celebrants

Death in the community

30 August 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, Attitudes to death, celebrants, ceremony, coffins, End-of-life issues, funeral customs, funeral directors, funeral reformers, funeral trends

 

Beyond the unappetising business of flogging pre-need plans to the tottering classes, undertakers do next to nothing to educate the public about funerals. They seek to be seen as public-spirited. They do good stunts, raise money for the hospice here, the air ambulance there. But how many stage events to raise awareness of the immense emotional and spiritual power of a funeral to transform grief?

Expectations of funerals are so low that most people are just relieved to get the whole horrible business behind them. They are so low that they bitterly resent the cost. So there have to be very sound commercial reasons for all undertakers to get out there and talk up their product.

Two recent events have brought death into the community in original and effective ways. Both were, for the apprehensive, welcoming in their informality; both set out to inform rather than sell.

The first was the Six Feet Under Convention held in Bournemouth on 12-14 August. It was a brave venture, which attracted 20 or so delegates to a series of talks by eminent funeralists and others. Alongside it was an open-air coffin display organised by the Natural Death Centre, complete with a coffin to paint and another to pose dead in. There were sporadic outbreaks of musical performance. It was reckoned to be the first-ever public display of coffins. So wary was Bournemouth Borough Council that it insisted on warning signs. It was notable that some foreign visitors were discombobulated. Brits loved it.

The second was ARKA’s Bringing Death to Life show in Lewes. An atmosphere of cheerful informality was inviting to the casual visitor, and a good number of people in the locality had made a very deliberate bee-line. They weren’t disappointed. There was an afternoon of excellent talks from Cara herself; from Julie Gill, who’ll be running the new ARKA branch in Lewes; from Hermione Elliott, a doula from Living Well Dying Well; and from Peter Murphy of Light on Life Ceremonies. Peter and his wife Belinda have a ceremony shop in Brighton, and work very closely with ARKA. How good to see a funeral director with an understanding of the vital importance of collaborating with ritualists. Cara certainly knows how to surround herself with brilliant people. A highlight of the day was hanging out with Jean Francis, author of the excellent Time to Go.

We gonna celebrate your party with you… (Kool and the Gang)

18 July 2011
Charles
11 Comments
Categories: celebrants, ceremony, death and funerals, funeral, funeral customs

Posted by Sweetpea

Am I alone in sensing a nasty niff?  The vague whiff, perhaps, of a fashionable diktat in the air?  I know it’s not really the done thing, but I have to confess to feeling a little oppressed by the phrase ‘celebration of life’.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a celebratory kinda gal.  Some of the ‘best’ funerals in which I’ve happily taken part have been wonderful, sometimes exuberant, expressions of love and gratitude to the deceased.  Great, and if there’s much to celebrate it gladdens my heart to be involved.

But I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of a ‘celebration of life’ becoming a lazy by-line for secular or civil funerals.  I see the phrase bandied about – sometimes in print and sometimes without much thought or insight – by funeral directors, celebrants and elsewhere.  But we don’t do lazy by-lines, do we?  We have a much more interesting role.  We meet people where they are, and much more importantly we make no assumptions about where that may lead us.

Have you examined some of the publicity material/information leaflets to which the bereaved are exposed?  Confident statements such as ‘I will help you create a ceremony which will celebrate your loved one’s life…..’   Isn’t that rather prescriptive?  And aren’t prescriptive notions what civil funerals, in particular, were conceived to counteract?  If we are going to put people in a box (literally and metaphorically) then let’s at least allow them to choose their own box and help to fashion it into something which actually suits them.

I’ve worked with nearly 700 families, and occasionally someone might say ‘we want a real celebration of mum’s life’.  They’ve heard the phrase, thought about it and mean what they say – and usually with good, sound reasons.  Sometimes, however, I get the sneaking feeling that they’ve heard that phrase and almost feel they should be saying it to me.  That’s the modern way, after all – we’ve chucked the vicar overboard, and this is what this civil malarkey is all about.  Celebration.

