Category: life

On Being a Pallbearer
By Paul Gregory AlmsWednesday, January 23, 2008, 6:45 AM
Recently, I served as a pallbearer for my grandfather on my mother’s side. I had never served as a pallbearer before. I have served as a Lutheran pastor in many funerals in the past fifteen years. I have been a son at the burial of my father. I have attended hundreds of burial services. But being a pallbearer was a unique experience.
I quickly realized that there is good bit of the ridiculous in the task. One does not do too terribly much. Pall bearers are no longer necessary in any tangible way. The service they once supplied (carrying the casket from church to graveyard) has been replaced by various mechanical devices, the automobile chief among them. A funeral these days can get along quite well without those six men marching in and out of the church or chapel. Pallbearing is vestigial, a once utilitarian necessity now carried out from habit.
The tradition carries codes and ways of acting. You step into a role and do what has been outlined for you. You realize that countless other Christians before you have carried the same burden, walked the same aisle. The task itself and many of its components are archaic, fast losing significance for those who witness them. The pall itself, for many a puzzling custom with little if any meaning, proclaims a tie to centuries long silent. That a simple white garment decorated only with a cross could be a final statement seems remarkable these days. A pall is wildly out of touch with the individualism and ostentation so in vogue. However, that is what pall bearers do; they bear the pall. They carry the dead, covered only with a baptismal emblem. That is what has been done for centuries.
To be part of it, to march in two tidy rows down the long aisle of a church with casket and family and clergy is to find oneself in a line, not just the line walking in and out of the church, but a procession of the living and the dead. From time immemorial mankind has gathered to mark death. All have had to deal with the fact of a corpse. In such times there is something sacred about we do. How we treat the dead says an awful lot about how we live. For the strong and able to serve the helpless dead, to honor frail remains, reaches deep inside us to something basic to humanity. To carry a heavy box filled with a father or mother or brother connects us to countless ancestors who have carried the mute dead. We are unlike them in so many ways, yet the experience of death unites us, the desire to honor the dead ties us together.
Many customs and traditions in many areas of life are disappearing from among us. Liturgy in the church, national “rites” such as the Pledge of Allegiance or taking off one’s hat at the National Anthem, and countless other shared activities are being lost. There is some advantage to the rejection of a “we’ve always done it that way” mentality. But there is also a danger. More is lost than simple habits. We become more and more isolated, more alone when we mark times and feelings such as birth and marriage and war and patriotism and death in idiosyncratic ways. It becomes “just us” and our decision. Any other greater meaning is gone. When we do things that have always been done, even when it seems antiquated or strange (such as pall bearing), we are affirming that we are not free agents who have landed on the planet in the last twenty years. We have fathers and mothers, grandfathers, great grandmothers, ancestors, who worked and gave birth and believed and raised children, and we are the beneficiaries of that struggle. We have a past to which we are connected through ritual and the shared experience those rituals bring.
A custom such as pallbearing is like a great tidal wave that rolls through the centuries. Each generation joins in it and is carried by it. In so doing the individual is connected to those who have gone before him or her by swimming in the same waters, being propelled by the same currents. This connectedness to the past through rituals and actions is a part of who we are as men and women who are born from other men and women who were born from other men and women, and so on. We are not the first to face death. We have ancestors. Mankind has always sought, at crucial times, to forge some connection with these forbears through doing the same thing they did. It is a part of a communal memory. We remember ancestors by acting like they did when we are born or die or are married.
The rush to be “individuals,” to express ourselves or have our own identities, has in the past century engulfed and destroyed many traditions such as pallbearing. Flamboyant displays of personal preference have turned weddings and funerals into extreme manifestations of self. We dare not do a “traditional funeral,” for we are told that such was not who the deceased “really was.” The soon to be married go to great lengths to design a wedding that is “their own” unlike any other. Ironically, in the hurry to be ourselves, we lose more than we gain. We shake off our connection to the great wave of the past and are diminished not enlarged. In stepping out of the stream of history, we isolate ourselves and become shallow puddles of self rather than members of a great deluge of lineage and relations.
Pallbearing involves all of this. It is an ancient custom no longer necessary but one that remembers the dead and the dead before them. I walked in the same way, carrying my grandfather as he had walked, carrying his brothers as those before him had done. To do this same thing, to walk the same path as they, meant I was more than a solitary individual grieving alone. I was a part of a human community stretching back centuries, all of us facing death together.
Pallbearing is archaic in other ways. I served with male cousins and sons of my cousins. This is one of the few roles I have yet to see a female perform. I am sure pallbearing is performed by females in many places, since most all-male roles are fast disappearing. Being a pastor (in many if not all ecclesiastical locales), a warrior, a statesman, and much else, is no longer synonymous with being a man. All this sounds very chauvinistic, I know. Much of this change, if not all, is good. I have four daughters. I have no desire to close doors of opportunity for them. Yet it cannot be evil to think that there must be something that is still reserved for men alone. The words “Be a man” still echo when one is carrying a casket. To stand up straight and do what must be done is an honorable calling. The urge not to weep, to look forward toward the altar as one processes in, and not to succumb to one’s emotions must still call forth admiration somewhere.
Carrying a casket is not only a metaphorical carrying of the past. It is a physical bearing of a particular human body. One feels the weight of the dead. One carries someone who can no longer carry himself. There is, in fleeting moments, real exertion involved. The funeral home tries to make it as easy as possible, with carts and rollers in the hearse and at the cemetery. But one must, at the proper time, grab the casket and lift. One is lifting an actual person who lived, who had a body, who married, worked, spoke, and all the other things flesh and blood people do. To carry his now dead bones means something. Those fingers and hands and bones have weight. They toiled and were strong. My grandfather lost most of two of his fingers working in a Houston, Texas, factory. I saw those stubs lying on his chest in the strange funeral home light the day before he was buried. Those fingers always struck me as signs of strength. He kept on working. He never applied for disability. I don’t recall but I suspect he didn’t miss many days of work after the accident. It would have been too much for him to sit around and look for sympathy. There was too much to do. That those fingers are now weak and waste away is but a command to his sons and grandsons and great grandsons to lend their strength to one who has fallen.
To carry my grandfather to his tomb connected me to him even as he lay silent, the casket closed and draped. It brought to mind his visits to our home when I was a boy and he was already in his sixties. His muscles were taut and his frame hardened by labor. He was a man of things, of machines and pastures and cattle, very different from me, who has always centered on books and thinking and classrooms. He treasured pickup trucks and property, measured in acres and the number of chores that could occupy his time. Lately he was unable to do any chores, and his pickup sat idle in his son’s driveway. Others carried him to the piece of property where, finally, after decades of ceaseless activity, he rests.
The now silent ninety-four-year-old whom we carried to a hole in the ground was a man of passions and energy. Much of it was often misdirected. He would sometimes explode in rages of anger and jealousy. He hurt those who were close to him. Yet he was a Christian. Baptized and, in his clearer moments, focused entirely on Jesus. Hebrews 13:8 was a favorite passage: Jesus Christ, the same, yesterday, today, and forever. The KJV and The Lutheran Hymnal (1941) of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod were anchors for him amid much change. He bought a house in the 1950s in north Houston that was soon overrun by crime and poverty and sinking real estate values. He found himself in a world that kept changing its rules, kept sinking into a mire he couldn’t fathom. He faced children who moved away and divorced, grandchildren who seldom visited. It was, for him, a world in chaos, a world passing away. All he could do was hold on to that Jesus, the one who didn’t change, the one he glimpsed in the memorized German hymns of his youth, in the cadence, almost but not yet broken, of church year and communion service.
To be a pallbearer was to serve that man, to give a gift to him in his death. It was to say: “Here is one thing that will not change, at least for now. Here is a tradition we will enact, a ritual we will uphold.” To be his pallbearer meant, for a few moments, witnessed only by a few aging Lutherans in a southwestern American city, to stand in tribute to that God-given faith of his. It was a faith that grasped desperately at the eternal hidden in the temporal, in human things like factories and hymnals and funerals and caskets and burial plots. It meant to carry his remains to the dirt he had so often obsessed over. It meant to carry him who had never wished to be carried, who had always stood and walked and worked. It meant to say to him, finally, “What you wanted, what you raged to find, what you worked for is now yours, now rest from your labors.”
That is what a pallbearer does. He bears someone else’s burden. He bears the family’s burden, the burden of the dead. He does so out of respect, out of love for those who have gone before him. He does it because that is what is expected of him. My grandfather did it. We did it. God willing, others will do it for us.
Rev. Paul Gregory Alms is the pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church (LC–MS) in Catawba, North Carolina. Posted in –>

