ceremony

Doing the rite thing

4 June 2013
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: ceremony, Ritual

On Monday, in response to this:

… we get to carry on without the benefit of a formal ceremony or other ritual observance after near-bereavement experiences like the breakdown of a relationship, or redundancy, or a child leaving home. We resolve those privately.

Kathryn Edwards wrote:

… from my ritualist perspective … how is it that we stumble through quasi-bereavement sorrows such as job-losses and relationship break-ups WITHOUT rituals?

It appears that she may have Harvard on her side. This won’t surprise anyone who knows her. 

Behavioral scientist Michael I. Norton became interested in mourning rituals after reading Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, which describes elaborate ways that parents, spouses, children, and friends dealt with the massive loss of soldiers during the American Civil War. It got him to wondering whether rituals were merely a traditional part of the grieving process, or whether they truly alleviated grief.

“We see in every culture—and throughout history—that people who perform rituals report feeling better,” says Norton, an associate professor in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School. “But we didn’t know if the ritual caused the healing.”

Norton did some experiments and found that rituals indeed alleviate and reduce grief, even among people who don’t inherently believe in the efficacy of rituals.

In one experiment, the researchers set out to determine whether rituals led to an increased sense of control, and whether that sense of control served to alleviate grief. To that end, they asked 247 individuals … to write about either the death of a loved one or the death of a relationship. Some participants were asked to include a description of a ritual they performed after suffering the loss; others were not.

Norton and Gino were surprised to discover that the majority of the recounted rituals were neither religious nor communal. Rather, they were personal, private, and occasionally angry—but in a controlled way. 

After the writing exercise, all the participants completed a questionnaire, using a numbered scale to recall how much they felt out of control after the loss, as well as the extent to which they still grieved the person. Those who had described a personal ritual also reported feeling both more in control and less aggrieved after the writing exercise, indicating the power of merely reflecting on ritualistic behavior.

If you’re still interested, do read the whole article. One of Norton’s conclusions, in particular, is vitally important for all students of funerary rituals:

Observing a ritual is not nearly as powerful as performing a ritual.

Whole article here.

We need no more out of town death malls

26 April 2013
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: ceremony, crematoria

Q: What’s Big Money to do? The industry big beasts, Dignity and Co-op, can’t make scale pay except by hiking prices (this may be incompetence). And funeral plans are beginning to look… well, decidedly subprime. 

A: Burn, baby, burn!

Yes, buying and building crematoria is the Next Big Thing in Funeralworld. Already we’re in the midst of our first nasty public spat. Mercia Crematorium Developments is in a ruckus over plans to build a crematorium at Hackington, Kent. Nearby Barham crematorium, owned by Westerleigh, is allegedly priming protestors, including  five undertakers and the Dean of Reculver, to abort the development. You can read about it here. There’s going to be more of this sort of thing according to senior analysts here at the GFG, just you watch. 

Memo to Big Money: Building crematoria is next best thing to feeding money into a blast furnace. Why? Because the way we do things now is bonkers, and when something’s bonkers someone’s bound to notice eventually, and when they do notice your bottom will fall out and we’ll all look back on the way we did things as the Age of Stupid. 

A funeral venue with an incinerator attached is nuts. More of the same won’t help us out of our present problem, which is: 

We’ve got too many incinerators and not enough venues. 

Our incinerators don’t work hard enough because they only function for an average of 6 or so hours a day, 250 days out of 365. The way to fix this is to house incinerators in nice wee buildings in around an acre or so of nicely landscaped grounds serving a number of funeral venues and operating round the clock all the days of the week. This would bring down the cost of cremation hugely. Add staffing costs to the raw cost of cremating someone — presently less than twenty quid for gas, leccy and reagent — plus the capital cost of the equipment, and you’re probably looking at something under £100. 

Okay, but what about the venue shortage, you cry. 

We’ve got more of them than we think. All manner of public and private spaces in the hearts of our commmunities are under-occupied from village halls and cricket pavilions to churches.