Well, no.  Not necessarily.  What about the many bereaved who have ambivalent or hateful feelings towards the deceased?  I went to visit a family a while ago, and the son’s opening words to me were ‘well, you might as well know the only reason we’re going to the funeral is to make sure that the old bastard’s dead.’  As I worked with the family over the next week or so, I could see he might have a point.  Their stated aim when I first met them was to pour their father’s ashes down the nearest drain.  I’m no magician.  We talked.  They were given a safe space to express themselves.  We fashioned a ceremony which even managed to acknowledge the one or two kinder moments that any of them could remember.  I hope that in 10, 20 years time, when they re-read the ceremony, they at least won’t be ashamed of what was enacted.  And possibly could even be proud of what they did.  

To have gone into that family’s front room with any preconceptions would have done them a grave disservice.  And how must such a family feel when they pick up an information leaflet, only to be told that a eulogy is central to a funeral, and that eulogy is a ‘celebration’?  Neither of which has to be true.

The reason I love my job so much is precisely this kind of variation in experience.  We help people find their way to saying whatever it is that needs expressing at THAT funeral.  It may be celebratory to the point that ideas for poetry, words of gratitude, story-telling, prayer and praise, dancing, singing, eating and drinking come pouring out.   It may be that only the hard-won clipped phrases, which feel like they’ve been chipped out of granite, can be elicited.  And anything in between, of course.  But, find the words we do, and it’s precisely that challenge which makes our job so interesting.  

So, a plea to fellow celebrants in particular.  Free yourself to the real purpose of what you do, and please shed the prescriptive wording and thinking.  You might surprise yourself.  

PS they didn’t pour him down the drain.

Uncle Arthur

12 July 2011
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, celebrants, ceremony

Posted by Ariadne

For an altar there was the chest of drawers in the corner by the window.  Flowers, candles, drawings and sea urchin shells collected from the beach.  The bedroom had turquoise walls or perhaps they were white and it’s just memory doing the decorating.  When everything was right and ready, I made my parents and 10 year old sister file in and stand solemnly bearing witness, hands folded.  I may have bossed them around further, but from this distance the details are hazy.  I spoke and they did as they were told and so we all said our goodbyes to Uncle Arthur.  I count this as my first service.  It was my 8th summer.  

Uncle Arthur had come to live with us after the death of his wife Dotty, my Father’s Aunt.   In his eighties, he wore a collar, tie and waistcoat even at weekends and had fought in the First World War.  I was 6, wore an eager expression most of the time and fought with tying my shoelaces.  We had plenty in common.   He taught me the names of garden birds, trained me in shoe-polishing, button-sewing and cigarette rolling.  We’d watch Thunderbirds, Dixon of Dock Green and Z cars together on a small black and white TV.  I’d play my recorder along to the Z Cars theme tune.   This would put him in a bad mood.  We’d cheer together for Mick McManus or Giant Haystacks on Grandstand wrestling – One-AH!  Two-AH!  Some days I’d tip out my felt pens and starting at either side of the paper, we’d create what he mysteriously termed a ‘joint effort’.  Abstracts mostly, in our early period.  

We were abroad on holiday when the news came of his death; he’d been staying with my grandparents in Wales and I have no idea what kind of funeral took place as we stood remembering him in the afternoon heat of another country. 

It’s now about 40 years later and I’m still a novice celebrant, having recently trained with Green Fuse.  It’s early days.  Days during which I have become no less exasperated with inevitably having to explain what ‘funeral celebrant’ means.  Need to work on that one.  Keep wanting to say ‘oh you know, fake vicar’ or ‘someone who dances at the graveside  – for cock’s sake what do you THINK it means?’  and it won’t do.  

Dealing with those who can’t understand – for the life of them! – why anyone would be interested in doing such a thing is another matter.  The Persistent Vegetative State would appear to be a lifestyle choice for some people.  For me, caring about death seems as obvious or as basic as caring about life.    It’s been pointed out that everyone dies, but not everyone lives.  Despite this, discussing the subject or even simply acknowledging its attendant practicalities can still mark you out as a bit weird.  Apparently.  Even in London.  

