The Good Funeral Guide

Romany funeral, Warwick, 2007. Source.

Posted by Charles

We’ve talked quite a lot on this blog recently about ritual. There have been times when a better and more accessible word might have been theatre.

For what is a funeral if it is not theatre?

The playscript for the drama we call a funeral, together with its delivery, is, for the most part, the responsibility of the ceremony leader. But funeral directors get to play a major part in act one, scene one, the procession, and, though they love dressing up for it, I think many of them have lost sight of the story they’re supposed to be telling and, therefore, the role they are supposed to be playing.

The story of a funeral procession is that of the last journey ever taken by a dead person here on Earth. The dead person is accompanied, as Thomas Long expresses it, with love and lamentation to the Edge of Eternity. The element of accompaniment is central. 

It’s a ritual journey, obviously. The dead person’s last actual journey was probably to the hospital by ambulance. There, on their deathbed, family and friends hopefully got a chance to say goodbye. A funeral re-enacts this ritually, theatrically: a ritualised final journey followed by a ritualised goodbye.

In the olden time a funeral procession could make its way to the place of farewell at a dramatically slow pace (there’s no practical reason for going slowly). Those whom the procession passed amongst would stop and doff their hats and bow and pay their ritual last respects. It was a good show.

That’s all been consigned to the past, borne away by traffic and indifference. Keeping a procession together now through traffic lights and roundabouts is wing-and-a-prayer stuff. The first 100 meters works well enough, the undertaker leading the hearse at a stately walking pace down the street. Like all good actors, s/he is in character. So are the understrappers. Splendid. Then we get to the main road and s/he dives in. The actors come out of character, most of them – all the while keeping up appearances. Heaven knows what talk they talk, what jokes they swap, let’s not speculate. This part of the journey is not about stately procession, it’s about getting to the crem on time. It’s a hiatus, an ellipsis. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

Which is why, in a film, unless it’s a satirical comedy, you’d jump cut to when the church or crematorium hoves into view and the occupants of the hearse get back in character. The funeral director hops out and carries on where s/he left off earlier for all of 200 metres max. And stops just short of the coffin’s destination.

If a playwright wrote it like that you’d shoot him. For this is the point at which the principal actors are joined by The Crowd. When you’ve got that many people on stage there must be ensemble action, a single focus of attention. We don’t get any of that. As the limousine doors are opened and the occupants unfurl under the indulgent but prurient gaze of The Crowd, the Men In Black Macs are, severally, easing the coffin out of the hearse and doing things with flowers.

The procession has entirely lost its momentum, not in itself fatal, but it can never regain a sense of purpose because, by the time it is ready to move on once more, it’s far too close to journey’s end. It falls over the finishing line. The Crowd was never part of a procession. The minister declaimed “I am the resurrection and the life” to empty air and an organist. The Men in Black Macs probably put the coffin on the catafalque before everyone was in and sitting. It can work out a bit better in a church, where everyone is in first, but this denies The Crowd any processional role.

Could it be staged better? In theory, yes. A procession — for those who want one — needs at least 80 metres, a decent run-up. Everyone out of cars, on foot, standing tall. Coffin out, too. People formed up in some sort of order of precedence, leader/s (optional) in front of the coffin, stepping out as one, everyone playing their part, understanding the part they are playing, and quite possibly singing, too.

In practice, no. To do all that you need a gathering-place. Most funeral venues don’t have one of those.

So we’re down to one person walking in front of a car. This does retain an element of theatre. But you can’t help feeling that the grandeur and much of the point of the narrative has been lost, and that’s a shame.

Too much me, funeral directors, not enough us. 

Posted by Gloria Mundi

Another opinionated passage from a sometimes-frustrated celebrant. Please remember – it’s only my opinion! So with apologies to some wonderful funeral directors I know, here goes.

I am not anti-funeral directors. I think their job is frequently stressful and demanding in ways the rest of us may hardly understand. Also, some of them (a small minority?) are open to change, and to new ideas. 

