Diogo Jota, the Doctrine of the Resurrection of Bodies and the Indispensability of Presence

There's no subject more vivid than death. And Diogo Jota's death, which struck us like an immoderate tragedy in the life of a restrained young man, forces us to look straight into the hole: this Catholic darkness, this whirlpool with its own name: I wrote about it just yesterday. But it wasn't enough. All that's left to talk about is the funeral.

It was Filipe Costa Almeida, my favorite provocateur, who gave me the barb: "Look, you who are always fantasizing about semiotics and metaphysics, are you really going to miss the Silva brothers' funeral?" Of course, I didn't. I couldn't.

And behold, mediatized death led me to communal death.

Let's start at the end. With burial. The final gesture. The most just synecdoche of death. However, today we don't bury. We burn. As if Hell were now part of municipal regulations. As if the body were recyclable waste. One only has to go to one of those civilized incineration centers to understand everything: the priest doesn't quite know what to do, the living don't know why they came, and the dead... well, the dead are dead. If there were any doubt about the pagan vertigo of Western societies, one only has to pay a visit to those sinister complexes where bodies—our shrines of flesh, the last thing we have left—evaporate, fade, disappear. It's like being there just because, without any liturgical support to support or justify it. It's fire without smoke. A terminal gesture, unprotected, vitreous. Without sacramental mediation.

I grant you, it's semiotics and metaphysics. It's the symptom. The great symptom. We've lost the symbol. (Now, reader, follow the geographic and spiritual shift.) But not in Gondomar.

Gondomar! A coat of arms. A Germanic name; it could be biblical. There, in that North where "still" is the last adverb of resistance, people still bury themselves. They still play catch. There are still communities. People still believe. They still return dust to the dust from which dust was made. As if they had never stopped believing in the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. As if to say: just in case, let it be.

My grandfather Barbosa always said: "No bulls." It was a theological order. An ancestral doctrine worth more than a thousand encyclicals. It was the secret commandment of the North: do not touch. It's because there, they know (they know it in their bones) that there are things that should be left as they are. Because then, perhaps, who knows, one day, they will return. A Catholic believes this. And the North is Catholic.

What we saw at that funeral was a church still standing. People came. They were there. People of all ages, all means, and all walks of life. Against all odds, against everything that separates us from one another, people still head to a temple to honor their dead. To pray for them.

There are those who think, and often shamelessly say, "I don't like funerals." And they don't set foot in the cemetery. They say it with the attitude that it has nothing to do with them. Which is true; it really isn't. But that's the point. The funeral is the anti-self: against narcissistic culture, against the privatization of emotions; it points to the communal depths of death. It is the ultimate confrontation with the other, in which our predilections or sympathies are not at stake. It is the final victory of annulment over the elements. It is over the one who died. Over the body, that trace we leave behind when we depart. Like a piece of clothing left behind.

Sir Roger Scruton, another of our ancestors—the Englishman—said that, in the dazzle of abundance, we cannot easily discern the sacred things, "which shine most clearly in the darkness." Because on that sunny day in Gondomar, there were black t-shirts. Some suits without ties. Something like that, somewhere between inappropriate and insipid. It was the sobriety possible in a world that long ago chose fuss and disorder.

Will it be more difficult to discern the sacred under these circumstances? Presumably. But it's, first and foremost, a matter of presence. We need to wake up, shower, leave the house. Get out of ourselves. We need to be there. As volunteers, in the vicinity of great fear. Gondomar isn't a bad start. A Chapel called Resurrection isn't a bad start.

Manuel Fúria is a musician and lives in Lisbon. Manuel Barbosa de Matos is his real name.

The texts in this section reflect the authors' personal opinions. They do not represent VISÃO nor reflect its editorial position.