Funeral cake

 

This is from the New York Times:

SPECIAL occasions of every sort feature food and funerals are no exception. In many cultures, there are foods that are customarily served after a funeral.

The funeral cakes that were traditional in some denominations in this country, mostly Protestant, were often meant not only to provide refreshment for mourners, but also to be a token of remembrance. A pair of these cookie-like cakes, sometimes called seedcakes in old cookbooks, might be wrapped in black crepe paper or paper printed with such symbols as skulls, and given to mourners to take home as keepsakes.

In his book, ”Traditional Food in Yorkshire” (John Donald, 1987), Peter Brears, a professor at the University of Leeds in England, documented one instance when funeral cakes tied with black crepe were delivered to homes in the village as invitations to the funeral.

In the United States the custom of serving special funeral cakes has all but disappeared. But appropriately a selection of funeral cakes was offered to guests at the opening reception last week for an exhibition of gravestone carvings at Federal Hall in lower Manhattan, presented by the Museum of American Folk Art. William Woys Weaver, the food historian who researched and adapted the recipes for the reception, said: ”Funeral cakes came here from Europe. They were common in northern Europe, and today the tradition is maintained primarily in rural areas of Sweden.”

 

Leslie Macchiarella has a recipe for funeral cake (pictured above), which she also calls Good Luck Peach Cake. The peaches carry ancient Chinese associations of happiness, luck and immortality.

Find it here. Well yummy. 

 

Quote of the day

 

When we walked into the funeral home, there was my mother laid out in a pretty blue dress with townspeople milling around, smiling, greeting me, speaking of old times. Happy talk.

My wife, ashen, asked, “Why is she wearing glasses?” 

Michael Pulley

Source

Advertising Jesus

We’re always struck here at the GFG by the vilification which the unchurched can heap upon those in holy orders. It never seems to happen the other way round. Almost all secular funerals are notably inclusive and hospitable towards believers.

Now that we are living in a multifaith society where any funeral audience is likely to span the spectrum of beliefs, do faith groups have a duty to take cognizance and adjust? 

Here’s some vilification. The writer is describing her grandfather’s funeral:

Let me start by saying that I understand the role of religion at a funeral. I understand that the idea that death isn’t real and permanent is a comfort to a great many people. I’m not one of them, but I won’t begrudge solace to those who are.

That said, I despise, with all I am, the time at a funeral that is spent on advertising Jesus instead of on the dead and the survivors.

The pastor was perfunctory in those bits of service that are actually service to the mourners. He read the bits of Revelations that deal with heaven without much attempt to string them into coherence. He did not, thankfully, try to pretend that he knew anything about my grandfather.

For whatever reason, the pastor wasn’t content to simply reassure those of us who believed that my grandfather and grandmother were together again in heaven–or would be together after the resurrection. He was clearly up on his theology but uncomfortable getting that specific with us; he hinted instead. No, the pastor poured his energy into exhorting us all to believe as he did.

There were bits and bobs throughout the service, but the worst of it came as a sermon after the eulogies. It was very much an “Enough about the dead; let’s talk about Jesus” moment.

Me? I had to sit there and bite my tongue… And I had to do it at my grandfather’s funeral because selling Jesus to us all was more important than focusing on those of us who were mourning.

It was the single most selfish moment I’ve seen at a funeral, and the pastor didn’t have the excuse of being distraught.

Full text here.

Do it yourself

“Someone will wash the body. Someone will dress the body. Someone will close the eyes for the final time. Someone will. At the critical moment of death, someone will perform these tasks for the person whom we have loved and cared for all our lives. Why would we give those meaningful rituals away to a stranger? Why do we give away the best stuff?”

Anne O’Connor here

Quote of the day

“Taking a  deep look at my own death I began to envisage how exactly I would like my death to be. It made me realise that what I am leading my clients through in the hospice is definitely not what I would want myself and I see now that I must take a new look at what I am doing.”

 

Hospice consultant who attended a Dying to Live workshop

 


The case for a secular funeral ritual

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. 

