I know a lot of you like a good gangster funeral. This one’s not premier cru, but it’s not bad.
“My father was no saint,” Ryan McElroy, one of Mr. McElroy’s three children, said in a eulogy. “But people said he could light up a room. He’s been away 15, 20 years, and you still felt protected by him.”
Read the entire account in the New York Times here.
Three views here about what a funeral is for by Christian holy people in response to this article here.
Something that allows space for people of all faiths and none to recognise that our lives are about more than the acquisition of wealth and bigger than the sometimes compartmentalised lives we live … until we have a national language and a pattern for doing these things that all can relate to, it is simply not going to meet a very human desire for ritual action that all can take part in. Rev Adele Rees London
A funeral service is neither a “time for thanksgiving” nor “the celebration of a life”, even though that certainly seems to be what many mourners nowadays think they have to have, thereby hurrying past the all-important grieving stages. But the principal focus of the rite is the dignified and appropriate disposal of a corpse. Fr Alec Mitchell Manchester
Three really good things – a tribute by a family member, humour and applause … excluding language about God limits what you can say about the richness and depth of human life. Canon Robert Titley Rector in the Richmond team ministry
Having spent last night listening to religious choral music by that well known atheist Mozart I am moved to suggest to Canon Titley that invocations to the Supreme Being do nothing to detract from a sense of wonder and mystery.