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

Our choices have consequences. What we do brings results. If we swing a hammer onto our finger, we will understand this principle immediately. The consequence is pain and damage to our finger.
This principle holds true in our life. To some degree, we get out of life what we put into it. If we treat others badly, we should not be surprised if they treat us the same. So, we have a certain amount of control over what life gives us.
There are two separate lists found in the Biblical book of Galatians. They are found in chapter 5 starting in verse 19 and going through verse 23.
The first list is called “the deeds of the flesh.” It includes strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, envying, and those sorts of things. If you have experienced any of these things, you know they are not fun orenjoyable. They are more in the realm of pain and anguish. Are these the sorts of things you want in your life?
The second list is called “the fruit of the Spirit.” It includes things like love, joy, peace, kindness… If you have experienced any of these, even for a short period of time, you know that they are more in the realm of fulfillment and satisfaction. Are these the sorts of things you want in your life?
Either of these can be a part of your life. It is your choice. If you follow your own desires, doing whatever you want to, you will experience the deeds of the flesh. Your life will not get better. It willcontinue on a path of addiction and destruction until these things kill you or until you decide to kill yourself because of the hopelessness.
Or you can choose to follow God’s way and allow Him to produce the fruit of the Spirit in your life. You can grow to love. You can become patient and caring. You can be gentle and self-controlled. Your heart can be filled with peace and joy. The choice is yours. God has given you free will to make that choice. He offers all that is needed to follow Him. If you have noticed, it is fruit that He brings into our life. It is a blessing from Him.
One more thing: There is more than this life. After this life, these two choices come into play. If we decide to follow ourselves in this life and reject God, He allows us to do that. He lets that stand for all eternity. We will exist in a hopeless, painful existence. Or, if we decide to follow Jesus in this life and reject our own way, God allows and helps us in that. And He lets that stand for all eternity. We will exist in a loving, fulfilling, and wonderful life. The choice is yours.
Our choices have consequences. Make your choices carefully.