The Good Funeral Guide

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!

Regular blog reader Melissa Stewart has been getting into the spirit of Christmas by burning incense made by the Cistercian monks of Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire. “I like the waft when I’m singing carols,” she says.

She writes to suggest that incense would work well for some funerals. It all depends on the venue, of course — you couldn’t do it at the crem. But she’s absolutely right in suggesting that, as all good religions know, a good funeral should appeal to all the senses. Secularists, take notice. 

You can order best-quality incense online from Prinknash (pronounced ‘Prinnash’) Abbey and pay for it through PayPal. It comes in a range of scents, some of which, as you might have supposed, are created from secret recipes. 

Find the Prinknash Abbey website here. 

By Richard Rawlinson

Today’s elderly, even when not religious, are more likely to choose a funeral conducted by a priest (pastor/vicar depending on denomination) than a secular celebrant. Given the choice between a person in a robe or business suit, they opt for the former. Their decision seems as natural to them as taking the dog to the vet rather than the local homoeopath on yell.com, even if they were aware of the alternative choice.

This generational conventionalism is set to be eroded in the years to come as today’s middle aged – more strident in their secularism – plan their send-offs. Instead of feeling comforted by the involvement of those in holy orders, many see the religiosity of the ensuing services as more hindrance than help: they don’t feel the need for prayers for their immortal souls; the division of limelight between God and the deceased might bore their attendant family and friends; and, worse still, some priests seem to jump at the opportunity to proselytise to this captive audience of non-churchgoers. Rarely successfully.  

So the swords are crossed. Teams huddle to plan strategy. Neither opponent is in it for financial reward, although they’d both welcome a steadier stream of cheques from those who choose their service. At the moment, the priests have the virtual monopoly (about 465,000 of the 500,000 who die in the UK each year, according to the National Association of Funeral Directors). But for how long?

The motives on both sides are honourable by and large. They want to give the deceased and bereaved the funeral they deserve: smooth-running, comforting, memorable, moving, inspiring, beautiful, profound. If any professional pride comes into play, it’s because they’re aware of the inherent communication skills, charisma and hard graft required to pull off such a feat.

The clergy assess their situation. It’s important to remind ourselves here that priests come in all forms from the extremes of progressive and conservative to varying shades in the middle. To complicate human nature further, all types can seem loving, intelligent and charismatic to some, and annoying to others. A darling of liberals might seem muddled to the traditionalist. Muscular orthodoxy might seem intrusive and domineering to those who prefer TV’s amiable Rev. What’s more, whether woolly or forthright, both camps can be either good or bad communicators: some people literally exude star quality, others lead us to assume they must have had their heads shoved down the lavatory at school.

When addressing the slow but steady loss to civil celebrants of funerals within their parish community, it’s inevitable there’s disagreement among these men (and women) in holy orders about the best ways to keep death ritual in the religious sphere.

They may comfort themselves that funeral directors still tend to put most ‘business’ their way (more blogs on why this is, please). Clergy might also feel at an advantage as they don’t just deal professionally in death like some in the funeral industry: they’re the shepherds of living parishioners, who they see at church and during school and hospital visits; who they baptise, confirm, marry and counsel in times of need. Their churches are not linked only to dying and visited under duress like the crematoria.

But they’d be unwise to be complacent about the growing demand for good secular celebrants. Like the clergy, these celebrants come in various shapes and sizes. Some appeal to the more forthright atheist, others – believing in bespoke service – more readily tailor their service to audiences made of different faiths and none, perhaps going along with requests for prayers, hymns, and so forth.    

This in some ways places them head to head with the more liberal members of the clergy, those who are keen to adapt to mixed congregations, both atheist-lites and those simply without strong religious convictions. In ‘market’ terms, this is rich picking. Of the four in 10 Brits who claim membership of the Church of England, it’s clear many are secularists, who increasingly see hypocrisy in using their church simply for baptisms, weddings, funerals and the Christmas carol service. The NAFD has confirmed that most of those choosing non-religious funerals were ‘hatch, match, dispatch’ Protestants, whereas lapsed Catholics remain more likely to uphold the ceremonial traditions of their forefathers, hedging their bets, so to speak.

This leads to consideration of various ongoing debates here at GFG: the discussion about secular ritual, whether religion-inspired or not; the shared, non-denominational nature of crematoria, and the call for faith groups to adjust to mixed funeral audiences.

The latter discussion point, in particular, depends on personal taste. I’d happily pay respects at a secular or multi-faith funeral at a crematorium, but I’d choose for myself a requiem mass in a Catholic church followed by a graveside committal on consecrated ground. I’d want less emphasis on eulogy in the homily, and more on praying for my immortal soul in Purgatory. Loved ones can celebrate my life before and after the mass, if they so wish, but I’d hope, whether they’re secular or from a different faith group, they’d accept my wish to keep the sacred mass centred on (my) God.