 I’m not a believer in the afterlife, or any other kind of life apart from the one here and now and at times even that one’s too much.  I’m hugely drawn to the ideas put forward by Irvin Yalom in Staring at the Sun.  And surely everyone’s entitled to believe whatever they damn well please –  I love the fact that there’s no right answer and sort of expect everyone to defend their own views as robustly as I’ll defend mine.  Speak as if you’re right, listen as if you’re wrong, as Charles Cowling said to me at the London Funeral Exhibition recently.  I’m rubbish at listening as if I’m wrong, but it’s good advice.  I may add it to my To Do list.    

The Work of the People

6 July 2011
Charles
21 Comments
Categories: celebrants, Religious funerals

By Vale

Some words seem problematic for the secularist. There was a good to-and-fro recently about ‘ritual’ on the blog a while ago and, in Funerals Without God, Jane Wilson says (a little sniffily to my mind) that Humanists talk about ‘ceremonies’ rather than ‘services’ because ceremonies are about celebration and mutual support while ‘service’ merely implies something done for God.

‘Service’ is one way in which the old word liturgy is translated and, if ‘service’ alarms the secular cats, liturgy puts their ears flat and their fur on end. As far as I can make out there are (at least) two reasons for this. The first is that the word has always been a religious expression. The second is that liturgy implies a fixed order of service: words said and actions done in a prescribed way. And, of course, we celebrants aspire to the ideal of unique and individually tailored services.

I don’t want to spend too much time on the religious objections. It matters, but the argument that religion has – for far too long – been allowed to colonise and define what is important and intrinsic to each of us, or that part of our job here should be to insist on reclaiming it as a right (a sort of Arab Spring of the spirit), can wait for another day.

No, I want to think about liturgy as something that could be important to take into account in the ceremonies I (we) have been creating.

Sure, we do wonderful things – flowers, doves, candles, music and motorbikes – but, if we are honest, aren’t these memorable because they are the exception? I’m not saying that our ceremonies aren’t individual, that we don’t try to tailor what we do, or that the elaborateness of the ceremony is any guide to the depth of feeling but…but… is it just me or does everyone get tired sometimes of the sound of their own voice? Are we all sweating over words that try to bring out something more of the meaning and value of the ceremony we are creating? Do others lie awake thinking of ways to engage people more in what is being enacted in front of them?

Liturgy is also translated as ‘the work of the people’ in the sense that, in religious services, God is asked to do something, but the congregation are expected to work too – through prayer, repentance, and all the regular religious ducking and dancing. In this sense Liturgy is less about words than the expectation that, when you are in a service, you are expected to do something too. Quakers sitting in silence waiting for the spirit to move them are practising a liturgy.

Of course the religions have this nailed down now. People who take part in religious services know what is expected of them. Are we letting people down by not expecting ‘work’ from them in our ceremonies? They aren’t services for God but shouldn’t celebrations also be services for the support and comfort of the people gathered together?

Isn’t there work to be done?

Sage endorsement?

4 July 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: celebrants

By Jonathan Taylor

From ‘Why We Die’, by Dr Richard Steinpach.

Arthur Koestler (Der Mensch:  Irrlaufer der Evolution) says:

“ ‘Self-assertion versus Integration… exists in biology, psychology, ecology, and wherever we encounter complex hierarchical systems, thus practically everywhere we look.  In the living animal or the living plant each part must assert its individuality just as in the social system, because otherwise the organism would lose its structure and disintegrate.

‘But at the same time each part must bow to the demand of the whole.  In a healthy organism and a healthy society the two tendencies are balanced at all levels of the hierarchy.’

“Quite a few people believe that the final goal of our path is Nirvana, the complete dissolution of our ego into an all-embracing power.  The mistaken idea that the ego is something deserving of destruction could only arise because here, on this low earthly plane, we know it for the most part only as selfishness, as egotism….. therefore, let us not derive the task assigned to us in the order of creation from the faulty current state, but from the healthy desired stated… this order of creation is so perfect that cooperating in service within it means, at the same time, the greatest personal advantage.”

