IF HONEST CONFESSION IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL... then I need to say that this morning I tuned the TV to MSNBC looking for news and found instead the live news report of the Whitney Houston funeral in New Jersey. I wasn’t interested in attending a funeral, certainly not a broadcast funeral. I switched quickly to CNN, and damn, the funeral was going there, too; so I left the TV at CNN for a minute and went back to some writing that I had started yesterday. But I let the funeral go on and watched for what I thought would be one minute before I’d go on and find a news network channel. Here’s the confession part:

I don’t particularly like funerals. I dread them, but I go when a funeral is for a close relative or a close friend or when it’s a duty and I am expected to be there. I don’t go to TV funerals. I wasn’t looking for a way to spend the morning and if I had been looking for something to watch on TV, it wouldn’t have been a funeral; but I stayed with Whitney Houston’s funeral for one minute, then two, then three, and then I couldn’t turn away. I had thought it would be a staged event. I thought the Baptist Church would be one of those massive, showy mega-churches with seats for thousands. It wasn’t. It was a regular Baptist church. I thought it would be decked out with banks of bright flowers. It wasn’t. The flowers were much more elaborate last Sunday in the Methodist where I worship. I expected the coffin to be something fit for a Twentieth Century Cleopatra. It was a simple, ordinary coffin that might have come from the same factory where the caskets for my parents were made. I expected the volunteer regular choir to be in an audition mode hoping to be noticed and perhaps picked up later for TV or movie work. No doubt about it: those volunteer regular singers did exactly what that choir does every Sunday.

Like everybody else, I had liked Whitney Houston’s voice. It was obviously a gift... to the singer and to all of us who heard her sing... but there are lots of great voices out there. I thought the funeral would be a showcase for performers. It wasn’t. I thought the eulogies would be platitudes. They weren’t. The few maudlin remarks and readings during the more than three-hour service weren’t distracting. They are easy to forget. As Kevin Costner walked up to the pulpit, I thought to myself that now I would see the real glossy, Hollywood veneer paint over the service. I was very, very wrong. His words moved me. They weren’t from a script somebody prepared for him. His eulogy was more than a tribute to Whitney Houston, someone he obviously loved and respected. It was a sermon that I don’t want to forget. He ended his remarks with advice that I’ll try hard to remember: “Guard the precious gift of your own life.”