But here are a few practical suggestions and thoughts I’d like to offer to the others, because for as long as we continue to have separate funeral directors and celebrants/ministers, we really do need to get our act together.

1.     You are in a controlling situation. You phone me to tell me there is a family who might want me to work with them. That’s how it is, mostly. OK. But I want to work with you. I am not just an “additional disbursement.” In effect, I personify what the family wants for the ceremony, at this stage.

2.     If I work well, it reflects well on you. So if you care about the quality of a funeral service, you should very much care about how I do things and why. Don’t call on me because I’m convenient; work with me because I’m the right one for that family. If I’m not, then call on someone else. Please use your discretion and your judgement. You’re not just a handler of bodies and supplier of limousines. As we move towards the right, unique ceremony for these people, you’re my co-worker. Aren’t you?

3.      I know it’s a bit nerve-wracking getting the right “slot” at the crem, but will you do two things please? One – just check with me first, rather than saying “I’ve got one for you next Tuesday at 11:00.” My time may also be under pressure. Two – please get an idea about how many people might attend, and if they have any ideas about the nature of the funeral, so you can, at once, book a double time allocation if it’s needed. We can’t get 130 people in and out and have a satisfactory funeral with contributions from several people, plenty of music, a hymn and some poems in twenty rushed, anxiety-filled minutes.

4.      In fact (this should be number one) please talk to them as soon as possible about how they might approach the funeral, i.e. put the ceremony at the centre of your meeting. You see, and I’m sorry if this sounds patronising, but some of you don’t seem to get this – the sort of coffin, the announcement in the newspaper, how many cars (if any) are wanted, the flowers, the crem itself– ALL this is not the priority. It should come out of the kind of funeral they want, the sort of people they are, the sort of life that has just ended. And here’s a thought – even if there is a cremation to be carried out at some point, you can have a funeral somewhere other than a crem! Do you discuss that with them? No, I didn’t think so. Well, I can. Of course, if you’ve already booked the crem and they’ve told everyone the day and time before I can get near them, then we’re on rails again.

5.      Please don’t take a faith position as default mode for the family and the funeral. I know some of you do. “Would you like me to phone the vicar? No? Oh, well, I know this woman who can…” People without a lot of cultural confidence may well think they should fall back on the vicar, because it is somehow “proper.” Actually, that’s a bit tough on the vicar, I’d have thought. We all want to be wanted! I’m not default mode, nor is the vicar, wonderful though she may be. See number 4 above. Surely the question should be “And how much help would you like with the funeral? I’m in touch with secular celebrants, vicars, priests…” etc. And BTW, please be wary of the term “humanist.” It means little to most people, and can be confusing. If someone is or was really a Humanist, you’ll probably be told so.

6.      If, at the funeral, you sit there looking out of the window, or you are outside chatting too loudly about the football until it’s time to walk forward from the back, you won’t even know what anyone’s ceremonies are like, will you?

7.      This doesn’t often happen, but it has just happened to me, so: please don’t tell them what will happen in the ceremony, and then tell me what will happen in the ceremony, before I’ve even had a chance to meet the family and see what is emerging for them. God dammit, this thing is theirs, not ours! And I am responsible from the moment we start walking forwards at the beginning of the ceremony to the moment I leave. That bit belongs to the family, with me acting for them. I do ritual and ceremony. If you want to, fine, but let’s be clear about who does what, please!

8.      We’re getting to the crux, aren’t we? Please stop selling them a product. Find out about a ceremony, the one that is just beginning to form in their minds. Encourage that formation. Ask them to consider how much help they would like, if any, and from whom. Then phone me, or the minister, or the shaman or whoever you think fits. Then this funeral won’t be one product, with a few adjustable trimmings. We’ll have something unique that may help them for the rest of their lives.

9.      You think I’m exaggerating? Just try asking a family who has had a crap funeral ceremony. “It still haunts me.” And that’s a quote. About ten years after the event. “It was nothing. Meant nothing” Now, is that what you want to deliver?

No, because you are a compassionate human being, so let’s get working. Together. Please?