So the good dokter is incidentally implying that the personalized funeral is the only right course even in the service of religion.  And that therefore the religious boys should butt out and let the celebrants take over the job that religion is doing so badly and so misguidedly.

On Being a Funeral Celebrant

16 May 2011
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: celebrants

Here I am, somehow standing in for this person
we have all gathered to honour and farewell.
I have listened to family and friends,
asked questions to elicit the fullest picture,
the roundest sense of the life at the centre of our ritual.

And here I am, holding it all,
the balance of dignity and lightness,
truth and compassion, sorrow and hopefulness.
In the face of death I am alive, fully present,
every cell seeming to take in and give out what is needed.

Who am I serving in this cherished role?
I am serving the deceased,
standing in the midst of her family,
listening on her behalf,
open to the shades and the nuances.

I am serving family members,
each different in relationship and perspective,
each creating their piece of the remembering.

I am serving friends, colleagues,
anyone who needs to mark an ending,
to say goodbye,
to use the efficacy of ceremony
to be with their regretting and their gratitude.

I am serving the professionals –
the funeral director,
crematorium and cemetery staff,
musicians and bearers
by attending to the details
so the process is orderly and timely.

I serve healing,
for a funeral that is fitting and meaningful
and invites participation
sits well in our bones,
and the journey back to wholeness can begin.

And over and around all this there dwells a larger picture,
a sense that we are held, each one of us,
in something sacred,
and far beyond our knowing.

Margie McCallum

Funerals are for…

10 May 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, celebrants, funeral trends, Humanists, Secular approaches to death

Four comments here from this article in yesterday’s Guardian.

Organising the funeral for my 17 year old son, who died in an accident overseas in Sept 2008, was made vastly easier by the wonderfully kind funeral director and an equally wonderful C of E Canon – a Canon whose first words on meeting us were to offer us the keys to his Church so we could go in, lock the door behind us, and curse God.

Yes, funerals are for the living but there is virtue and comfort across generations in familiar rituals. We sang no hymns apart from the Lord is My Shepherd. But we said prayers and despite my rage and despair I said them with heartfelt sincerity. My daughter and I spoke about the boy we loved so much. The Canon gave a fiery and angry sermon of amazing power on about the cruelty of loss and the pain of grief. The rest of the music consisted of Max’s favourite songs. We had 500 people at the crem, standing room only, many of them stunned and tearful teenagers who couldn’t believe what they were a part of. The funeral service was just right because it was mostly about him but also about those of us left behind to cope with his loss.
My real point is that it’s all very well to intellectualise and pontificate about these things but when it comes to deciding on a funeral service we must go with what our heart tells us, not our head, and we must remember that like the other great set-pieces of our lives the rituals exist because they express a deeper meaning than we sometimes realise.

 

Over the years, I’ve been asked to recite eulogies at Atheist, Jewish and Salvationist funerals.

The approach I used on all these occasions was more or less the same; fully acknowledging the grief of the bereaved, offering the solace of friendship and respect and duly celebrating the lives of the departed. In all cases, there was a lot worth celebrating.

Following the very dignified, secular funeral service of a dear and respected friend and mentor, a formerly Catholic Atheist, I felt there was something missing, if not for him then for me.

So, being Jewish, I went home and recited Kaddish for him and continued to do so for a year. Given his tolerant indulgence of religiosity , I can’t imagine that my old pal would have objected.

It was my way of thanking whatever forces may or may not shape our destinies for the apparent serendipity of friendship.

