times when i had was given some funerals to do um and i always enjoyed celebrating funerals i thought they were very beautiful you know as we were talking about the rituals and the rights and that sort of thing but it never i was never uh not surprised by sort of the questions especially around like you know cremation or burial or did the body have to be at the funeral where you know especially if there were cremains you know like the family rolling up with the cremains that they had from a funeral home for months ago you know it was just always very surprising to me and i always found it to be not not i mean sometimes that might be disrespectful in itself but not coming from a place of disrespect but coming from sort of place of of ignorance of simply not knowing um especially coming to a catholic funeral you know what the church proposes and why the church proposes what it does for treatments treatment of of the body and burial and these kind of things so i think knowing these things as catholics you know whether we're preparing for uh the burial of a loved one or even thinking about our own you know death and making preparations there and and that sort of thing um it's just good to know what and why the church teaches what she does in reflection of as you said of our lord and of respect for the body and these sort of things so um in our remaining handful of minutes that we have left i guess what i what i kind of want to ask is what i guess practical tips or advice would you have for um for catholics who are either you know preparing for for the death and burial of a loved one or their own or you know what are good things to know um so as to um you said you know death is always a big deal and it's always a thing to deal with but what are some things that might help deal with it well i guess um you know i i read this quote some years ago and i think about it i mean i work in a funeral home so i think about it very regularly um but saint anselm of canterbury said that um you know death death is the most expected thing in the world and yet you know it you never know when it will come for you like you you know you can't get out of it um and yet there's always kind of that mystery as to when it'll happen for yourself or your loved ones um and so i don't know i think even the best thing i could say maybe two things i i have something less tangible my the piece of advice there would be just think about your own death honestly i think that would cure a lot of today's ills in the world just thinking about your own death not necessarily preparing for it like putting away money or picking your casket or something but i'm just thinking about it knowing that like time is short and and like not only for you but like with your loved ones too and to just if you think about if you think about your own death enough i think it puts you in the right perspective for when it does happen to someone you know um and then i guess maybe the the more practical piece of advice would be you know read up on what the church teaches on on death and cremation and funerals um because most the people that i talk to and this would be you know of any religion generally think that uh a traditional funeral with the body present and a cremation with the urn are like the only two options and the people should know that like you can have a visitation with your loved one and you can have their body at the funeral and then you can have cremation following that um and for people that are worried about cost i mean you can save yourself thousands of dollars if you go that route if cost is a big concern but then you get the benefit of seeing your loved one of doing that actual physical work of having i don't want to say closure but i mean you're having this physical experience that you can't get at any other time it's it's it's you can never take it back um so that that would be my encouragement would be that if people are thinking about you know cremation and burial as this kind of um either or situation to just really look into it in their area even talk to their local phenol professional and to see what their options are because most people don't know about it until it's happening to them and it's really hard to make a decision you know kind of in the heat of the moment when tensions and emotions are high yeah i'm thinking in in what you're saying and then what you've said throughout the episode um of this of this book that it's not exactly well i mean i guess it's appropriate the title is called a time to die it's by nicholas diaz who um wrote some stuff or some introductions for some of cardinal sarah's books and the book is about the subtitles monks on the threshold of eternal life and what the author did was visited different you know famous monasteries throughout europe and talked to the abbot and some of the monks about how the monks die in the community and maybe it's more appropriate you know as a religious someone who lives in a community to kind of read these experiences experiences and be able to identify with some some of them but it was really moving just to see how these monks who you know prepare for death and the death of their brothers and i think has a lot of well you know translates very well over into you know for the laity too so it's not just for religious but it's a really beautiful and and book on on death really and it was just published a couple years ago and i think um as you were saying like to think about your death that we don't do it well or enough you know it doesn't have to be kind of a gruesome kind of um like macabre kind of thing but can be a really beautiful thing to think about the way by which we will you know come to meet the lord and how we can prepare spiritually but also practically for these things so i think that at least i mean i'm not the expert here you are so i was going to say those things are spot on but you know like i said you're the expert not me so there you have it all right y'all thanks so much for uh yeah of course thanks for um thanks for tuning in to this episode victor thanks so much for being here um if you've enjoyed listening to what victor has to say you can check out that youtube video uh on put out by wired it's called mortician answers dead body questions from twitter so it's just up a couple months ago and but is i found it to be really interesting and kind of fun so check that out if you'd like i think for news from us just one thing to keep an eye out for um more guest splaining episodes we're bumping things up to twice a month so the first and third mondays of the month we'll we'll have our guests on instead of just the first mondays of the month so um stay tuned for for more guests to come um other than that am i forgetting anything follow gregory i'm i don't think so right that's kind of what we have we're just okay we're just kind of rolling along so all right thanks again victor for being with us on the episode it was a lot of fun and great to hear your your insights on these things um that i guess everyone kind of deals with at some point but you know maybe more less less so on a podcast and more so like in an immediate situation so it's been great to have you and to pick your brain about about yeah death and the faith and how these things work together so thanks for that yeah thank you so much fathers yeah of course uh to all of you are listening as always we are keeping you in our prayers pray for us thank you too to our sponsors and supporters those who support us in so many ways and until next time god bless thanks for listening to god's planning a work of the dominican friars of the province of saint joseph follow us on facebook twitter and instagram leave a review on your podcast app and visit us at godsplaining.org [Music] you

Channel: Godsplaining Podcast

Views: 924

Rating: 4.9120879 out of 5

Keywords: catholic, dominican friars, theology, philosophy, religion, faith, order of preachers, godsplaining, seekers, Truth, preaching, questions, searching, prayer, meditation, death, dying, catholic funeral, catholic teaching, priest, mortician, wired

Id: isMPfjz84Zg

Length: 33min 15sec (1995 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021