More than just a matter of tone

This is an interesting blog post. Here's a taster:

What I hate most at funerals is the tone used by the officiant (almost wrote: the presiding officer). No matter what the religious faith may be, the person in front of the congregation speaks as if he knew ... I think it’s the tone of voice that does me in. As if the officiant had a direct line into whatever deity resides in that particular structure. I’d rather hang around with the person’s old buddies, whoever they may be ... We’d drink to his peace of mind and ours, then we’d start working his absence into the fabric of things.

Read all of it here.

What needs to be done

Here's a guest post by Jonathan Taylor. He's posted before, here and here. He's a loyal and regular commenter and contributor to debate. Indeed, he puts the fizz into much that we discuss.

In his post; Doing what needs to be done, saying what needs to be said Charles raises the point that the recently bereaved aren’t given the opportunity to grieve practically and effectively through active funeral ritual and rite during liminal mourning, and celebrants need to encourage them into more hands-on involvement. Of course this means, among other things, gently opening up the idea of a useful, rather than a merely dutiful, funeral, which may be a foreign concept to many. It all takes time. And, as X-Piry rightly points out in her comment, time is the one thing we’re mostly short of. But why?

Let’s not demonize the poor funeral director. He’s only doing his job (with a handful of notable exceptions, they know who they are). But that’s just the trouble, isn’t it? What, or rather who, is the common denominator in all such unnecessarily hurried funerals?

Remember my post about my son’s girlfriend’s sister who was killed by a bus? We had her funeral on Tuesday, over three weeks after she died. To cut a long story short it worked perfectly, for all the literally hundreds of people there, including me, and total strangers hugged me afterwards in floods of tears to tell me so. One comment summed up them all: “It hurt like hell, but it did my heart good.”

All I did was arrange as well as conduct it – I acted as funeral director as well as celebrant – according to the family’s evolving needs over the weeks. It was a long, painful journey for us all but every step, every twist and turn, was essential. It was as if the funeral went on for the whole three weeks, communicated partly through Facebook between her hundreds of young friends, with everyone actively involved and connected from the start right through to the end of the ceremony and beyond. It has changed my own concept of the funeral out of all recognition, and mostly thanks to the young ones because they were so open.

What I did was something any celebrant could do. The only thing you need a funeral director for is a fridge big enough for a body (and even then, only when you can’t keep it in a hospital mortuary), and probably to sell you a coffin. It’s possible to find an obliging one if you explain yourself nicely – you don’t even have to be one of the family.

Just maybe, then, the answer is that the celebrants’ movement has to promote itself not to funeral directors but to the public, and to provide the full service ourselves? I trained in funeral advice and arranging with Green Fuse (one of the bracketed F.Ds above, see their website), and that’s how I managed it – it’s easier than you’d think. So how about it, fellow celebrants?

It may alienate some funeral directors, but they’re not the boss. The purpose of the likes of Charles’s blog, as I see it, is to help us enlighten and empower the grieving public, at or long before the funeral. Celebrants are so much better at ceremony than most funeral directors, and it doesn’t make sense to hand the vital function of making the arrangements to someone who doesn’t truly understand the chaotic evolution of grieving in the early days, and isn’t committed to putting a family’s changing needs before his own. Funeral directors could do it, obviously, but do they? Mostly not. And we can’t wait for them. This is one area where time really is short.

We are in the early days of a funerary revolution, begun perhaps by the Natural Death Centre, the Humanists and others, and now largely in the hands of liberal independents (us). There’s no-one in charge except ourselves and the families we work for. It’s only our own habit that limits us to others’ habits, and we can envisage and accomplish anything we want, however apparently outlandish or arduous, with enough imagination and commitment. There are plenty of us if we want to begin it. This is more than just a job to most of us.

Wouldn’t you throw yourself down in the path of Destiny to pave the way for Death? Of course you would. We can come together and promote the reality of the Celebrant/Funeral Director. I’ve started already, with the help, support and training of Green Fuse, and it’s so, so much more rewarding than the ‘damage limitation’ job I see myself doing over and over again, trying to make the ceremony good enough to compensate for the (poor family’s lack of involvement in the) same old superficial ritual. I’m up for it if you are.