The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition

A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, Maggi Hambling, Graham Harvey, Gary Lachman, Nick Reynolds, and Dignity in Dying.

It’s out in May 2012!

By Richard Rawlinson

Ed’s note: Richard wrote this for us at a time when the market in blog posts about ritual was approaching saturation. There’s good stuff here, so we’re posting it now, timeless seasonal greeting and all. 

…that remains the question. In order to express a meaning you need to establish what the meaning is you’re seeking to express – whether by word, act or symbol. Without meaning, the practical reason for disposing of a rotting corpse is hygiene. As a fond, finite and formalised farewell to someone we love and shall miss, a funeral clearly means more.

To mark a death, we pay tribute to a life. By setting aside an official occasion to do so, emotions are aroused which accentuate the loss we’re feeling. This is deemed good as it helps give closure by preparing us for the ultimate parting – when the curtains close on the body, or it’s lowered into the ground, to be with us no more.

A religious funeral’s meaning is exactly the same as that of a secular funeral – except for the fact it offers hope that death is the beginning of a journey towards peace with God. When you take eternal salvation out of the equation, it’s the same – a fond, finite and formalised farewell to someone we love.

The most meaningful ritual of funerals must surely be the presence of the deceased. Being physically close to a beloved dead person feels extraordinary. Having already grieved the loss for several days, we may yet still be unprepared for the upsurge of emotions on seeing the coffin – let alone the face of the deceased in repose if the lid is kept open. No sooner have we grown accustomed to it, the committal shocks again with its absolute finality. He/she is going, going, gone. Forever. Per sempre. Na zawsze. Jamais. Für immer.

So a key purpose of a funeral is to instruct the living in acceptance of death. In both religious and secular funerals, the celebrant collaborates with the bereaved to give a dignified, relevant, moving and loving send-off that helps the living come to terms with their loss.

If a chief aim is to bring emotions to a crescendo to aid closure, what words, actions and symbols best inspire ‘healthy sadness’? We have the essential presence of the body, along with the ultimate tearjerker of its departure. We have eulogies that capture the essence of the deceased, along with poems and other readings. We have music, the most moving art form of all, and, even better, music accompanied by lyrics. We have contemplative moments of remembrance, and processions past the coffin for intimate farewells.

We have buildings with meaning too. Church interiors are often designed to inspire wonder; they’re dramatic backdrops for rituals that appeal to sight, sound, smell, touch, taste and even the sixth, supernatural sense. The chapels of crematoria, not being theatrical Baroque or Gothic in style, are nevertheless arranged so those present can face the drama around the coffin. There’s the inevitable comparison with a place of worship, but they can just as readily be compared to a theatre. The principle of the layout is the same in a chapel as it is in a theatre or even a classroom, a platform for participants whether priests, actors or lecturers. Just as a priest has his altar, an actor his set and a lecturer his slide show, so can a celebrant have scripts and props that give performance resonance. But which script and what props?

Some here have assumed I’m an advocate of more ritual in secular funerals. As a passive observer, I’ve listened to a couple of differing opinions but have formed no firm views. In truth, I’ve been discouraged that ideas don’t spring to mind intuitively, leaving a suspicion that struggling too hard to contrive more ritual implies the proposition itself may be unworkable.

One significant obstacle seems to be reconciling both diversity and individuality. How can a prescribed ritual or standardised wording resonate with an eclectic, perhaps multi-faith, audience and one unique person? Perhaps the answer is any secular ritual must avoid atheistic and theistic specifics to form universal statements about death and bereavement. We all love, we all die, we’re all affected when those we love die.

So without further ado, let’s throw a handful of ideas out there that are sufficiently general, and designed to move us in order to heal us – positive tearjerkers for healthy sadness. In office brainstorms, we say there’s no such thing as a bad idea. This is blatantly false but is nevertheless useful to rid us of inhibitions. By hearing both good and bad ideas, we’re then better able to compare and contrast in a process of elimination. Two half-baked ideas can merge to form something excellent.

