Churchill was mulling over a cabinet appointment, weighing up the merits of a candidate. Glancing towards his principal private secretary he enquired: “What about So-and-so?” The PPS murmured: “Simply won’t do, Prime Minister.”
They talked like that, then. They understood the thermonuclear power of understatement.
That same PPS might have pronounced the same judgement on a number of today’s funeral celebrants.
In the beginning were the humanists. Then came the civils. Then the Green Fusers. Then the AOIC. Then, in what order I knoweth not, the Fellowship of Independent Celebrants, the Fellowship of Professional Celebrants, Perfect Ceremonies, County Celebrants, the Scottish Independent Celebrants Association… That’s as many as I can be bothered to track down in 5 mins of googling. These are all training organisations. There’s a bunch of self-taught freelancers out there, too. Together they’re breeding like rabbits. Demand for secular funerals is rising, but is it really rising this fast?
So who’s good and who’s not? If there needs to be a cull, who needs to go?
If you were to say that some celebrants are better than others, how would you make that value judgement? Where’re your criteria?
If it’s about brains, what level of intellectual attainment does a celebrant require? Some would say you need to be really quite bright to be any good at this work. It helps with the thinking and the listening and the writing. You need grammar, you need spelling, you need vocab, you need apostrophes. It does no harm to be well read. You need a formidable armoury of brain cells to create something appropriate and thoughtful and meaningful that articulates the feelings and values of the mourners and makes a funeral intellectually, emotionally and spiritually useful.
How are we to rate performance skills? Just as a beautifully crafted script can be devalued by mumbling, so can an indifferent script can be made much of by excellent delivery, a compelling presence and a mobile face. As to the quality of the thoughts and ideas expressed, one person’s banality is another person’s enduring wisdom. A lot of clever stuff uttered by brainboxes possibly passes over everyone’s heads. Style may count for more than substance, emotional rapport for more than cerebral rigour, with an audience whose minds are suffused with sadness.
What about motivation, then? Celebrancy has got to be vocational, hasn’t it? You’ve got to have a sense of mission, surely? You care about your work so much that you spend hours agonising over every script. You wouldn’t dream of taking on more than five ceremonies, max, a week. Three, even.
There is no doubting that bright, vocation-driven celebrants work incredibly hard at what they do. They reflect on their work self-critically, hanker to do better, are never satisfied with themselves. They are, in their way, admirable human beings. It’s not the money they do it for, not principally, it’s the getting it right that gets them out of bed in the morning. But are they in the wrong line of work? Is it really this hard?
When I posted a video of David Abel, of the Fellowship of Independent Celebrants, on the GFG’s Facebook page, comments were universally disparaging. Mr Abel, addressing would-be celebrants on his website, doesn’t address the matter of vocation at all. He doesn’t talk about supporting bereaved people and creating meaningful funerals in a secular age. He bypasses philosophical and vocational values and confines himself entirely to money matters: “It’s a market that’s very quick to get into … Some of my colleagues are conducting eight to ten funerals a week at a minimum fee of £150.” Watch him here.
The verdict of the market would seem to be that Mr Abel and the celebrants he trains are doing a perfectly good job at 8 to 10 a week. If he neglects to talk about vocational values in his video, his organisation requires high ethical standards of its members. Furthermore, Mr Abel has been instrumental in working to establish an umbrella organisation for all celebrants in order to drive up standards.
Just as funeral directors conduct their own backstabberly feuds in the best traditions of any caring profession, celebrants, too, are prone to really quite beastly factionalism. This is not just a matter of turf wars and power plays, though, goodness knows, these abound. Nor is it as simple as mutual animosity between visionary pioneers and cut’n’paste journeymen.
It may be the case that some celebrants take themselves more seriously than the job demands.
Wherein lies the value of a funeral?
A celebrant came to see me fairly recently, and she told me the reason she was so successful was that she was so beautiful. Ironically, the leaflet she gave me had the sentence “I conduct ceremony’s in many places” in it.
Two statements, take ’em or leave ’em: 1. The job is endlessly uncertain – that’s why we may at times be perceived as taking it all too seriously. Not that I have any sense of what the “right” level of seriousness would be. More to say about why it is an uncertain business, or seems, thus, but it’s a lovely morning… 2. The verdict of the market? Libertarian economics hasn’t had a good press recently…My experience has been that some FDs have a real concern and interest in the quality of the ceremony, and the others don’t care as long… Read more »
I wouldn’t say it’s about taking yourself seriously. It’s about taking the work seriously. And if you don’t think helping people through dying and death and loss is important, why are you doing it? And this is as true for celebrants as it is for funeral directors, mortuary technicians, bereavements officers – all of us.
p.s. A celebrant with pants tucked into skirt who showed some heart beats a smartly dressed celebrant on automatic any day.