Fair dos for Henry Scott Holland

Posted by our religious correspondent Richard Rawlinson

In this initial blog, Fr Tim Finnigan explains his irritation with this famous reflection on death by the Anglican Canon Henry Scott-Holland (1847-1918):

 “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

 Fr Tim retorts: “Death is not ‘nothing’, it is a big thing and can be devastating. Something has happened and it can seem that everything has changed…. Yes, we should keep our happy memories and cherish them but we do not need to “force” solemnity and sorrow – they come quite naturally”.

 He adds: “As Catholics we have the best possible comfort in our grief. At every Mass we pray for all the faithful departed. At Mass… the whole Church is gathered together, including all of the Holy Souls in purgatory. We are not helpless because our prayers actually help our loved ones who have died… The popular transformation of the funeral into “a celebration of the life of …” distracts people from the opportunity to do the one thing that really helps those who have died: to pray for them”.

 All good stuff, in my book, but Fr Tim follows his first blog with this clarification after correspondents pointed out he has been unfair to Canon Scott-Holland.

 The fact is that, while at St Paul’s Cathedral, Scott-Holland delivered a sermon in May 1910 following the death of King Edward VII titled Death the King of Terrors, in which he explores the natural but seemingly contradictory responses to death: the fear of the unexplained and the belief in continuity. It is from his discussion of the latter that his best-known writing, ‘Death is nothing at all’, is drawn.

Fr Tim concludes: “The poor man has been badly served by having the “Death is nothing at all …” section quoted so widely without the context of his argument and contrast”.

Though rain berated the street

An Taoiseach Enda Kenny carries the coffin of his mother Eithne from the Church of the Holy Rosary in Castlebar yesterday, assisted by his brothers John and Henry and his nephew, Henry Jnr. 

THEY came in their thousands to pay respect to her loved ones, and though rain berated the street outside all morning long, the Church of The Holy Rosary in Castlebar was alive with the kind of celebration of life that the family of the late Eithne Kenny had longed for.

Ah, no one does a funeral — or writes it up — like the Irish. “Though rain berated the street…”

Eithne Kenny was the mother of the Taoiseach — the same Taoiseach who recently berated the Church in the wake of the paedophile priest scandal, denouncing “the dysfunction, disconnection and elitism that dominates the culture of the Vatican to this day.” No matter, Eithne Kenny’s funeral mass was co-celebrated by a full line-up: Monsignor Joe Quinn, PP Knock, Fr JJ Doherty, CC Glencolmcille, Fr Brendan Hoban, Castlebar, Fr Martin O’Keefe, CC Glenisland, Fr Peter Quinn, Ballina, Fr Karl Burns, CC Westport, Fr Jack Garvey, PP Carnacon, Fr Peter Waldron, PP Keelogues, Fr Michéal Mac Gréil, S.J Westport and Reverend Val Rogers, Westport, representing The Church of Ireland. Father Michael Farragher acted as master of ceremonies and Canon John Cosgrove, PP Castlebar, acted as chaplain to the President’s aide-de-camp, Colonel Michael McMahon.

No one does a funeral like the Irish.

At the end of his address to the congregation, her son,  An Taoiseach Enda Kenny, asked those gathered not to applaud his words, but to “applaud the mothers of Ireland, those gone and those here, and to draw on their strengths as you face the challenges of life”.

Full report here

Wants out

Since a stroke six years ago Tony Nicklinson’s life has been, in his own words, ‘dull, miserable, demeaning, undignified and intolerable’. Tony can only move his head and his eyes. He has locked-in syndrome. 

And now he wants to die. 

In fact, he’s demanding the same right to end his life that any able-bodied person has. But because he is physically unable to kill himself, he’s issued proceedings in the High Court asking for a declaration that it is lawful for a doctor to terminate his life, with his consent and with him making the decision with full mental capacity.

Full story here

Hat-tip to Kingfisher 

Sal-ute

Yesterday’s funeral of mafia aristo Salvatore ‘Sal the Ironworker’ Montagna was notable for the thinness of the attendance — in contrast to the hundreds who turned up to say farewell to Nicolo Rizzuto Sr in November last year. Montagna was shot last Thursday as he left a house on Ile Vaudry. Mortally wounded, leapt into the river to escape his attacker.

It seems that Montagna, onetime acting boss of the Bonanno family crime business in New York, was manoeuvring to become head of the Rizzuto empire in Montreal.

Photos here.

More about Sal here.