Yes, churches. Lovely things. We’ve got thousands of them, all echoingly underoccupied. Except that:

In Aberdeen, every Friday, Imam Ahmed Megharbi leads Muslim worshippers in their lunchtime prayers inside St John’s Episcopal Church in the city centre. His mosque had become too small for all his worshippers, so the incumbent, the Rev Isaac Poobalan, invited them in. Imam Megharbi and his flock seem wholly at ease with the Christian inconography all round them. You can read the full story here(£)

Let’s applaud the C of E for its ecumenical spirit and, at the same time, let us recall the words of CS Lewis: “A church is the only organization that exists primarily for the benefit of non-members.”

So it is that, down in Slough, an interesting thing has happened to the local C of E school. 75 per cent of its pupils are now Muslim, so it is conducting its assemblies without Christian hymns and has allocated separate prayer rooms to boys and girls. The headteacher, Paul McAteer,  says: “The Church of England describes itself as a faith for all faiths … Our assemblies consider humanitarian and spiritual issues that concern everyone. We don’t have it as part of our philosophy to do assemblies based on the Bible.”

Might our churches therefore be prepared to extend a welcome to all those who presently huddle outside the crem waiting for their 20 mins-worth?

Well, pretty much every funeral in Britain considers ‘humanitarian and spiritual issues’. Pretty much every funeral expresses spirituality of some kind. An awful lot have a Lord’s Prayer and The Lord’s My Shepherd. If the elastic of the C of E stretches to embrace worshippers of another creed, it seems already to have stretched quite far enough to embrace the troubled Vale and his ilk. Might it be agreeable to inviting them all to come on in and take all the time they like — and, if you want, the vicar can pop in at the end and dispense some juju?

I think it’s time we asked them. 

De mortuis nil nisi bonum

16 April 2013
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, celebrants, ceremony, Etiquette, funeral customs, funeral directors, Personalisation

Pace the spirit of the age, a celebration-of-life funeral does not fit everybody. Nasty, bad, horrible people die, too. We refrain from holding celebration-of-death funerals for them, preferring instead to curtail, allude and acknowledge, to a degree, often disguising our meaning between the lines. Difficult people die, too. They often mean different things to different people. As any celebrant or undertaker will tell you, they’re possibly the hardest of the lot. 

Mrs Thatcher was one of the latter. In the shadow of the old idea that one mustn’t speak ill of the dead, there’s been a lot of talk about what we may and what we mustn’t say about her just now, before she’s had her funeral. 

In the Independent, the philosopher AC Grayling wrote this:

Why should one not speak as one did when the person was alive? The story of a prominent individual’s life cannot be complete without the truth about what people felt at the moment of summing up, whether it is in mourning or rejoicing. Let us say what we think, and be frank about it: death does not confer privileges.

Respect for the dead is a hangover from a past in which it was believed that the dead might retain some active influence on the living, and that one might re-encounter them either in this life or a putative next life.

Future historians will be glad that people have begun to speak frankly of their estimations of major figures when they die. Frank opinions explain far more than the massaged and not infrequently hypocritical views expressed in obsequies [he means eulogies, of course].

The democratic value of frank expression of opinions about public figures and public matters should not be hostage to squeamishness or false ideas of respect – let us respect ourselves instead, and say what we truly feel.

In The Times, Libby Purves responded thus:

In November 1990 a young Quaker was staying with us. He was even more anti-Thatcher than me, but as the news of her fall from office came, he took George Fox’s advice to “walk cheerfully across the world, answering that of God in every one” and muttered unironically: “I hope she’ll be happy.”

The nastiness of the past few days on the streets, online and sometimes in print raises a bigger question about our attitude to death itself. Traditionally it “pays all debts” and you do not insult the newly deceased at least until after the funeral and family shock, when history may claim its due. To dance in the streets when a dictator falls is understandable, so is the soldier who, fresh from extreme danger, high-fives at a successful shot. But we don’t let the soldier urinate on the corpse. We bury enemies decently. We acknowledge the fellowship of mortality.

For the modish entrepreneurial philosopher Professor A. C. Grayling, this is nonsense. “Do we owe the dead respect, even if we disagreed with them?” he pipes scornfully. For him the Bitch-Is-Dead celebrations are “understandable and justifiable” and “death does not confer privileges”. Respect is “a hangover from a past in which it was believed that the dead might retain some active influence on the living”. He likens it to Chinese ancestor worship. “Honouring the dead is not only a form of remembrance but propitiation.”