I’ll try to remember that, Poppy…!
In an industry whose customers think they’re under obligation to buy your product, are in a state of stress and confusion, and have no idea what they’re buying or even what it’s for, anyone can get any old crap past the checkouts. But that doesn’t mean every supplier is content to do so. What we need is death publicity – death cafes, funeral exploration workshops, pavement conversations about death and dying; actual death needs to be in the streets and shops and on the television and the national curriculum; death needs to be in its rightful place – in our… Read more »
Has any celebrant tried writing their own eulogy as a mind-focussing exercise in discovering what they’d like said about themselves, and what they’d not like said? Or have any celebrants conducted research among friends about what they’d like said about them at their funeral?
Here’s a voxpop on this subject on vice.com: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/what-would-people-say-at-your-funeral
Warming to the idea of continuing feuds with enemies beyond death, one self-confessed intolerant grump says he’ll have a strict guest list in order to exclude those he doesn’t want to attend.
That’s the good thing about funerals – our families and our friends can say what they like and we can’t do anything about it.
Quite so, A Celeb. it’s the last word in talking about someone behind their back, an opportunity to let off steam — in a loving way or in a cross way. Talking behind someone’s back is reckoned a bad thing, but we all do it and we all need to do it; it’s a perfectly healthy way of testing/verifying a viewpoint. (The blessing of extreme old age — 50+ — is that if you become aware that people are talking about you, you don’t give a fig.) This is why a living funeral is a non-starter. All you get to… Read more »
Interesting idea…. There’s the stuff I’d LIKE to be said …. He was a breath of fresh air….. And there’s the stuff I think is more likely to be said… He was a cantankerous old bugger who hated the world! It all depends which day I die…. A very challenging idea in truth though… How to write it so it sounds ‘true’ …flattering yet real, honest not cruel, gentle not sloppy, humble yet eulogising… Flipping heck it’s a hard thing to achieve. Hats off to all good celebrants! Perhaps I could interview a few a la Sir Alan Sugar? There… Read more »
AH: perhaps her beauty dazzles so much that no-one notices anything else…
And, if we’re not beautiful we can distract people from our mediocrity by leaving our flies undone/tucking our skirts in our knickers. Something to add to the training courses?
Maybe we do take ourselves seriously, but you know what? I’ve taken every job I’ve ever had seriously. It’s my default position in life. I serve by nature – my job choices have reflected that and I have always wanted to do my best for those I serve. I sound like a self-congratulatory arse (with or without skirt tucked in) but in fact I find it a burden to be like that. Oh! How I long for the ability to earn a decent wage by ‘doing’ more than five ceremonies a week. Oh! How I long for those people I… Read more »
taking the job seriously and taking your self seriously are not one and the same…I take my job extremely seriously but, lets face it, it isn’t rocket science, its just like everything else in life. You can do things well or you can’t.
(IMHO)
I feel celebrants would be well advised to take a horses for courses approach to their role. Some funerals require minimal input with the family taking full control of eulogies and other time consuming aspects whilst others may require the skills and experience suggested by Charles. Many businesses tailor their products to fit the ‘good, better, best’ model with families who would prefer to pay for ‘good’ getting a bill for ‘best.’ As funeral director I often play the role of master of ceremonies and, since I’m paid to be there in any event, at no additional cost to the… Read more »
Simon, I don’t know about the rest of them, but as a mystic humanist with a small h, a thorough working knowledge of the Bible is essential. And we all know what happened to the chaff, that old unquenchable fire did it’s thing.
The value of a funeral lies in the price of the components and in the feeling of ‘we did a good job for Grandad’ today. Good FDs really take responsibility for the job of matching celebrant to family. The FDs know their families and hopefully know their celebrants. The brilliant, vocational, attention to detail celebrants who put their heart and soul into each ceremony should command higher fees and flexibility, to reflect demand for their time, commitment and talents. Those where ‘this is just a job and I can do 10 a week’ should be cheaper. Like Waitrose and Aldi.… Read more »
Blinking good point, Jed. Perhaps off-the-peg and hand-tailored? Good celebrants can offer both (if they want).
But no. No FD should be in the business of promoting or tolerating secondrate ceremonies, I feel. The future of the funeral depends on the quality of the work delivered by celebrants, as does the commercial survival of FDs. As a proportion of the cost of a funeral, the services of a celebrant are astoundingly cheap. Better to make economies elsewhere if it’s a budget funeral that’s asked for. Better a Galaxy hearse than a blah-blah sendoff.