It should not be a ‘duty’ to homogenise all funerals to make them inclusive of all. When the culture is strong, it trumps good manners. When the culture is not a heartfelt issue, then general consensus can take over. There’s a difference between multicultural society and pluralist society. In society, cultures do not all mix as one homogenous whole but they should be able to coexist peacefully with their different cultures respected by others.

A multifaith funeral may indeed be a good thing, perhaps for the majority today. But, for the minority of resolute religious or indeed militant atheists, there will always be some things too important to compromise.

This has been the case with decades of ecumenical conferences held by different Christian denominations striving unrealistically for unity on key issues. Ecumenism more often than not means disparate groups getting together to proselytise their own cause. I’d rather a smaller Church that’s not diluted than a bigger Church that’s lost its meaning. 

Ed’s note: If this has got you thinking, you may be interested in a Muslim view of traditional religious funeral culture vs the way we are today. Here’s a taster: “For the first time in my life, I really needed religion to give me solace, but here I was, listening to an unfamiliar language where the word “devil” kept popping up, alarming rather than comforting me.” Full article in the Guardian here. 

Image from the Purple Funeral Company

Though secular people are increasingly saying no to a religious funeral, we note that it’s taking them forever to do it. Why so?

Because, though they reject the theology, they like the ritual. Ritual is the antidote to chaos. It brings order. Everyone knows what to do. When death turns our life upside down, convention conquers confusion.

Which is why the Victorian funeral procession is still with us, too, albeit vestigially. Our modern grieving style does not go in for the same vulgar ostentation, and modern traffic has made stately procession mostly impossible, but we can still travel the first and the last twenty yards in reasonably good order just about, and people cling to that because, dammit, the way to do it is the way it’s always been done.

Once the undertaker and his or her bearers have bowed deeply and departed, that’s where, at a secular funeral, familiarity flies out of the window. Up steps the celebrant and no one knows what the heck to expect. And though the verdict of the audience afterwards may be that they liked the negative quality of the ceremony – it gave the dead person, not god, star billing – I think they often go home nursing a secret disappointment, a sense of something missing. 

They miss the familiar script. Because they feel a funeral should be a custom.

Which is why they like the traditional dressing-up, the undertaker, clad in the garb of a Victorian gentleperson, handing over to someone dressed in medieval vestments. Secular civvies just don’t cut it – too dowdy, too individuated.

People miss the heightened, numinous language.

They miss the non-verbal elements of a proper ceremony: symbolism, movement, the elements that make for a sense of occasion, a sense of theatre, the transfiguration of the ordinary.

Because at a time like this they need ritual.

Secular celebrants take upon themselves an intolerable burden. It takes disparate qualities to be a good celebrant: intelligence, empathy, writing skills, inexhaustible powers of origination, a feel for theatre and the ability to hold an audience. It’s too hard. In a secular ceremony the celebrant is often a solo performer. That’s not the case in a ritual. In a ritual, the celebrant is an actor uttering familiar words, and is merely pre-eminent in an ensemble performance which involves all present. In a ritual, the celebrant may not be an awfully good actor – but Hamlet is still Hamlet. Here’s the point: in a ritual, a superb celebrant is a bonus, not the be all and end all.

Unique funerals for unique people. It’s a lovely idea. But come on, no one to whom death has happened actually wants a celebrant sitting on their sofa, sipping tea, saying brightly, ‘You can do what you like – we start with a blank piece of paper!’ When your brain is in bits that’s one of the most unhelpful things anyone could say to you.

Can a celebrant really reinvent the wheel every time he or she creates a ceremony? Of course not. Unique funerals for unique people is a pipedream, and the time has come to declare the experiment a partial success but an overall failure because it meant chucking out the baby with the bathwater.

Which is why secularists need now to move on and devise their own liturgy – or, if you prefer, something generic, formulaic, recycled, polished and proud of it, because that’s what a liturgy is.

Is it really possible to achieve a good funeral without improvising every time someone dies? Can a secular liturgy be both personal and universal? Can it be prescriptive and adaptable?

Why not? Religious ceremonies do it all the time. And the eulogy will always be the centrepiece.

A good secular ritual will be well-plotted, of course, and like all good rituals it will be a purposeful, meaningful journey.

It will visit places along the way which participants may find difficult, but which they will be glad they did. This is the nature of ritual: in order to be therapeutic it must sometimes be medicinal.

It will unashamedly plagiarise other rituals.

