The Good Funeral Guide

Found at Postsecret. 

More at the  Manchester Evening News and all the mourning chic fashions at the Daily Mail

“I don’t want a funeral. All I want when I die is a simple tribute concert at Wembley Stadium. And maybe a covers album.”

Chris Martin

Seneca killing himself on the orders of the Emperor Nero

Guest post by Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD) , our Stoic correspondent 

Is it solace that you look for? Let me give you a scolding instead! You are like a woman in the way you take your son’s death; what would you do if you had lost an intimate friend?

A son, a little child of unknown promise, is dead; a fragment of time has been lost. We hunt out excuses for grief; we would even utter unfair complaints about Fortune, as if Fortune would never give us just reason for complaining! But I had really thought that you possessed spirit enough to deal with concrete troubles, to say nothing of the shadowy troubles over which men make moan through force of habit. Had you lost a friend (which is the greatest blow of all), you would have had to endeavour, rather, to rejoice because you had possessed him than to mourn because you had lost him.

But many men fail to count up how manifold their gains have been, how great their rejoicings. Grief like yours has this among other evils: it is not only useless, but thankless.

Has it then all been for nothing that you have had such a friend? During so many years, amid such close associations, after such intimate communion of personal interests, has nothing been accomplished? Do you bury friendship along with a friend?

And why lament having lost him, if it be of no avail to have possessed him? Believe me, a great part of those we have loved, though chance has removed their persons, still abides with us. The past is ours, and there is nothing more secure for us than that which has been.

We are ungrateful for past gains, because we hope for the future, as if the future – if so be that any future is ours – will not be quickly blended with the past. People set a narrow limit to their enjoyments if they take pleasure only in the present; both the future and the past serve for our delight – the one with anticipation, and the other with memories, but the one is contingent and may not come to pass, while the other must have been.

What madness it is, therefore, to lose our grip on that which is the surest thing of all? Let us rest content with the pleasures we have quaffed in past days, if only, while we quaffed them, the soul was not pierced like a sieve, only to lose again whatever it had received.

There are countless cases of men who have without tears buried sons in the prime of manhood – men who have returned from the funeral pyre to the Senate chamber, or to any other official duties, and have straightway busied themselves with something else.

And rightly; for in the first place it is idle to grieve if you get no help from grief. In the second place, it is unfair to complain about what has happened to one man when death is in store for all of us.

Again: it is foolish to lament one’s loss when there is such a slight interval between the lost and the loser. Hence we should be more resigned in spirit, because we follow closely those whom we have lost.

The next Death Cafe will take place at 2-4pm on Saturday 5th November. Please get in touch if you’d like to attend: jon [at] deathcafe.com

If you can’t read this, try clicking the picture. You can find Archa’s website here.

Posted by T Roll

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Posted by Charles

Yesterday (15 September) Hilary Benn asked this question in the House:

May we have a statement on reports that the Government propose to ask bereaved relatives, including those on low incomes, for payment when they go to register the death of a loved one? The charge, estimates of which vary from £100 to £180, is apparently intended to pay for a new system to check on causes of death, but the cost, which is no longer to be hidden in funeral directors’ charges, will be collected when families turn up, often in a distressed state, at the register office, or they will be sent an invoice later. Given that the Conservative party made such a fuss at the last election about a so-called death tax, will a Minister explain at the Dispatch Box why they now plan to impose one?

Does anyone know anything about this? 

Source

Posted by our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson

“Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty to high ideals.”

Sir William Gladstone 

Following the recent spate of arson attacks and looting sprees, it’s easy to conclude some of England’s more feckless vandals have been dragged up expecting rights without responsibilities, and that we’re doomed unless we rein in aspects of the liberal social experiment of recent decades.

One of the challenges of society today is the nature and speed of cultural change, in particular how people seek meaning and hope. Ritual has always played a part in helping us process life transitions, whether from bachelor to husband or wife to widow.

In today’s pluralistic, late-modern world, fewer people are using religious rites of passage to help understand meaning in life and death. Secular state-endorsed civil marriages and funerals are providing an alternative. But even when humanistic services include religious elements, do they not tend to be consumer-driven – ‘what the client wants, the client gets’?

If the Church is trying to revive her relevance, I don’t think the answer is accepting requests for ‘Fly Him To The Moon’. So what does she offer that’s different, what’s her ‘unique selling point?

Regular church-goers receive community support and consideration of bereavement beyond the funeral. But so, too, do those surrounded by friends and family in a secular community, so pastoral care alone is not a justification.

The true answer also won’t wash among non-believers: faith in God and the hope of His love for eternity. It’s a chicken and egg dilemma for the Church. No faith, no gain. No gain, no faith.

So the question is how to inspire faith, and increasingly the answer is a return to traditional liturgy and rites, not yet more guitars, tambourines and pagan-style dancing in the sanctuary. This traditional revival, driven by His Holiness Pope Benedict, is not about empty aesthetics, but about liturgy and ritual showing how beauty and truth connect with one another. Interestingly, it’s the young who get it and are cheerleaders for the cause. They’re fed up with Vatican II aging hippies making them cringe as they try desperately to be ‘in touch’.