Jonathan Taylor

jmtaylor55@yahoo.co.uk

Pugnacious priests and supine celebrants

A little while ago a United Reformed Church minister wrote this:

I’ve had a bit of a narrow escape : I’m doing a funeral today and went to see the family three days ago. As I was leaving the house, something they said suggested that they had requested that “the curtain should not be closed”. I checked, and it was true. The funeral director had not passed on this important bit of information, and they had not specifically asked me. It sort of slipped out by accident ... So we could have had a situation where they suddenly found themselves, at the most sensitive point of the service, facing a closing curtain they didn’t expect. I was not happy, and have raised it with the funeral director concerned.

I suggested to the funeral director that rather than putting the idea of leaving out the Committal into people’s heads they should leave it to the family themselves to suggest it - at least, as long as it is a Christian funeral to be conducted by me as a Christian minister. The response was that ‘some families prefer it’. Choice is everything . . .

As far as I am aware, there is no Christian funeral liturgy or service that misses out the Committal : I feel the funeral directors are overstepping their boundary in deciding what the content of a Christian service should be. The funeral director was under the impression that ‘the Committal’ was the name given to ‘the whole service’; I think that ‘the Committal’ is that bit of the service (around which the whole thing revolves psychologically) which starts with the words “Therefore . . we commit his/her body to . . etc.” and is followed by the lowering of the coffin or the closing of the curtain.

Take out an act of committal of any sort and, it seems to me, you’re left not with a funeral service but a service of thanksgiving. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s not a funeral. In a funeral we stare death down in the light of faith. The curtain, for me, has particularly strong resonance ... It is very appropriate to be left staring at a curtain.

For myself I have said to the funeral director concerned that if they know they are going to ask me to conduct the funeral

> that they do not suggest to the family that they leave out the Committal, or offer it as a ‘choice’. It is my job, not the funeral director’s, to discuss with the family the content of a Christian funeral, and though I’m happy to accommodate their wishes, I would rather they made an informed decision.

What I am uneasy about is funeral directors deciding what is and what isn’t a Christian funeral and then either presenting me with a fait accompli, or (worse) creating a situation where I unwittingly cause pastoral hurt.

It’s bad enough that they sell printed orders to people and are pressing me for the order of service before I’ve even had a chance to meet the family. It seems they want it both ways :

> they assume that the order of service is predetermined such that I can tell them what it is before consulting the family. (As a URC minister I can be a lot more flexible than that). But . .

> feel that they can offer the family (but not me) choice over whether to include an essential element of a Christian funeral.

On the same theme, I have just come across this in the Australian ChristianToday:

Mark Tronson, a Baptist minister, was recently asked by a bereaved family to conduct the funeral as a Christian service ... However, Mark Tronson was distressed when the family told him that the funeral directors had contacted them twice, trying to persuade them to have a civil celebrant conduct the service. Further, the funeral home representative had made several calls to different family members in an attempt to control the service program.

Christian ministers had been reporting this sense of this 'being pushed aside' for some time now, saying that they, too, had been surprised and in the end had to establish their stamp of authority.

In his particular case, to spare the family any more stress in their delicate situation, Tronson had to make it very clear to the funeral home representative that the service was now in his hands, full stop. Moreover, no further contact on this subject was to be discussed by the funeral home representative to any member of the bereaved family other than himself as the Minister.

It appears that the civil celebrant industry may be tied to the management of the funeral homes, who may therefore like to retain control. In this way, the funeral directors have a more straightforward task, in that they do not have to contend with the requirements of the wide and varied forms of community farewells, as expressed by ministers or leaders of the other religions from around the world.

The Christian community needs to be made aware that they can insist on whatever service they like, they do not have to accede to the suggestion of the funeral directors.

The rise of the secular celebrant, whether humanist or semi-religious, is regarded as a good thing, but complacently so. In the UK funeral directors have been incredibly slow to understand that a good secular celebrant makes them look good (for all that a bad funeral director could never make a good celebrant look bad). In the dawning light of that understanding, they have been incredibly slow to bring them utterly under their control.

The relationship between funeral directors and priests was always based in deference—rather like that between sergeant major and commanding officer. They occupied different classes and so, this being Britain, separate worlds. Status was firmly established, as were boundaries. There may or may not have been mutual respect, but that’s another matter entirely.

