Father Basil Foote, OSB: a beautiful farewell to an austere life 

The people walked in the rain all the way up from the final bend in the road, from where the trees open up to the red-tiled roof of the seminary and bell tower. Some walked slowly, due to age or because they pushed on wheels or pulled behind them by hand one child or more.

Others, like a gaggle of seminarians and a girl and her parents, impeccably dressed in funeral black, walked quickly. The parking lots were full, yet people kept arriving.

Now steps before the church, some slowed right down and gazed through the windows of the seminary foyer. A few stopped. There in the entrance of the monastery was the room which held a model-sized replica of Westminster Abbey and Seminary of Christ the King.

Father Basil Foote, OSB, had for decades held court as the monastery’s doorman, organist, and unofficial PR man. His friends stopped to remember the affable six-foot tall, blue-eyed monk who would greet them at the threshold, usually smiling and often horsing around with the kids.    

He would usher them inside and seat them down in the chairs before the windows. He himself always took up his position on the window sill, legs tucked in, long organist fingers folded across a worn soutaine.

As his hearing grew worse, he’d lean his head closer in to hear what it was that one had come to report from the outside world. It was then that the requisite offering of pipe tobacco and hearing aid batteries would be made. What brought his old ear closest, however, was the sound of a singing child.

Father Basil lived an austere life in accordance with St. Benedict’s Rule. His passing from earthly life, however, was marked by worldly splendour. To the eye, the long procession of churchmen, old, young, and aspiring. To the ear, the strings of a quartet followed by the singing of perfectly pitched voices amplified by the adorned vaults above. Then the procession stopped, the coffin stood still, and Mass began.

After the funeral Mass, the people filed out of the church and in slow-moving, soft-speaking clusters moved down the hill to where the deceased priest and monk was to be buried.

Children ran ahead to the small cemetery next to the pond where a half-dozen brothers, past family and friends, were interred. My own children were among those who ran, and they ran until they stopped at a freshly dug grave, and there near its edge they looked down. Then back at the descending lines of mourners. They had never seen the earth opened like this. A simple pine casket lay next to a heap of soil.

We arrived and held hands with our youngest ones. Presently the priests arrived, and the final rites were said in a Scottish accent which put the finishing touch on a scene straight from the novels of Evelyn Waugh.

Four of the bigger seminarians grasped the rough ropes, lifted the casket and suspended it momentarily over the hole. I hung my head. When I looked up again, the casket was gone.

The priests and the monks and the seminarians began to throw dirt down onto the lid. I put my arm around my wife. When others began to join in this procession of final farewells I, too, moved towards the heap of dirt. My wife followed and then our children: my handful, then a second; then three, four, five, six handfuls and finally a very small seventh. Like all of our children, our youngest had been blessed by Father Basil well before and then shortly after her birth.

Philippa had known our monk friend long enough to sing directly into his ear a few times. But now she was silent in her little black dress, a tiny Catholic, witnessing a beautiful farewell to a life changed, not ended.

Peter Valing is a Burnaby resident and a friend of Father Basil Foote.