 

I think the divine spirit can be just as much in so called ‘secular’ words and music as in so called ‘religious’ words and music.
to say something is ‘god free’ doesn’t mean that god is not present. I think we try to separate the ‘spiritual things’ from the ‘non-spiritua’l things creating a dualism that isn’t really present in our world

 

Quoting: ‘At my age, I go to more funerals than weddings nowadays. What dismays me about them (except in the case of humanist occasions, which have proved excellent celebrations of life, not death) is the way the person officiating is always a priest, and the true object of the funeral is a recruiting pitch for the church. The person concerned is forgotten as promises of eternal life for those present are made – providing, of course…’

I understand where you are coming from, really I do but I wonder why – if the deceased or their family, have chosen to have their funeral service taken in a church, anyone would be surprised that a priest is taking the service – in the CofE, a licenced Reader may also take the service. My husband is a Vicar in the CofE and as such, has a responsibility to ensure that certain protocols are adhered to within that church – the church belonging not to him, but to the Parish. The other point that I can speak of from personal experience is that when my husband is arranging the funeral with relatives of the deceased, he asks if they would like the service to have a evangelistic aspect or not; many times people say yes. If people say no, my husband obviously respects their wishes and at all times, at least in our church, the service is about celebrtating the life of the deceased and what that person meant to their family and friends. Christians believe in an afterlife; why would this belief not be a part of a Christian funeral – indeed it is part of the liturgy. Nobody is forced to have a funeral service in a church.

By contrast, my daughter – not a church-goer and a Guardian reader to boot, went to a humanist service and was appalled at the ‘advertising’ for atheism. It can cut both ways.

Are you a lightning rod?

3 February 2011
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: celebrants, Humanists

The last time I directed you to the Hearth of Mopsus blog you were mostly pretty beastly about the writer, a clerk in holy orders who has the cure of souls in Swanvale Halt. Here’s what you said.

He’s actually a bit of a sweetie, and if you like reading clerics’ diaries (I do), then you might even want to follow him (as I do).

A year ago (I’ve been trawling his archive) he wrote this about funerals:

This week I’ve taken two big funerals at the crematorium, big enough to fill the chapel and some, attenders standing all round the sides and down the central aisle, and out into the narthex. The first was for a woman who died of an aggressive and nasty cancer in her forties, and naturally there was a lot of emotion. The second was for a man who was also only in his sixties, and carried a certain amount of intra-family tension; he was also a member of the ambulance service and so the local branch’s banner was carried ahead of the coffin and there was an honour guard of boys and girls in green Service overalls.

I was exhausted at the end of both these services. I feel increasingly that the priest acts as a spiritual lightning rod on these occasions, and that all the emotion present ends up channelled through you. The size of the funeral makes no difference: I’ve presided at big funerals where that sense of strain has not been present at all. Nor do tears, on their own, seem to be the deciding factor: some tearful funerals I’ve taken haven’t been charged in this way at all. There is something more subtle happening. It would be interesting to see whether humanist funeral celebrants have the same experience.

Do leave a comment either here or at the Hearth of Mopsus blog. I take humanists to include celebrants of all stripes.

Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye

5 January 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: Books, celebrants, ceremony, Dead people's rights, End-of-life issues, Formality vs informality, funeral plans, Good books, Plan your own funeral

Me and the missus are getting down to some serious death planning. There’s no best time of life for doing this, of course, so long as you get it done afore ye croak. And the more I think about it, the more clearly I can see that it’s not an activity whose end result is, phew, done it. No, I think that once you start you need to, want to, keep at it, continuously revising, adding, elaborating. Which is why I’d now have all children start making death plans at the age of 8, and do something useful in their PSHE lessons. When’s too soon to introduce Mortality to the curriculum?

The process is going to be interesting and tedious. We are impelled by necessity mostly, of course, or thoughtfulness to put a positive spin on it: we don’t want to be remembered by higgledepiggledness and fly-blown filing systems. So there are the who-gets-what decisions to make, the legal stuff, and also the horrible physical phase towards the end to strategise – the advance decision to refuse treatment, powers of attorney, then, when we’re done, organs, tissues and carcass disposal. And that’s not all.

Our relicts will want to commemorate us, we reckon, in their own way, and we shall encourage them to think about the myriad ways they can do that, giving not a fig for convention. I really don’t know that any of those ‘what he/she would have wanted’ considerations apply when you’re dead, bar the religious/superstitious ones, and we don’t have any of those.

So we’ll leave it to our relicts to decide if they want or need to have funerals for us. That’ll probably depend a lot on the nature and duration of our separate demises and how they feel about us after we’ve been wheeled away with a sheet over our heads – a matter, for us, of just deserts.