As a (hopefully) half-decent organist, I’m inclined to agree with you, Jed, to an extent. It pains me to hear Abide With Me murdered by someone who has commanded the same fee as a semi-professional, especially when you get to the end of the hymn and have to ask ‘what was the tune?’ But at the same time, is it fair to ask (as an FD now) your client “would you like the organist who can’t play for £50 or the one who can for £100?” Similarly, is it professionally reasonable to ask “would you like a celebrant who will… Read more »
Interesting point, Andrew. Food-on-table considerations need to be factored in? If bespoke comes in at around 10-12 hours (often more), there’s got to be a reasonable hourly rate. Perhaps. (Depends if the celebrant has a pension, say.) Dunno.
Aha – good points AH & CC… I patently hadn’t imagined the scenario to its conclusion… Theoretically it’s one thing to think of a pricing differential but of course as an FD I wouldn’t want to be offering any family the ‘second rate’ celebrant. And I’ve had a taste of the second rate organist too – grimsville indeed! You’re right Andrew, we should only be offering the best… So that would do it then? If you know who’s any good and only use them then presumably that would be market forces at work…?
That should be a new post, Jed.
But one thing springs to mind when reflecting on this: ‘bespoke’ from my point-of-view as a funeral director is about cutting the fancy stuff, the limos, the prats in the hats. The same thing from a celebrant’s perspective is about getting more involved (and thus commanding a higher fee).
Can the two live side-by-side?
The whole reason we have funerals is because we value people we were attached to, and to contemplate a tier system for celebrants is comparable to offering a low-budget half-baked cremation with burned flesh still clinging to the cremains.
It takes what it takes to complete the work, and as with cremation or burial it ought to cost what it has to cost, and that is the simple truth that funeral directors need to be telling their clients. There are no short cuts in this part of the service.
I’ll confess to following this thread since it’s beginning, an it is only the fact that I have just written my 15th service for the week ahead that I have time to comment 😉 What makes a good celebrant? For myself the essentials are, in no particular order as they say on the tv: compassion, writing skills, listening skills and conversational ability to keep the talking going when the client dries up through grief or simply confusion as to what is expected of them at that point, along with an ability to speak in public without shrivelling up or dying… Read more »
Wow Lol, that’s made me completely reprint my mental picture of you. Thank you! Something to do with your name had put me in mind of Wilfred Owen, so I had you in tweeds with a haircut nearly a hundred years out of date.
Nothing wrong with a shaved head. Or tatts. Or a face from crime watch…
Ru, I like to surprise people 🙂
I read this recently: It’s about sharpness, softness, diligence, dottiness, intellect, ignorance, curiosity, compassion, love, laughter, timing, tenacity, vocation and a touch of juju voodoo!! None of these appear on the job description, or essential job skills/experience when you start training… None of these can be ‘taught’ or ‘trained’, the families probably couldn’t quantify what it is they love about Their ace celebrant – they just know they feel safe and supported and guided…. it’s a gift.
OK, so we celebrants can congratulate ourselves on the list of qualities we bring to the job (including humility); but part of Charles’ original question was whether there are simply too many of us. And I think it needs answering. ‘Too many’ could mean that everyone who wants a celebrant can find one; or that everyone who could conceivably want a celebrant but didn’t know they existed can find one if they decide that’s what they want; or that funeral directors have too many people like me turning up & reminding them (again) I exist.. Quite often I wish an… Read more »
Ruth hit the nail on the head there.
As a fd, IMHO the ‘market’ is a bit oversaturated. we have just received the BHA book of registered members – I haven’t even heard of most of the ones in our area. We try to match up families with celebrants to use the person that, in our opinion, would be most suited. But to be honest, most people want pretty much the same thing. You then start to work on other criteria. I am sorry to say, Lol, that I would struggle to use someone with any visible tattoo’s at all. (and believe me I’m no old fashioned fuddy… Read more »
I have to agree with Ian, mostly. (Lol, before I even knew what you looked like, I’m afraid I had turned off due to the 5 spelling mistakes on the funeral page of your website). There are more and more fds out here who care about the ceremony, but still a very large proportion who don’t. The simple way to evaluate your fd is to listen when the phone call comes. How many of you are told “the funeral is at 2.30pm on Wednesday”? That is the point at which you should lose all respect for him or her. If… Read more »
being *told* the truth, that should be in the last paragraph!
Point taken about market research. But at least if all the FDs said no straight away, I’d stop trying to influence them.
I don’t think I’ve ever had an FD (except Poppy) not tell me that the time was already booked.
… which is why those of us that do it that way stand out?
