Psychic Phenomena of Jamaica by Joseph J.Williams

Author:Joseph J.Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub

CHAPTER V

FUNERAL CUSTOMS

ONE of my fondest memories of Jamaica, and carrying me back to the closing days of the year 1906, has already been told in Whisperings of the Caribbean.

As you leave Falmouth, travelling east, and abandon the shore road, the ascent leads you up through the Trelawney Mountains, and if you are fortunate enough not to lose your way, you may come to a peaceful spot, far from the busy turmoil of the world, that is not inaptly named Refuge.

To the north, the undulating country, studded with palms and other tropical trees, with here and there areas of sugar cane and bananas, stretches far away to the purple Caribbean.

The little mission church with its red roof and simple bell cupola has been built upon a gently rising knoll, the whitewashed walls forming a pleasing contrast with the green of the surrounding shrubbery.

God’s acre has found its place around the church, and even as we arrive, the bell in the cupola begins to toll. With mournful, resonant note, it breaks the peaceful silence of the hour to speak the prayerful

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remembrance for the passing of a soul. Up from the valley, a funeral procession is finding its tortuous way. Old John Ferreira is dead. Marse Marny he was always called in fond affection by the children of the “bush.”

Only a few short months ago, a visiting missionary had written back to the States concerning this dear old man: “Old John Ferreira, who lives near the church is a Portuguese, seventy years old, who came to Jamaica in 1857, and has been in this one spot ever since. In spite of his years, he is still a good strong specimen of a man and his solid piety is refreshing when one meets it in such uncongenial surroundings. Somehow or other I could not help thinking of Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez as I looked at him; whether it was his simplicity and earnestness combined with real old-world holiness, or the fact that he is a widower unaffectedly devoted to God, or perhaps the union of the two things in him, I can’t tell; but such was the impression left on me. Looking up at the heavens this evening, after the usual night prayers and catechism instruction by the priest in the church, his eyes fell on the constellation of Orion. Whereupon turning to me and pointing to the line in it of three upper stars which was almost parallel to the horizon, he said: ‘In my country we call those three Marys and the other three near them, we call the three Kings. And those two stars close by which shine together so as to seem almost to be one star, we call St. Lucy.’ As he spoke, I could imagine the peace sanctified by religion which is afforded in a truly Catholic country, a

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peace, which in this case, this Madeira peasant had not lost with departure from the scenes of his faraway childhood.”

So wrote the Reverend Patrick F. X. Mulry, S.J., under date of April 2, 1906.

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