Concluding, Professor Grayling condemns “false” respect and smirks: “Let us respect ourselves instead.” There lies all the smug, narrow, self-regarding, inhumane, mechanistic aridity of atheist academe. Thank goodness he’s still alive, so I can say so straightaway.

Finally, on Facebook, and not à propos Thatcher, the celebrant Lol Owen wrote this:

I’ve written services for some right swine. For my own father’s service, who definitely had many faults, there was nothing to be gained from disclosing any of them. It would in no way validate our feelings towards him, and only diminish him in the eyes of others. Those who know the truth will gain nothing from shouting it from the rooftops. Rather, they will look small people.

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral

5 March 2013
Charles
22 Comments
Categories: celebrants, ceremony

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

— Aaron Freeman “You Want A Physicist To Speak at your Funeral” Source

The eloquence of silence

16 October 2012
Charles
14 Comments
Categories: burial, ceremony, funeral customs

Posted by Georgina Pugh

On Friday the autumn sun was just too much – I had to leave my cave like dwelling and head out somewhere you can touch the sky. On the advice of a friend I found myself at the edge of the North York Moors, just past the aptly named ‘surprise view’ at the village of Gillamoor, searching for an old Quaker Burial Ground. In the 1600s non-conformist churches were persecuted and not permitted to bury their dead in consecrated ground so Quakers used private land.

Lowna was used as a cemetery for Quakers between 1675 and 1837 – I guess even after the ban was lifted, the Friends still preferred their lovely corner of peace as the final resting place for their earthly remains.

The burial ground has well and truly returned to nature but remains defined by dry stone walls just high enough to create a space that feels gently enclosed and yet part of the woodlands that surround it. A beck flows nearby. There is an old bench on which you can sit (so long as you are happy to ignore the ‘no entry- falling branches’ health and safety warning sign) and soak up the peace and quietly blessed atmosphere that in my experience always pervades Quaker spaces.

It was quite easy to imagine the Friends all those generations ago, quietly and reverently carrying the bodies of their dead to Lowna and laying them down into the earth – perhaps a prayer if anyone felt moved to speak one, otherwise the rich silence saying all that needed to be said.

I have often mused how afraid we are of silence these days –I used to teach a meditation class at a boarding school in Surrey that was originally established with an hour of silence enshrined in each day. The headmaster described how over the years the ‘Frensham Silence’ had shrunk, being slowly squeezed out by various (I’m sure noble) activities until it was completely absent in the modern school. This seemed an interesting example of how silence has perhaps lost its value in modern society – it’s just not considered productive enough.

I am curious to know of others’ views/experience of weaving silence into modern funerals. I sometimes suggest to a family they might like to have some brief silence as part of a funeral ceremony and sometimes they agree.

Sometimes those silences feel natural and rich and sometimes you can feel people are just not comfortable with it……. Personally I love words and music but I also love quiet and instinctively I feel it has its part to play in a ‘good’ funeral but the whys and hows – I have my thoughts but it would be lovely to hear yours.

Here is the ‘surprise view‘.

Mozart v Rogers & Hammerstein

16 September 2012
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: ceremony, music

I was at a funeral for a much loved gentleman last week – he wasn’t into opera at all, but had heard Mozart on The Shawshank Redemption and loved it. He was a great believer in daring to dream. The whole room was surprised when we played an excerpt from the Marriage of Figaro as the curtains closed. ( Sull’aria, Che soave zeffiretto – find Renee Flemming on YouTube for a pure version)

We listened to the aria, then I read these words from the film script (Red narrating after the song in Shawshank Redemption)

“I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singin’ about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I like to think they were singin’ about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away. And for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free.”

We concluded: ‘When you are in a grey place, when the colour leaves your world as you lose someone so precious and you feel trapped in your grief, wondering how this pain of your aching hearts can possibly ease…. hold on to the fact that you now carry them permanently inside your hearts, memories and dreams. Talk about those dreams, remember those happy memories and for the briefest of moments – every now and then you will be free.’

As a young man he had dreamed of having his own little boat. When he finally got his boat he named it ‘Happy Talk’ and that’s the song he chose to have playing as we all left.

“You’ve got to have a dream, if you don’t have a dream… how you gonna make a dream come true?”