To signify the importance of the arrival of the coffin, perhaps a bell should be rung to remind us to stand and to focus our thoughts. Individuals could then choose between a silent procession or one accompanied by music.

Perhaps the celebrant should wear something more distinctive than a somber business suit, just as a master-of-ceremonies at a formal dinner wears a uniform that sets him apart from the guests in regular black tie.

Perhaps the entire ceremony could be structured more formally. It could begin with a formally scripted greeting to fit all ceremonies: beautifully crafted words that remind us of the gift of life, and the significance and inevitability of death. The middle section could blend prescribed words with open parts for eulogy and poignant songs, readings or prayers. The set words could perhaps introduce the unique parts to enhance their poignancy and keep them on message. The climactic ending could return to prescribed words, reflecting universal feelings when saying goodbye.

Perhaps it should be encouraged as integral to the ceremony that the audience files past the coffin, laying down flowers as a physical symbol of respect. Perhaps candles could be lit on the way out as a final sign that the deceased lives on in memory. 

Nothing radical there. No suggestion we start to don death masks, or introduce communal wailing and beating of breasts. Too churchy? Well, the Church does ritual well on the whole, and the hope of eternal salvation has been conscientiously avoided. Too traditional? Those who equate progress with ever increasing informality will no doubt find it so.  

Happy New Year!

I follow The Hearth of Mopsus blog. I like it very much — the writer’s fastidious prose, his rigorous,  intellectual objectivity on the one hand, his very earnest doubts and self-questioning on the other. He’s written a very good book about holy wells, by the way. Not your bag? Fine by me. Each to his/her own. Much more to the point, I don’t comfortably think that he would like being talked about on this blog, and I’m sorry to do it to him but I’m going to do it anyway. 

In a recent post he describes his father’s funeral. He is a minister himself. 

The worst part was the minister. At least he wasn’t the ‘crem cowboy’ who’d taken my uncle’s funeral, but he was cracking on a bit then and may well not be around himself now. The chap who performed my Dad’s obsequies was a somewhat offhand Ulsterman who preached not on the Bible text that I’d chosen but on The Lord Is My Shepherd which was one of the hymns. The argument was: the Psalm that hymn was based on was written by King David. King David was a great sinner. He found peace and hope in his relationship with the Good Shepherd, and so must we. ‘We must do business with the Good Shepherd’, he said several times, having come up with a line he liked. 

He concludes:

I don’t know, perhaps I do it all wrong – perhaps I should be completely ignoring the deceased and whatever the bereaved might be feeling, and trying to convert people by making them feel bad rather than loved. You may detect a degree of scepticism in my tone. Thank God for Fats Domino or I would have been left thinking I’d prefer a secular funeral. Perhaps I still would.

You can read it all here. Do, please. 

You probably know how he felt. And we reflect that, though funerals need to be done better, because they matter more, than any other ‘life event’ ceremony, they’re not always, whether religious or secular. The occasion doesn’t look after itself, nor do the words, you can’t just arrange your face and rattle them off. That Ulsterman probably thought he did just fine. So, probably, do lots of secular celebrants. But this is a job for extra-ordinary people. 

You may need Fats to cheer you up, too.

“A couple of parting thoughts on the development of new ritual for secular funerals before I switch off the computer for Christmas,” wrote our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson some days before the onset of festivities. Yikes, sorry, Richard; we lost that post in the tinsel. 

We’re not letting it go, though; your thoughts about ritual are always welcome, and they have not been rendered obsolete by the passage of time. By happy coincidence, Gloria Mundi has a piece on ritual waiting to go out tomorrow. So this’ll work just fine side by side with his.  

In a thread on a recent blog, Gloria Mundi has said: ‘I don’t think we’ll get far in the development of new rituals for secular funerals until we stop arguing about belief and concentrate on shape and meaning… Let’s move forwards, shall we?’

I’ve said previously that it’s up to secularists to take up the mantle to create any new ritual, but the future is best formed by looking at the past.