That demarcated relationship has clearly begun to break down. Funeral directors no longer know where their job ends. Secular celebrants, too, get fed up with them telling them what their clients want in the ceremony. Mind your own bloody business!

More sinister, though, is the way that celebrants in Australia, where the secular movement has been going longer, are now being subsumed and enslaved by the funeral homes.

Given the supine and sycophantic way in which our own celebrants behave, it’ll be happening here any time soon.

Spirituality in contemporary funerals

There’s some interesting research work going on at the University of Hull. This is what they’re up to:

This project reflects the growing interest in spirituality which we are seeing in society generally and the changing shape of modern funerals. We are interested, for example, to see what the ‘spiritual' content of a so-called ‘alternative' funeral on the one hand and a traditional Christian or Buddhist ceremony might be; how people, as individuals and communities, express their spiritual feelings and beliefs and the meanings they attach to particular practices and symbols.

Why do they think it's important?

It will contribute to knowledge and theory in a changing field which is also of increasing public concern. It will also assist in refining the practical responses of professionals involved with mourners, and with dying and bereaved people in their creation of ceremonies and rituals which help people in their bereavement.

Here’s how they are doing it:

Subject to gaining the informed consent of all participants, we will first attend the meeting of the funeral director with the family when arrangements for the funeral are discussed. Then we will observe about fifty funerals of different types. At a suitable time after the funeral (perhaps one week) we will interview one or more family members about why they chose the funeral they did, the meaning it had for them and how it helped them with their loss. Finally, having analysed the funerals and family interviews, we propose to interview a sample of funeral directors and celebrants to obtain their views on emerging themes.

You can see how they’re getting on by reading the progress reports at the foot of the web page.

Interesting to note that, having attended 39 out of the fifty funerals they have set themselves, they are no longer finding anything new. For all the talk of grieving people reclaiming funerals from funeral directors and priests and creating life-centred ceremonies as unique as the life lived -- ceremonies which articulate and express the personal and possibly idiosyncratic values and spirituality of the person who has died -- the new paradigm has in most cases evolved into a new bog standard—a palatable, emotionally manageable ceremony served up by a second-rate celebrant comprising a handful of banalities tossed in a Henry Scott Hollandaise sauce, a eulogy spiced with a few nice jokes, the whole washed down with some saccharine Andrea Bocelli. Ritual comfort food.

Starkness and drama. Love and lamentation. The strong sense of a silver cord loosed, a golden bowl broken, a life ended. The emotional reality of a date with eternity. All missing.

The public's right to be right

Ask them and they’ll tell you. What do clients want?

Choice.

Funeral directors have got the message. They’re doing the lip-service. How do they stand on delivery?

Not terribly well, most of them, and for sound business reasons. As soon as you start to unbundle funerals and let clients source their own merchandise and service providers, it’s not just your margins that wilt, it’s your whole raison d’être. Undertakers assert their indispensability by creating dependency in clients and providers. Thrall is all. I’ve blogged about this before. I don’t want to bore you.

But I am happy to bore you about celebrants again. They’re important. And the recent arrival of the brilliant funeralcelebrants.org.uk website ought to, both, enable them to achieve the emancipation they deserve and also require them to compete. How’s it doing?

The good news is that it’s filling up fast. The British Humanist Association has bought into it bigtime. So has the InterFaith Ministry. The Association of Independent Celebrants’ members clearly know a good thing when they see it: a number of them have bought premium listings. But I can see no member of the Institute of Civil Celebrants. Why on earth not?

Most entries are too terse to be descriptive. I could find no photos or YouTube videos. So: little evidence of competition yet—but it’s early days.

The funeralcelebrants website empowers consumers. It enables them to choose the celebrant best suited to them. It will, therefore, prevail.

But it takes three to tango. The public needs to know about this resource. Funeral directors must start telling them about it (because good celebrants make funeral directors look good).

And celebrants, you’ve simply got to stop sucking up to funeral directors and behaving like supplicants. If you really are serious about consumer choice you will, when any funeral director rings and asks you to do a funeral, respond with this question: “Did the family choose me or have you assigned me?” You will refuse to be assigned. To make this work you’ll need to establish solidarity with other celebrants in your area.