What, after all, is the value of a formal secular funeral shorn of all theological rationale? It is but a symbolic farewell event and also a commemorative event. Well, there are lots of ways of saying a one-off last goodbye, just as there are uncountable ways of commemorating someone. In any case, commemoration is ongoing, lifelong, both solitary and communal. It is about contemplation and recollection with added celebration or denunciation. We start doing that when people who mean something to us are still alive. When they’re dead it’s the type and degree of missing that makes all the difference – or the type and degree of animosity.

It’s a tendency of secular funerals to try to get too much done. Done, I suspect, and dusted. Some funerals resemble holiday suitcases, bulging, straining at the zip, bursting with biography and favourite tunes. Secular funerals are best when they’re not busy, when they’re not trying to get everything tidily, comprehensively bundled; when they’re reflective and contemplative and touch on the essence of somebody. Most of them need to leave more out.

Having in mind that when the history of the world is written neither my wife nor I will get a mention, not even in a footnote, we don’t feel a great debt to posterity. It’ll be nice, though, to leave behind letters to people. Nice and necessary.

Where my two nieces are concerned my exemplar is going to be Richard Hoggart’s Memoir for our Grandchildren, published in Between Two Worlds. It’s not a grandiloquent memoir. Far from it. It is an account by a working class orphan of those members of his family that he knew in childhood. It’s family history. It tells his grandchildren where and who they came from – it’s genetic geography. And it’s important, because what we learn about blood relatives tells us a lot about ourselves and it’s necessary knowledge, as any adopted person will attest. Hoggart writes beautifully in a plain, objective style and I recommend this book to you.

Hoggart writes formally and chronologically. This morning I stumbled on a less formal sort of memoir, the nang seu ngam sop. Nang seu ngam sop? The traditional Thai funeral ceremony book. In the words of the Wall Street Journal:

In Thai funeral tradition, books about the deceased are printed and distributed to people who come to pay their respects. Some are thin pamphlets, others, large volumes. The practice, mostly for those in the middle or upper classes, gained popularity in the 1880s and reached its peak in the mid 1900s. Within its pages are poems, personal writings — and recipes.

I really like the idea of this sort of ragbag miscellany. A fine commemorative and biographical item easily bashed out on a home printer. Greatly to be preferred to the sound of a celebrant revving up to 180 words a minute then blurting “XXXX was born on…”

The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away

20 December 2010
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: celebrants, Humanists, Secular approaches to death

Here’s an extract from the blog of a religious minister (clerk in holy orders, he terms himself). I like his rigour. Very bracing.

You wouldn’t expect me to enjoy humanist funeral services very much. Perhaps ‘enjoyment’ isn’t the right word for funerals anyway, but you know what I mean. I’ve been to a couple and always find them ‘thin’ compared to Christian funerals … But what I most dislike came in front of me on Wednesday. That afternoon I took a funeral service at the crematorium and noticed a folder on the table where I was putting my things. This turned out to be the notes left by the officiant at a humanist funeral earlier in the day. Usually humanist funerals spend the vast bulk of their time waxing lyrical about the heroic achievements of the deceased, but there was no trace of a biography in the notes, so I assume somebody else had read a tribute or something of that sort. Instead there was a passage from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and some heartwarming statements along the following lines.

For those of us who hold that the individual life concludes with death, it is nevertheless not the end … Arnold may be gone, but he lives on in your memories.

It is nevertheless not the end? Yes it is … As for Arnold ‘living on’ in his loved ones’ memories, no he doesn’t. They may have memories of him, but those memories are not ‘him living’, they’re a set of synaptic responses in the brains of those who shared some aspect of his life when it was a life which will themselves decay and come to an end.

What we have here is an attempt to accommodate through linguistic sleight-of-hand what the officiant believes, or doesn’t believe, with the perceived need to comfort Arnold’s family and friends with the thought that in some way he ‘lives on’. Shouldn’t atheists be brave enough to combat this weak-mindedness? Or perhaps it doesn’t really matter?

Read the entire post here.