As an exercise aiming to be helpful, I read a funeral mass, deleting the inapplicable (references that require belief) and attempted to adapt a few lines to secular taste. The exercise failed abysmally as most content ended up on the cutting room floor as it’s nearly all God-centred. Shape and meaning were lost due to the need for belief.

I pondered a few other exercises involving looking at political, legal and educational institutions, sports, festivals, and life cycle ceremonies. Much that I like an intuitive quick fix, I concluded this subject requires a more laborious, academic approach, where ritual itself is more thoroughly defined.

Ritual is paradoxical. It’s a social construct yet it defines a portion of reality. It’s intrinsically conventional – repetitive, formal, precise, stylised – yet requires collective imagination.

Too much analysis of a fictional drama pierces the illusion of reality that allows it to take on dangerous matters. The enemy of ritual is the spoilsport who is unwilling to voluntarily suspend belief, incapable of allowing the symbols of a man-made production to take on authentic meaning.

When blatantly designed by masters-of-ceremony and lacking the history and sanctity of traditional religious symbolism, rituals can seem too self-conscious, shallow and abstract to arouse deep emotion and profound conviction.

However, ritual can certainly be either sacred or secular. The key is placing the right symbolic acts within the framework of secular funerals. This might involve formalising the entire framework of the ceremony. The Mass is split into the Introductory Rites (greeting, blessing); Penitential Rite; Liturgy of the Word; Liturgy of the Eucharist (the big one); and the concluding blessing. By sequencing and scripting events, you eliminate potential disruption, unpredictability, confusion and accident.

Nor does sequencing deny individuality. Secular ceremony already alternates between highly specific acts – toasts, salutes, pledges, oaths – with open spaces for improvisation and particularisation – speeches, songs, and so forth.

Some of these structured, predictable – even unchanging – segments provide opportunities for participants to establish their individual emotions, identities, motives and needs. Others allow the ritual masters of ceremony to convey the specific, idiosyncratic messages which are unique to the occasion in hand.

Open sections can be short or protracted, can involve several people or one, can be conventional or new, but must be coordinated to ensure they’re a scene in the same play. If they fail as accurate and authentic metaphors, emotional momentum will flag.

A blessed new year to you all. 

Over in Pyongyang mourners wail for the loss of the great leader Kim Jong Il. As Andrew McLaughlin puts it:

This is really otherworldly. And terrifying. It’s depressing to be reminded that it’s possible, with energetic and relentless propaganda, surveillance, and oppression, to delude vast numbers of human beings into genuine feelings of attachment to, and dependence on, a brutal sociopath responsible for the degradation and humiliation of millions, and the starvation and murder of millions more.

Meanwhile halfway across the world the life of Vaclav Havel is being celebrated. As reason.com reports:

It’s a safe bet that in the history of state funerals, no former president has been sent off to the Absolute Horizon by not one but at least three different live, nationally televised rock songs about heroin.

Such was Václav Havel’s genre-straddling life and thoroughgoing conception of freedom that it seemed as natural as tartar sauce on fried cheese to bookend a portentous, Dvořák-haunted National Requiem Mass in Central Europe’s oldest Gothic cathedral with a loose-limbed, hash-scented rock and roll celebration at the Czech Republic’s most storied music venue, all while the non-VIPs on the streets of Prague (and their counterparts outside the capital) lent the most dignity of all to the three-day National Mourning by creating ad-hoc candlelit shrines in whatever patches of cobblestone reminded them of the man who made them most proud to be Czechs.

Two funerals, two societies and, as we head into 2012, a world of risks and opportunities between them.

In the Czech Republic Havel’s own words from the Velvet Revolution were everywhere. “Truth and love” he said “must prevail over lies and hatred.” As good a talisman as any to carry with us?

A happy, prosperous and loving new year to all our readers from all us Havel supporters at the GFG-Batesville tower. See you in 2012.

I sat down yesterday afternoon to write a review of Powell and Family, a brand new funeral home in Droitwich. In a supersaturated funeral industry, here’s one to watch. There’s a Darwinian clearout of superfluous undertakers already under way, and evolution is likely to favour the Powells. Check out their website.