It will be created by a team of sorts in the spirit of the creators of the King James Bible:

Neither did we disdain to revise that which we had done, and to bring back to the anvil that which we had hammered: but having and using as great helps as were needful, and fearing no reproach for slowness, nor coveting praise for expedition, we have at the length, through the good hand of the Lord upon us, brought the work to that pass that you see.

It will happen. Some people want to create their own funerals from scratch; most don’t. 

A self-empowered community brings its own aesthetic, its own feel, to a farewell event which is unique and authentic, where people can speak and sing and be still, and spend all the time they need. 

This one had it all, yes? 

Note how much this shares with Josh’s celebration of life event. If you haven’t seen that film yet, please drop everything and watch it now.  

Undertaking students learning burial skills at the Theo Remmertz Academy in Münnerstadt

Funerary customs are on the move in Germany, which seems to be emerging as the country to watch at the moment.

Undertakers are becoming a little like event managers. People who are not religious and don’t go to church expect undertakers to organize a ritual for the funeral.

In recent years the culture of mourning has changed in Germany. Funerals have become more personal, often more colourful.

‘As private business people, funeral directors are usually better able to cater for individual needs. A priest, on the other hand, is confined to certain structures,’ says Alexander Helbach, spokesman for the consumer funeral watchdog association in Germany. Helbach believes morticians are profiting from the change in attitudes by extending their services into organizing funeral orators or funeral halls for families of the dead.

As German undertakers move to meet consumer expectations by extending their service into ceremony-making, we note that most British undertakers have been very slow to exploit the opportunity.

Following recent discussion on this blog about who is responsible if a grave is dug too small, it is delightful to note that Germans, noted for thoroughness in all things, train their undertakers to cope with all contingencies:

In the central German town of Munnerstadt there is even a special graveyard where young morticians can practice burials – the only one of its kind in Europe. 

Read the whole article here. 

Natural burial √

Biodegradable coffin √

Cycle to the burial ground? Well, maybe.

You’ve done all you can to tread lightly on the earth while you’re here and – like the diver who plunges cleanly into the water – you want to make as small a splash as possible when you leave.

But what can you do if you are the problem? What if your body – full of toxins, chemicals and all the detritus of 21st century living – is going to pollute whether you like it or not?

One answer might be decompiculture. We’ve blogged on this before but a recent video from TED gives a fresh insight into the way that mushrooms trained to digest your own body could help clean up the mess you don’t want to leave behind:

The artist involved suggests that this is a journey we should all consider making – not astronauts or aeronauts but decompinauts. Her website is here. What do you think?

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

For better or worse, depending on your viewpoint, you know where you stand with both civil and Catholic funerals – give or take a few 1,000 variations on a theme. However, I’m not sure what to make of this organisation, and would be interested to hear your take on it. For me, the OneSpirit Interfaith Foundation seems to be forging a niche for itself that sits firmly on the fence between civil and religious, claiming to design funeral ceremonies where everyone attending, regardless of faith or views, will feel included.

Acknowledging that a funeral today often includes people attending from different faiths or none, the foundation supplies male and female ministers who have followed a two-year training programme with the Interfaith Seminary. It claims this training allows for the recognition of ‘the inner spiritual truths of the individual [which are also] at the heart of the world’s great faith traditions’. It adds: ‘There are countless paths leading to the One God / Truth / Great Spirit / Source-of-All’.

This is clearly not just another Protestant sect as it’s aiming to be as inclusive of agnostics and non-Christians as it is those uncomfortable with the organised Church. In fact, the reference to ‘God’ above is the only one I could find on its website.

Of its ministry, it says: ‘We aim to be of service to people of all faiths or none’, citing as an example ‘those who are seeking spiritual connection and expression, yet feel uncomfortable with conventional religion’.

It continues: ‘We are not creating a new religion, but filling a growing spiritual gap in modern society. It’s not our aim to convert anyone away from their faith, but to support people who wish to enquire more deeply into their own spiritual tradition and their own soul’.

Whether agnostic or religious, might this approach be comforting to some in the context of funerals?

I have my own views, but I’d be interested to hear thoughts from the civil funeral perspective.

Some of the GFG’s favourite and most admired people were in action yesterday. Clare and Michelle, who are Volkswagen Funerals, brought Lorna Grant to Cheltenham crematorium with their customary love and care in a Glastonbury themed funeral. Look, even the conducting funeral director is wearing his wellies.

The coffin, if I’m not mistaken, is a Sunset. 

Full story here.

Posted by Richard Rawlinson, religious correspondent

Vale makes interesting points in the thread beneath my Beyond the Abyss post, which discusses the gap between secularist individuality and religious communal ritual:

We (I) believe that community and the communal celebration of key events is important – yet secularism, at least as it finds expression in the west today – tends to be individualistic. Not surprising, perhaps when the only common bond is a lack of belief.
My own feeling, though, is that we are in a transitional phase and will over time evolve new and meaningful rituals to reflect the reality of people’s sense of personal meaning and purpose.