Posted by Evelyn

Temporary temples

20 August 2012
Charles
14 Comments
Categories: ceremony

Posted by Rupert Callender

If the sun shines in between the deluge, the next few days should see armies of combine harvesters moving across the land, particularly in Wiltshire, the UK’s breadbasket, bringing in the harvest, and bringing this year’s crop circle season to a close, too.

After a slow start it has built to be a fine year as the delicate relationship between the people who make them, the people who interpret them and the people who, well, consume them continues to hold– just.

This most misunderstood of art forms has followed a pattern for over twenty years now, with the beginning of the summer seeing simple designs which build in complexity as the season progresses. There are two main reasons for this. The vast geometric patterns look much better incised into mature wheat, the edges are crisper and, from the air, the flattened golden crop reflects the light back with a picturesque metallic gleam, but mainly because the lengthening nights give the teams of up to twelve people much more time for their work, and work it certainly is.

This one below is state of the art, a vast Buddhist mandala, a never ending knot obviously made by one of the best teams in the world, probably the notorious Circlemakers, loathed by the croppies, the name given to the people who are certain that the circles are made by something other than human, but also controversial within the secretive community of artists who make them because of their commercial work — logos for Mitsubishi, Shredded Wheat, and idents for TV companies.

Controversial they may be, but nobody denies they are accomplished, and this exquisite circle shows all of the skill and breathtaking beauty that is their hallmark. They are not alone at the top of their game, but there aren’t many teams that can pull off something like this. Few have done as much to further the game, endlessly pushing the boundaries of what is considered possible, giving the researchers the reasons they need to insist on outside forces.

Of course the croppies view them as almost satanic. They believe that if these teams exist at all, who of course keep a low profile, because any circle that has a confirmed authorship immediately loses any power it has, then they are malicious disinformation stooges of some shadowy military elite, determined to keep ordinary folk from the awesome truth of about the circles. Nothing could be further from the truth. True, deception is necessary to imbue the circles with their extraordinary power, qualities that can have visitors swooning, or feeling nauseous, or being spontaneously healed of longstanding injuries, but their impulses are less to fool than to create a liminal space where odd things can happen, and do with spooky regularity.

In the criminally undersold book The Field Guide, the art, history and philosophy of crop circle making, published by Strange Attractor, who also publish the fifth edition of The Natural Death Handbook, author and circlemaker Rob Irving explains that what people are having when they enter a crop circle is a reaction to a work of art, but because they don’t know it’s art, they attribute the emotions it produces to something else, often with a strong spiritual subtext, and this is what gives the circles their enduring hook. They create transcendence, a simple and uplifting emotional surge that can feel like being initiated into a huge secret, a revelation that incredible things happen, hidden in plain view.

In between the tired and dew damp teams leaving a circle just as the sky is lightening, and the first wide eyed croppie entering the design, something profound happens which tells us more about things like homeopathy, belief, peer pressure and religious experience than almost anything else in our modern world. It is an extraordinary experiential game, a sociologist’s dream, the echo of our own curiousity that has changed lives for better and worse and significantly shaped our modern culture in the short time since a UFO obsessed nature artist persuaded his drinking partner to spend their Friday night after the pub making indentations in the corn, partly to fool the world into thinking a spaceship had landed, but with unmistakable devotional undertones, an attempt to call down the aliens he longed to meet.

What an incredible phenomenon to create from nothing, for camera batteries do fail in them, odd earth lights do zoom about the corridors of wheat, synchronicites build until it makes your ears pop, you really do feel like the New Jerusalem is just behind a veil in front of you, and with a bit of courage and faith you can pop through it.

All well and good I hear you cry, but what relevance to funerals does this have?

Well, for me, crop circles have played a profound part in shaping what I believe and, more importantly, how I believe it.

When my mother was dying in the mid nineties and I was at my most shaky, veering between a nervous and a hedonistic breakdown, crop circles provided a neat religious ledge to cling to, so unlike the reassurances of a Christian afterlife that failed to comfort me as when, as a seven year old, I had to process my father’s death. I so wanted to believe that the behind the circles was something amazing; aliens, Gaia, interdimensional beings dripping with spiritual resonance, and for several years that opportunity flourished. Some of the weirdest experiences of my life happened around crop circles.

