Much to celebrate?
When wireless listeners switched on for the BBC Home Service (now R4) news on Good Friday, 1930, the announcer began in familiar terms in his familiar dark brown voice: “This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news. There is no news today.” The resulting startled gap was filled with 15 mins of pianoforte […]
Greening grief
The GFG motored purposefully south yesterday afternoon to Chiltern Woodland Burial Park. It was a three-birds-with-one-stone mission: to have a look at this well-heeled natural burial ground; to hear the great Dr Bill Webster talk about grief; and to meet up with Louise from Sentiment and Jon from MuchLoved, two of Funeralworld’s Good Guys. I […]
Celebrancy opportunity
Here is a possibly inspiring tale from a celebrant in the south-east. She has asked me to withhold her name and email address because she simply won’t have time to correspond if lots of people want to contact her. Hi Charles You have quite often written about celebrants and recently people who do not want […]
Words, words, words
Following my post about the ineptitude and ineffectiveness of words, I stumbled on this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s actually about citizenship ceremonies, but you’d never guess it from the way I’ve plucked the extracts: Traditionally, ritual, including rites of passage, is embedded in our religious culture. And it is true that religion […]
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 […]
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 […]
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”. […]
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’ […]
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 […]
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 […]