If you really think you’re any good you will relish competition because it brings out the best in you. What’s more, you will enjoy a warmer welcome and a far more fruitful working relationship with a family which has actively chosen you.

You think you’ve got a choice between, in Milton’s words, “bondage with ease” and “strenuous liberty”? You haven’t. The market will decide, and it always plumps for strenuous liberty.

Something to celebrate

A while back I blogged about celebrants. The essence of my argument was that people do not get to choose their celebrant from the range available locally because funeral directors, who like to hold all service providers in their thrall, do not offer them a selection.

Very soon they’ll have no choice. There's now an excellent website which enables people to type in their postcode and instantly survey all the celebrants in their area.

Funeral directors: sit up and take notice, please! And hospices and bereavement officers!

Celebrants: register!

If you are looking for a celebrant, have a look. The website also describes the various organisations which train celebrants.

The time has come to give celebrants their due

The business model of most busy undertakers subordinates the needs of consumers to the necessity to get things done—paperwork, prepping bodies (laying them out and dressing them), transport issues. The interests of the business and the interests of you, the consumer, conflict. In balancing, on the one hand, things to do against, on the other, people to talk to, undertakers prioritise things to do. They are running against the clock.

 

You get in the way.

 

In another important respect the business model of most undertakers is faulty. Undertakers have a dual role. They are tradespeople skilled in looking after dead bodies. They’re generally good at this. They are also event planners who source, instruct and orchestrate service providers. These are, of course, unrelated skills. What’s more, the two roles are easily separated.

 

Undertakers tend not to be good event planners. Many cling obdurately to the same old same old. They have a template: one size fits all; less is best. They won’t make clients aware that they can have doves or balloons released at the funeral because booking them is too much hassle. Never, when mystery shopping, have I been offered Heaven’s Above fireworks or the services of LifeGem for my fictitious Dad’s ashes. When I die, my ashes will make a LifeGem diamond which will hang from my beloved’s neck and dandle between her breasts. There’s nowhere I’d rather spend eternity.

 

What disqualifies almost all undertakers from being event planners is this: their focus is not the focus of their clients. For their clients, the climax of the process is the funeral ceremony. But the funeral ceremony is none of an undertaker’s business. No, for the undertaker the climax of the process is the cortege. As the ceremony gets under way with all its majesty, emotional intensity and great grief, the undertaker and his or her staff are off duty, oblivious, often larking.

 

No wonder specialist event planners are filling the gap, and terrific people they are, too. Check out Sentiment Farewells and The Fantastic Funeral Company. Highly recommended.

 

The rise of the personalised funeral and the secular celebrant throws into even greater relief the inadequacy of undertakers as event planners. Ask any family, when it’s all over, which person was most important to them, the undertaker or the celebrant, and they’ll likely pick the latter. It’s enough to make celebrants feel that the tail is wagging the dog. They’ve got a point. Does it anger them? Of course it does. Celebrants are the principal drivers of change in the way we do funerals.

 

In the olden time, when all funerals were conducted by priests, no client, rightly, would ever blame the undertaker if the ceremony was awful.

 

But when an undertaker refers a client to a secular celebrant, that changes. All at once the undertaker is answerable for the quality of that celebrant’s work.

 

A really good celebrant makes an undertaker look really good. But no bad undertaker, however dreadful, can make a celebrant look bad. This is a revolutionary development. The balance of power has lurched away from the undertakers with the exception of those few who prioritise the emotional needs of their clients and involve themselves in their farewell rituals. It has created an interesting and potentially beneficial instability. Undertakers complacently suppose that celebrants are dependent on them. It's time for them to wake up and smell the formaldehyde. Guys, it's exactly the other way about. 

 

There are some superb celebrants out there. They bring to their work skills of a high order. They are listeners first and foremost.  They are wordsmiths: they must write literate ceremonies. But they must deliver them, too: they must be good performers. That’s a rare combination of talents.

 

There’s a wonderful variety of celebrants out there. That’s important. A celebrant speaks for the family and friends of the dead person. He or she is their representative. All the more important, therefore, that the celebrant is ‘one of us’. Staid middle class professionals do not want to be represented by some kindly scruff wearing a pony tail and suede shoes any more than a bunch of pagans wants to be represented by a starchy ex-headmistress.