Luckily for me, my gradual acceptance that they were actually made by extremely clever artists, interacting with and imbedded in the community they were ‘fooling’, didn’t plunge me into despair or denial as it has so many. If anything it deepened my interest. It also finally cut out a way of fluffy thinking that had been keeping me in childhood, an infantile yearning for cosmic intervention that reaches back to ideas of the Rapture and that permeates conspiracy culture. Not everything has fifty shades of grey, sometimes there is a right answer and a wrong answer, and it feels good to choose.

But at the heart of the phenomenon is a surprisingly pure centre that isn’t about deception or solving a riddle but, instead, is about making a space to step outside of our lives for a moment, the creation of a sacred space from scratch. One of the photographers involved in the scene, part of the multi stranded, multi million pound industry that has evolved alongside the phenomenon, calls them ‘temporary temples’, and this term neatly sums it all up. The circle makers are creating the space for people to have their own religious experience, a simple and profound act of creation that allows the believer to superimpose their own belief system on top. They are a spiritual Rorschach test, reflecting back what we want them too.

Hopefully, there is nothing deceptive about the way we create our funeral ceremonies; indeed we pride ourselves on creating entirely transparent rituals that rely on nothing more than honesty and connection. Nonetheless, we try to create an atmosphere in which people feel unexpectedly moved by the feeling of the ritual, a sense of profound connection to each other, and to the reality of the situation that comes from standing together in a temporary temple, held up by nothing more than love and each other.  Humanity make circles – of stone, or wheat or flesh – and in the middle of these circles something wonderful can happen, even if it’s just our fellow human beings finally coming into focus.

What a smashing funeral!

16 August 2012
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: ceremony

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

I’m revisiting a post by Charles in January about whether a funeral can ever accommodate the venting of chaotic feelings generated by death. If so, what behaviour can be ‘officially’ appropriated: formalised wailing, hurling plates against a wall, a punch bag in the vestibule, or even a bout of fisticuffs between mourners? (I hope Lyra Mollington can one day give us an eye-witness account, from a safe distance).

Regulars Rupert Callender and Jenny Uzzell contribute differing takes on this splendid debate. Ru recalls witnessing a woman shout down angrily at her sister in her grave, describing it as a transformative moment. He concludes it would be healthy to find a way to integrate violent emotions into our rituals.

Jenny, while agreeing unrepressed emotion is cathartic, questions whether it could ever be built into ritual in our decorous culture, saying outbursts need to be spontaneous, and ‘bottom up rather than top down’.

It’s nigh on impossible to create a ceremony that accommodates the uncontrollable, but we should show compassionate tolerance of venting individuals, whether they interrupt a service, or start a drunken scrap at the wake.

I don’t have personal experience of fighting but my best friend at school was a first-rate pugilist. His duels were organised affairs. Insults would be passed in the cloisters between lessons, and a time would then be agreed for he and his adversary to meet behind the pavilion, where a noisy crowd would gather for the ensuing thrill of black eyes and bloody noses. I held my friend’s jacket and cheered him on, praying he wouldn’t break a tooth.

I also recall leaving Westminster Cathedral after mass to be confronted by a large crowd of Muslims chanting that we must die. It was a legal, ‘free speech’ demo, kettled by our boys in blue, and triggered by Pope Benedict XVI’s 2006 Regensburg speech in which he freely quoted a 13th century Byzantine Christian emperor in conversation with a Persian guest: the erudite Christian emperor politely argued with his educated Muslim friend that spreading the faith through violence was unreasonable, and therefore displeasing to God. The academic Holy Father’s allusion to this historical record was deemed apostasy by 21st century fundamentalists.

A brawl in the Cathedral piazza that morning might have been a craic, but only if weapons were banned, partakers were consenting and we all shook hands afterwards. But the peace-protecting police refused to take such a risk, rightly distrusting human nature to know where to draw the line.

One acceptable invitation to anarchic behaviour at civil funerals is rock music: aggressive dancing in the aisle with The Clash’s White Riot on the sound system, perhaps? In my last blog, I compared Terry Jacks’ drippy Seasons in the Sun, with a greatly energised cover version by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. Hearing it reminded me of sweaty air guitar sessions in my study at school (as well as the fights): The Ramones’ Teenage Lobotomy, anyone?