For Ian and Andrew, re-read my post, I mention a hint of tattoo peeking out of shirt cuffs. There are none on my hands or anywhere else immediately visible, and whilst even that may be too much for the sensitivities of St. Neots, where I ply my craft it causes absolutely no problems whatsoever, even for the Country Life readers amongst us. How shallow an approach to discount someone because of five spelling mistakes on their website. For what it’s worth, I coded the site by hand, hence no spell checker. Does that make me a bad celebrant, someone not… Read more »
LOL, you said yourself that some people have been ‘dissatisfied initially’. Its just a fact of life. if you can cover the tattoos then fine. It obviously has no bearing on your ability as a celebrant – I never implied that it did. I have a whole arm full of tattoos that go just to my cuff. no one knows I have them. I live where I work and I never go out without a long sleeved shirt/top/jacket on. I wouldn’t risk the potential of someone of someone judging me based on that. It’s a reality that I get on… Read more »
All I can say Lol is that first impressions count. Your website was my first impression of you. Have a look at Charles’ view on spelling mistakes on websites in his blog post on April 11th, and you’ll see I’m not alone.
“If you can’t get the spelling, grammar and punctuation right on your own website, what does that say about your ability to arrange a funeral?” (C. Cowling, 11 April, GFG blog.) Well, it doesn’t say much about that ability, of course – any illiterate person can arrange a funeral – though possibly it irritates and prejudices pedants such as I, or Charles. George Orwell said: “Correct grammar and syntax [and, by extension, spelling] are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear.” But Orwell was wrong. Language is about more than making one’s meaning clear – you… Read more »
Yes, how do funeral directors and arrangers decide? Tell us!
I have never been interviewed. I got my first few bookings because they were desperate to get someone. And it’s not always the funeral arrangers who insist on a particular slot – sometimes the client is determined to have a particular day or time.
It’s all about the easiest option, A Celeb, and the one that creates the least hassle for us. Book the funeral to suit ourselves, then find a vicar/celebrant/anyone really who can ‘do’ the funeral. Why should we care about the ceremony? That’s your job. Been there, seen it, rebelled against it, regret it occasionally, thrive on it frequently. And yes, sometimes the client is very specific about where and when the funeral should be, but not very often. After all, the funeral isn’t really about the client is it? It’s about the funeral director and his big black vehicles, his… Read more »
We use those that we know are going to do a good job, end of. I’m with Andy – all we do, in reality, is ensure that a family get exactly what they want and everything runs smoothly. A few weeks ago I used someone I met at the crem. She was taking the service after us and did a great job. Unfortunately she couldn’t stick to her 30 minutes. That’s unfair on everyone else (in particular the family following us, whose funeral is just as important). I tried to explain the problem to her but she wasn’t interested. One… Read more »
Kingfisher: it does feel like that at times! (‘It’s about the funeral director and his big black vehicles’) but, call me an idealist, there are a lot of good people out there who care. Like you.
ian said ‘IMO if you speak clearly, can communicate effectively with people and dress smartly you’ll be on to a winner…’ Seems crude but I agree. Also, calm under pressure. A flapping celeb is no good to anyone.
A long thread rich in interesting and amusing insights. More!
Ian – my only comment directed in your direction was a clarification on the extent of my inking. “And if verbal mistakes don’t show in the oral delivery on the day, their presence in a celebrant’s literature hint at other stumbling blocks to comprehension that will certainly compromise the appreciation of an audience of mourners.” I can’t agree. Give me good, honest, heartfelt words of compassion, love and respect for the deceased over any amount of scholarly brilliance, delivered perfectly, devoid of personality or individuality any day of the week. At first we had the colour bar, now we have… Read more »
Lol I’m with you. I think you have been unfairly judged. If you’re doing four funerals for Peace Funerals, then I can think of no higher endorsement. I hate all that Eat shoots and leaves self congratulatory bollocks. Fuck dat shit. Spelling is not about intelligence, especially emotional intelligence, which is all you need in this job, not a classical education. Long may you continue Lol. To me, you sound in the right job. And to answer another earlier question, yes, there are way too many celebrants, poorly trained and led to believed that there is a career out there.… Read more »
Appreciate the back up Ru 🙂 I have considered the “embed” question and it makes sense, yet like many I value my independence. I am seriously considering the Greenfuse FD training in a few years and could then act as a freelance celebrant and FD. All options remain open 🙂
[…] The answer is that the bereaved are best served by people with good hearts, good minds and good judgement. Eyebrows have rightly been raised at the spectacle of what some would characterise as an incursion, recently, by funeral celebrants who are not only reckoned second-rate but, also, unhealthily mercenary — those who seem bent on putting the ‘sell’ into celebrancy. Narcissistic windbags intoxicated by the sound of their own voices, some would add. The GFG has, of course, been even-handed and defended those so disparaged. […]
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