Summer is a great time for getting out into nature, and breathing fresh air. I know many people who enjoy the “great outdoors,” and if you were to ask them about the ways that they feel God’s presence, they’d include their experiences on a beach, or in the woods, climbing a mountain, or watching a sunset. I am one of those people! We tent camped for about thirty glorious years, until I became disabled, and I count those trips among my most cherished memories. I say all of this in order to express how deeply I love the wildly popular funeral song, “How Great Thou Art.” Having said that, as a person who ministers in the Church, I can’t begin to count the number of times that I have heard it sung! It has been relegated, in my mind at least, to the “Oh no! Not again!” roster of songs for me, which I hate. I really want to love it without that extra downside. Honestly, at one point, I asked a music minister if he’d write a new song for me that conveyed the same sentiments in completely different lyrics and melody! He was sweet when I asked, but I came to take his lack of response for a “hard no.” Because of his “no,” I began to search to see if there was anything already “out there.” What I found, gave me very mixed feelings about death, funeral planning, and the march of time.
My first realization about the song was the fact that, according to many sources on the internet, the song is “by Carrie Underwood” with no mention of its original author. In reality, the song, “How Great Thou Art,” is a Christian hymn based on an original Swedish hymn entitled “O Store Gud” written in 1885 by Carl Boberg (1859–1940). I mean, if you dig a bit, you’ll find the correct answer, but I wonder if many people would credit Ms. Underwood, simply because they don’t know any better, and that the misinformation was easy to find. My only saving grace, when I saw the first search results, was that I am old, so I knew better. How sad that I never knew Carl Boberg’s name. He, the nameless man, with a famous song.
As I thought about the irony and sadness of Boberg’s lack of fame, it struck me that funerals are a place of remembrance. Often filled with photos, stories, and the statistics of a person’s life, a funeral can place a lovely capstone on a mountain of memories. What happens, though, when time marches on, and the funeral attendees face their own funerals? Who will remember then? It was with that thought that I recalled a recent email in my inbox.
In recent years, my sister and I have been casually working on our family tree through Ancestry. One of Ancestry’s features is that it will send you email updates if new information surfaces regarding someone on your tree. Today, I received an email that was linked to the “Find a Grave” information service. Complete with a treasure trove of information about my paternal grandparents and their children, I could easily see why the Catholic Church requests that our loved ones be placed in an actual, marked grave or niche in a mausoleum. If my relatives had not been, I may have missed many facts about their lives, and the knowledge that their final resting place is in the same cemetery, Mt. Olivet, that my maternal grandparents lay.
While I know that God knows every hair on my head (and yours), may each of us, as we write the song of our lives, find ways to leave our mark.