by Angela Tilby, Church Times
‘In our secular age, we have become much more uptight about the reality of death’
FOR me, the month of November comes as the low point of the year — a month of remembering, and often of quiet sadness, as the sun sets in the late afternoon and the blaze of trees gives way to piles of wrinkled leaves.
Following Hallowe’en, All Saints, and All Souls, and awaiting Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day, I have been thinking afresh about funerals, and how we mark the deaths of those we have loved but see no longer. I have been to a number of funerals this year; it is one of the inevitable responsibilities of getting older.
More than half of those that I have attended have taken place after the body has been buried or cremated. “Direct” funerals are cheaper, and “a lot less fuss”. What follows, sometimes weeks or even months later, is, in effect, a memorial service, a “celebration” of the life of the deceased, composed of tributes, a reading, perhaps a poem, and a few prayers.
This detachment of mourning and remembrance from the physical reality of death troubles me. Attending a funeral, as Richard Hooker put it, is an act of friendship. It represents solidarity in death as much as in life, and requires us to attend to the mysterious transition between absence and presence indicated by the coffin, the solemn entrance, and the final exit.
Seen in this light, the funeral is the deceased’s last social engagement. We are all on a journey through life, and, in a Christian understanding, our coming and going from this world should be marked by ceremony: baptism and funerals speak of our beginning and our ending, all held within the gracious providence of God.
I remember attending an Orthodox funeral in Cambridge, many years ago, when the coffin was open, and we were all invited to walk round it and make our personal farewells, while the priest prayed that the sins of the deceased might be forgiven. It felt very real to me, as did a funeral for a Nigerian-born matriarch, which was attended by her extended family who had flown in for the occasion and wept and sang for more than an hour at the cemetery. The way in which we mark death matters.
Read here (£)