As I thought of things to write I scanned the comments coming in about this post concerning the desirability of ritual in funeral ceremonies. Here’s the joy of blogging. However hard you think a thing through you can never in a lifetime predict the responses or arrive at the sorts of insights generated by the GFG’s Usual Suspects. They were on coruscating form. We are incredibly lucky to have them.

The Powells attach great value to personalisation and, unusually in their business, they see the need to work collaboratively not only with their clients but also with celebrants. Bravo.

Personalisation is a much-bandied word in Funeralworld. It is the reaction against one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter funerals, especially funerals conducted according to the rite of the Church of England. Is this the fault of the rite? I don’t know. I suspect that if you throw a good ritual over a dead person it will mould itself to the contours of that person’s unique personality. It fails when it knows next to nothing of the dead person and does away with the sensuous element which so appealed to Jenni Russell. A fullblooded ritual can fall on disbelieving ears and still do a pretty good job.

So I would suggest that the problem isn’t one-size-fits-all funerals, it is could-be-anybody funerals. And while the move towards personalisation unquestionably addresses this problem it may not go far enough. 

Personalisation offers descriptors of a person – football fan, nature lover, motorcyclist, whatever. But however typical, these descriptors tend to be outward manifestations of identity, emblematic but also generic; they tell us no more than that the dead person was ‘one of them’. A funeral which has merely been accessorised in this way is likely to fall short of being personal.

A person’s identity isn’t definable by a single person. You are not who you think you are, you are everything that other people think you are. You don’t have a single identity, you have multiple, complex, contradictory identities. So a really personal funeral is not one in which the identity of the dead person is cleverly encapsulated by a single biographising eulogiser but, instead, one in which their identity is refracted through the many people who knew them.

If that is so, then a personal funeral is an ensemble performance. It is one where many people answer a duty to get out of their seats and bear witness in their own way to what the dead person meant to them and will go on meaning to them. Proper commemoration is likely to result not in a single version of a person but a rather marvellous kaleidoscope of versions, some contradictory, all valid.

In practical terms this is very difficult to achieve without the whole shooting match lurching off into embarrassment, sentimentality, irrelevance, rambling, mumbling, tedium, egotism, euphemism, trivialisation, bluffness or tonguetiedness.

Usual Suspects, over to you.

Here is a long extract from the Sunday Times article by Jenni Russell about the necessity for, and power of, ritual. 

I went to an astounding funeral last month. Philip Gould, the pollster who helped to create new Labour, died in November. He knew he was dying and he knew just how he wanted to orchestrate the ceremony.

I have been to many London funerals that are forced by the timetables of crematoriums into being perfunctory affairs. The mourners often have only 40 minutes in which to file into an unprepossessing room, evoke the personality of the person whose life they are grieving for, cry, sing or pray together and move hastily out again before the end of their scheduled slot.

These are often uneasy, dismal events. The readings, the music and the orations are chosen with love and thought. People attend out of great affection or respect. But nothing about the bland settings or the context lends itself to the expression of deep emotion.

Frequently, there is an anxiety about time and a diffidence about the ceremony itself. Speakers can feel shy about what they have been asked to do, partly because there is no form for them to follow. I have been to funerals where the person conducting the event has accidentally missed out whole chunks of it, leaving expectant participants with no role, and others where the music system has broken, leaving an awkward silence.

Everyone wants their own individually constructed service to be meaningful, but as funeral planners most of us are amateurs, and it is surprisingly difficult to make a random collection of readings and recollections feel satisfying to those who have assembled to acknowledge a life.

Philip’s funeral was utterly different. It was held in the Anglican church of All Saints in central London, which had confirmed him months before. The imminence of death had given him an intense interest in faith and ceremony, and his first conversation with the vicar there had been a request for him to conduct Philip’s final service.

