The Man with the Shovel

When I was in graduate school, I was the volunteer music leader for a little church on the north side of Waco, Texas. One morning I received a call from Robert, the minister, asking me if I was available the following morning. He had been notified by an official at McLennan County that an elderly woman who resided in one of the housing projects had been found dead. She didn’t have any money to pay for her own arrangements, so she was to be buried in the County Paupers’ Cemetery. Robert had been invited to come say a few words over her grave and he wanted to know if I would come and sing. Now I come from a long line of Baptist preachers, so it’s born and bred in me how to respond in such situations. When you are asked to come help with a funeral, it’s your duty. “I’ll be there,” I replied.

A dear friend of mine who was also a musician was visiting me that week, and I asked her if she would help me out. We quickly practiced a duet to sing at the service.

The next day the weather was cold and blustery. My coat, Robert’s suit and the sky – all gray. When we arrived at the cemetery, the county official shook our hands and led us over to the small plot where the woman was to be buried. It soon appeared that we would be the only members of the funeral party. No family members were present – not a single one. No friends or neighbors had shown up to pay their respects.

As the implications of this startling turn of events crept up on me, I was provoked to wonder what kind of life this woman must have lived for it all to have ended this way. Was she the sole survivor, having outlived her family and friends as well as her savings account? Was she alone because she had alienated herself from others? What did this woman have to show for her fourscore and ten on this earth? By all appearances – absolutely nothing.

Robert outdid himself, using his gentle voice to commemorate the life of this unknown woman as if she were a treasured member of his own flock. My friend and I sang our hearts out, hoping our voices would coax some sunshine out of the gray skies. When we were finished, the county official thanked us for coming. As I walked back to the car, it struck me that there were no gravestones – not in a Pauper’s Cemetery.

Over 25 years have passed since I participated in that memorial service. I had tucked the memory away in a back corner, but recently had occasion to call it back to the surface. Or perhaps it called me, requesting my attention.

I had been contemplating a question – why did I believe in God? And when did I realize that I believed in God? I didn’t mean when I first naively believed, the result of my upbringing. I meant the points in my life when I realized that I truly believed because of my own experiences. This story was the first to come to mind.

So I brought the memory out of storage and played it over again in my mind like a movie – but in slow motion. I pictured again the gray skies and the bleak landscape. When the county official came into view, I saw that he wore a suit that didn’t fit really well. I recalled his demeanor as he stood across from me at the gravesite -- his head bowed and his gangly hands folded in front of him with great reverence. An ordinary man, a county bureaucrat – yet he had shown greatness in his kindness towards a destitute woman.

Had he merely picked up the body from the morgue and placed the order for interment, no one would have been the wiser. His job description did not require that he plan a funeral. Without any family or friends as witnesses, why did he choose to go the extra mile? In my recollection, his was a simple but profound act of human decency.

As I continued my review, I was puzzled. I had previously remembered only 4 of us around the grave – Robert, the county official, my friend and me. But tears came to my eyes as I finally brought back to conscious memory the 5th person – the man with the shovel. When our portion of the service was done, his job was to entrust this woman’s body back into the ground from whence she had come.

When we had arrived at the cemetery, he had been standing over near his pickup truck. But just before we began the service, he had quietly edged up to join us. Dressed in old work clothes and thick boots, his face marked with grief, he held that shovel as if he were staking a claim -- that despite the circumstances, this woman deserved burial in holy ground. And following his lead, the five of us determined that it would be so. We stood in a circle around a stranger and together willed that that barren place be transformed into sacramental space – bearing witness that this woman’s life was of value simply because she existed.

And in that moment, the Spirit blew through and touched me, imprinting on my soul an experience of God that has shaped my own fragile existence.

The legacy of that experience continues to inform my own attitudes about the meaning of work. Because of a county bureaucrat and a man with a shovel, I believe in God every time I see ordinary people who view their jobs not merely as a paycheck but also as a calling. Who sometimes ignore the rules of efficiency and expedience to perform acts of simple human decency. Who stake a claim that in the middle of the barren spaces within their workplaces, there will be moments of holiness. Who remember that human beings are NOT capital – but precious souls who are of great value simply because they exist.


Questions for Reflection:

Today’s NY Times (Sunday, October 11, 2009) reports that officials around the nation are seeing an increase in indigent burials. In Oregon, for example, unclaimed bodies have increased by 50% because families cannot afford to pay for burial or cremation. The cost of “disposition” of the bodies is usually paid for by state, city or county governments.

How can we support through our prayers and actions the persons who make the decisions about how the bodies of poor people are interred? How must it feel for a family to turn over to the government the burial of a loved one because they cannot afford to pay? How can we be advocates for respectful rituals to mark the passing of our fellow human beings, no matter what their financial or social status?

What is your own vocational calling? How can you demonstrate the existence of God in the way you conduct yourself in the workplace? Where are the barren places that are calling you to stake a claim for the value of human life?