 

What chance is there that consumers get to choose for themselves the celebrant who will best represent them? Very little. And this despite the fact that good celebrants are of inestimable commercial value to undertakers. You’d be amazed how difficult it is for brilliant celebrants to find work or be paid what they’re worth.

 

The tail is definitely wagging the dog.

 

Every undertaker now has a small stable of celebrants: one frontline strict humanist, one frontline pick-‘n’-mixer (the sort who says yes to a hymn and a couple of prayers), plus a couple of standbys. No more. If Brad Pitt turned celebrant and offered himself to most undertakers they'd say, "Thanks, mate, we've already got one." They take no account of gender, appearance, accent, social class, education, ethnicity or performance style. You’d think they would offer their clients the publicity materials of all those celebrants who’d ever entered their doors, give them a steer and let them choose someone like them. Oh, no. Want a pagan? Over your dead person’s dead body, so far as most undertakers are concerned.

 

To what do we ascribe this? Stupidity? Well, okay, yes, up to a point, you’ll rarely go wrong there. But the principal reason is time. They simply haven’t got time to let clients go home and faff about interviewing celebrants. They need to book the crem. They need to find a time when everyone’s free and the hearse is available. There’s no time like now, now while they’re all in the office, everything done and dusted in one meeting. 

Thus are clients denied choice and celebrants work. 

 

The undertakers’ business model being what it is, their ideal client is the little old lady who makes all the arrangements for the funeral in twenty minutes and is never seen or heard again until the day of the funeral. Can it accommodate the growing requirement for personalised, participative funerals? In most cases, no.

 

It’s broke. Let’s not fix it. Let’s move on. Dead people and those who love them deserve good celebrants. Celebrants deserve a status which accords with their value, and they deserve the remuneration which goes with that. Consumers owe it to themselves to survey who's out there and make their own choice, not to outsource it to an undertaker. 

To find the right celebrant for you, go to: the British Humanist Association; the Institute of Civil Funerals; the Association of Independent Celebrants; the Interfaith Seminary. Many celebrants work independently of any organisation. Try your luck: type 'funeral-celebrant' into Google. 

Killing time

Wherever dead people go they are freed from time. It’s our apprehension of this that adds to our sense of their elsewhereness and convinces us that they will not be coming back. It adds to the mystery, too. It is difficult to conceive of timeless existence, much easier to explain death in terms of annihilation.

For afterlifer John Donne “there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends or beginnings, but one equal eternity.” I find that poetically meaningful, but I’ve no exact idea what it means.

Close friends and family of just-dead people can similarly find themselves existing in a different time zone, detached, surveying the rushing world around them with anything from bemusement to anger. It’s an idea that I try to incorporate into my funeral ceremonies on the grounds that it’s useful to hold up a mirror to mourners’ feelings. It used to take me far too many words to get my meaning across, and far too many blank-eyed responses impelled me to cut down. Now I say something like, “For the time that we are here this morning, time stands still for you, for a while, and this place belongs entirely to you and to [name of dead person].”

On Friday I went to the funeral of a former work colleague. I was there for her and her only, but it was, of course, impossible also not to backseat drive the ceremony.

The celebrant, a humanist, opened proceedings with a reading about time. I didn’t recognise it, and now I shall have to write and beg him to share it. It said what I have always sought to say.

He went on to conduct the ceremony in what I thought was an exemplary way. I would say enviable as well but I am too aware of my shortcomings to suppose that I could ever be as good as him.

His words were apt. He dressed the dead person in her best light, and why not, on this day of days? It was a happy likeness.

Outstanding, though, was his manner. It was utterly unhurried. In the context of a crematorium this was all the more remarkable because crems are tyrannised by clocks. He detached us from all sense of time even though he was on a tight deadline. What’s more, he detached himself from himself and came across as a person of no interest to us. To perform that well, ego free, unself-conscious, and thereby give the stage wholly to our dead friend, was an extraordinary accomplishment.

I am tempted to draw the conclusion that the hallmark of a memorable funeral is a forgettable celebrant, and the hallmark of a meaningful funeral is a serenity which derives from a sense of time suspended. It’s a bit pat, you’ll have your own view, and it may not do for every funeral, but I think there’s something in it.

The name of the celebrant I heard is Leslie Scrase. If you live close to Bridport, in Dorset, I commend him to you.