This traditional high church service was an unashamedly compelling and dramatic event. It had a magnificent setting, a choir with achingly beautiful voices, incense hanging thickly over the congregation and a vicar who could carry an audience. It was unembarrassed about taking up the mourners’ time. It deployed all the knowledge that the Christian church has developed over two millennia, from ritual chants to mass singing, sermons and prayer, to evoke solemnity, sadness, laughter, empathy, admiration and, ultimately, hope and relief. The speeches, readings and music selected by Philip and his family made it a unique experience, but that variety was contained and transformed by being in an established dramatic form.

The mourners left the church having lived through something extraordinary. Everyone I talked to felt both uplifted and dazed. Several people confided their intention to convert to high church Anglicanism the minute they felt death to be close. This was not on the whole a statement about their desire for faith, but for ritual. Whether they were lapsed Christians or non-believers such as me, what struck us all was that this ceremony met a deep need to have our emotions evoked and expressed. Believing in God was not the point. We just wanted the response to our own lives and to those of our friends to be as serious and as purposeful as this.

This isn’t an argument for Christian ritual in particular. Whether we are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or anything else, it is about benefiting from the understanding of the people who lived before us in our struggle to give our lives structure and meaning. The rituals of celebration, marriage, birth, sexual maturity and death developed only because people found that these were effective ways to bond with others and heighten experiences that might otherwise be lonely or mundane.

Many of my generation spent much of their lives rejecting formal rituals — abandoning religion, avoiding marriages or christenings, writing their own ceremonies. Living in a society whose highest value is individualism, we both want to fit in and to demonstrate proudly just how different we are. Lots of us grew up, as I did, with humanist parents, so there was no long tradition to tap into. Those born into long traditions have often left them behind because they had begun to seem too smug, too processed. They had lost the element of transcendentalism that made them matter in the first place.

In walking away we have lost much that matters. Some people have the knack of creating emotion and significance. A friend who buried her mother in a wicker casket on a Welsh hillside feels nothing could have been more satisfying. For many of us, though, the dismissal of ritual for personalised events would be like turning our backs on Shakespeare because we have faith in our capacity as amateur playwrights. We try, but we cannot create the same effect.

Perhaps the answer is to accept that there is pleasure and reassurance to be found in following forms and rules. I have been struck in recent years by the number of Jewish friends who have embraced the practices of suppers and Sabbaths although they ridiculed them in their youth. In the same way, I now see that Christian ceremonies can still be full of meaning for those without faith. In our desire to be brought together with others and to be uplifted, we don’t necessarily need to demand practices that perfectly reflect every element of our own views.

Perhaps we could just accept, a little more humbly, that the rituals on offer to us have sprung out of centuries of thinking about human need. 

Whole article here (paywalled).

Inspired by the format of Come Dine With Me, Guardian commenter BaddHamster is “currently developing a variation on the theme called, Come Pine With Me, where four recently bereaved people take turns visiting each others’ funerals and rating each other on the booze, grub, style of coffin, service, general mourning etc…” 

It’s a nice idea, and as I contemplated it my mind moved sideways and recalled the mischievous website Ship of Fools, for people who “prefer their religion disorganized. Our aim is to help Christians be self-critical and honest about the failings of Christianity, as we believe honesty can only strengthen faith.” 

One of Ship of Fools’ gently disruptive activities is to dispatch a Mystery Worshipper to churches all over the world to appraise their worship packages. The reviews are arch, sometimes waspish, but essentially affectionate. Anyone can sign up to be a Mystery Worshipper. 

Which brings us to what would be a very interesting and revealing experiment. Wouldn’t it be fun if the GFG could open up another front and somehow do the same for funerals? Our Mystery Mourners could report back candidly and drily on ambience of venue; mood of mourners; comportment of undertaker; type of coffin; description of ‘floral tributes’ (what we used to call flowers); type of officiant; style of ceremony; quality of delivery; general upliftingness; poems and readings; music; content of eulogy… 

It falls at the first fence, of course: too tasteless and intrusive for words.

But it doesn’t invalidate the role of subversive, humorous examination of the way we do funerals. Where there is complacency, let there be laughter. 

Find Ship of Fools here.