At first these will ape the religious ceremonies we are familiar with – because they are the ones we know. But they will diverge and in time consolidate new norms, patterns and meanings.

Actually, look at any civil ceremonies, the start has already been made’.

I’m trying to be open but find it hard to imagine meaningful death rituals devoid of any spiritual belief in an afterlife. I agree that non-religious funerals help bring comfort and closure, but wouldn’t a truly atheist ritual do this while professing the faith that God and souls don’t exist? Would it not be crucial to celebrate the fact that the deceased, however fondly remembered, is now nothing, incapable of pleasure or pain?

Some political and intellectual atheists can cope with such a nihilistic philosophy, but we seem some way from popular demand for rituals reflecting such secular realities.

Some stats…

Each year, around 500,000 people in the UK die, according the annual mortality statistics published by the Office for National Statistics. Over 30,000 funerals a year are currently non-religious, according to the National Association of Funeral Directors. This is around 6 per cent of deaths, or over one in 20 households affected by death.

This figure is increasing as families turn to celebration-of-life ceremonies rather than services conducted by a priest, either in church or crematorium. There’s certainly a growing willingness to admit non-belief, encouraged by secular educationalists, politicians and media pundits.

Of the four in 10 Brits who claim membership of the Church of England, it’s clear many are secularists, who increasingly see hypocrisy in using their church simply for baptisms, weddings, funerals and the Christmas carol service.

The NAFD has confirmed that most of those choosing non-religious funerals were ‘hatch, match, dispatch’ Protestants. Lapsed Catholics remain more likely to uphold the ceremonial traditions of their forefathers, hedging their bets, so to speak. This is borne out by weekly Mass attendance figures among the genuinely faithful – for the first time in the UK, CofE and Catholic attendance is neck and neck, each attracting between 800,000 and 1m a week, even though the starting pool of Catholics is smaller than those claiming to be culturally CofE.

But just as there are people of half-baked religious faith, so there are ‘atheist-lites’ for whom the fond belief in some sort of afterlife prevents them from totally parting ways with religion-inspired ceremonial.

Funeral direction

The muddled masses are only likely to reach clarity on one side or the other by authoritative guidance. In a nutshell, they need to be evangelised by fundamentalists, not in the nutty Creationist or Islamofacist sense but in the sense of inspirational leaders persuading others of their creed, be it religious or godless.

This is where the problem lies for anyone trying to devise new rituals devoid of quasi-religious elements. In the case of civil funeral celebrants, it doesn’t matter if they settle for a client-driven compromise. Who really cares if high priest of atheism Richard Dawkins disapproves of them perpetuating religious rituals? After all, he’s a biologist, not a philosopher or social worker, and, even then, considered a sloppy intellect by most of his academic peers.

In the case of priests, their vows in the Sacrament of Holy Orders mean they must serve God and the faithful of His Church by obeying and teaching God’s laws, handed down by the Holy Bible and Apostolic Tradition – the Mass with its divine liturgy and rituals as the focal point.

It’s at this point that Catholics must briefly digress – yes, there are priests who attempt sacrilegious ministry, and, of course, a minority who have committed vile crimes in the eyes of secular law, as well as mortal sins against God. But the point I’m making is that the way forward for the Church is not the same as for secular ritualists: a priest who dons layman’s attire for a civil funeral should be defrocked; a civil celebrant’s a la carte service, complete with religious appetiser, offers choice.

As Gloriamundi makes clear in his/her recent blog, ‘What You Need to be a Celebrant’, such choice forms a compassionate collaboration between celebrant and the bereaved. By the same token, the Church is being compassionate and indeed true by being relatively inflexible, as touched on in my post, ‘Individuality in the Requiem Mass?’.

True atheists and theists are dogmatic, not pragmatic. They are not relativists as they believe in orthodoxies: that we are just physical beings, or that our mortal bodies are vessels for eternal souls, saved by the grace of God.

Some religions do indeed seem to be committing slow suicide, but there are also fresh buds, a growing hunger for reverence among many younger Christians. In a parallel world, generations are growing up not even as cultural Christians, meaning they’re less likely to behave as their grandparents would have done when confronted by death.

But this seems more social consequence than conscious movement: has the average person really embraced the belief that a world without religion would be a better place, even if they do prefer living in the moment and banishing thoughts of life after death?

Apathy has wounded religion but a creed that denies belief cannot equal it, certainly not communally. True atheist diehards (die-easies?) will never replace religion as you have to fill a void with something, not nothing.

‘Teach them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen’. (Matthew 28:20)