From the Newsweek article “Cash and ‘Cat 5′ Chaos,” about the FEMA red tape complicating recovery efforts:

An issue raised by the Feds that [mortician contractors] found distasteful: an instruction that chaplains bless recovered bodies. A company source said the Feds are insisting on this, and the first chaplains are supposed to go out this week. Asked if that was mixing church and state, a FEMA spokeswoman responded: “A prayer is not necessarily religious. Everybody prays.”

Everybody. Everybody, everywhere. Why, I started praying right after I read that.

It will speed relief efforts immensely when they replace victims’ and workers’ MREs with empty boxes and tell them “meals are not necessarily food.”

The part of this I’ll be thinking about before bed is not that the government is praying over the dead, and not that a spokesperson would say something (so, so stupid) like this, but that the response she gave came from a group of people whose job it is to articulate what’s going on. That’s the answer she gave for a living.

The prayers of a not-necessarily-religious chaplain do paint a word picture, though, don’t they? “O No One In Particular, blessed Who- or Whatever, or Nothing, please watch over whatever it is that happens to this man after he dies, up to but not including the decomposition of his biomatter, keeping in mind that You do not necessarily exist to watch anything. Amen, asterisk.” I picture an androgynous man in a floor-length beige robe, the front of which has a giant UPC code and the word “CHAPLAIN” printed on it.