However, totally letting go through dance beyond the age of overactive hormones can be embarrassing. I’ll be sticking with Abide With Me and Ave Maria.

As you get older your friends start to die.

14 August 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: ashes, burial at sea, ceremony

Posted by Sue Gill

We’ve been to some truly awful funerals and I’m sure we’re not alone in that. Sometimes the ceremonies were healing, but more often they were formulaic and irrelevant, and we left feeling sometimes angry, sometimes guilty, frequently in despair.

That’s what compelled us to write the Dead Good Funerals Book, to offer a no-nonsense yet respectful view of what an inspiring funeral ceremony might be. A guide for someone faced with arranging a funeral for the first time. To start with we unpick a traditional funeral and show how it is stuck in the Victorian mode. We spell out how much we can do away with and still be legal and dignified, to leave space to create a funeral that is personal and distinctive.

I get asked, therefore, what plans do I have for my own funeral.

I don’t feel I am at the prescriptive stage yet, but now we live in the Beach House – a wooden house on stilts directly above the shoreline of Morecambe Bay – I have become increasingly aware of the weather and tides, the extensive horizon, and this has had a major effect on me. At the moment I feel I would like my ashes to be dispersed into the vast expanse of this bay, probably using an urn that dissolves in seawater, which could be placed way out on the bed of the sea at low tide.

I imagine people walking out at low tide and holding a service or ceremony of farewell out there. My grandkids would doubtless build something or make a garden from what they had picked up on the way out – shells, feathers, sticks and stones – to decorate the space for the urn to be placed in. Live music too from the Fox Family Band – that would be a last request Once they had walked back to shore and the tide had turned, within an hour the urn would have dissolved and off I would go.

A text that really resonates for me is from John F. Kennedy’s book The Sea which he wrote in 1962:  ‘ I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea. I think it’s because we all came from the sea. It is an extremely interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean. And therefore we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean, and when we go back to the sea we are going back from whence we came.’

Sue Gill was born in Yorkshire and educated in Hull and Cambridge. After working as Head Teacher of the smallest village school in remote North Yorkshire and lecturing in Bradford Art College Sue evolved to be: an author, performer, secular celebrant, cook, saxophonist, truck driver, co founder of Welfare State International (1968-2006) and grandmother. After WSI was archived she was, for one year, Director of Ceremonies for Lanternhouse International. From 1998-2006 course leader for WSI’s groundbreaking MA in Cultural Performance created in partnership with Bristol University. Honorary Fellow of the University of Cumbria. Invited to be Celebrant for the Ceremony of Remembrance for Great Ormond Street Hospital (2001).  Co-author of the Dead Good Guides  – books on Funerals and Baby Namings. Presently leads Rites of Passage Summer Schools across the UK with Gilly Adams, and works as a secular celebrant for weddings and naming ceremonies and funeral officiant, particularly for woodland burials.

Find Sue’s website here.

Is ceremony dying?

9 August 2012
Charles
17 Comments
Categories: ceremony, crematoria, direct cremation, eulogy, Formality vs informality, funeral customs, funeral trends, Memorial service, Requiem Mass, Ritual

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

This seems a strange question just after economically-challenged Britain has hosted the Olympics, a no-expenses-spared ceremonial games that unites nations in celebration of sporting prowess.

But as the cult of individuality nibbles away at established social conventions, more and more people seem to be caring less for ceremony on a more intimate level. It didn’t seem particularly surprising when a woman of my acquaintance announced on facebook she’d just had a quickie marriage in a register office, adding friends would be invited to a bash some months after the honeymoon. I’ve also attended a memorial drinks party several weeks after a no-frills committal to which only family were invited to the crematorium. As we tucked into canapes, the only significance of the occasion was that we all knew the reason for being there, and our conversation reflected this fact.

Even those who opt for ceremony can sometimes offer reasons other than a deep emotional or spiritual need to mark a profound rite of passage. Some admit to getting little satisfaction out of the ceremony itself, saying it’s just the bourgeois thing to do—and a means to the end of gathering people together for that social jolly afterwards.

It goes without saying there are many ceremony options available, though more for marriages than funerals. If a register office is deemed too sterile to get married in and you don’t want a church ceremony, you can choose any number of venues from a beach on a paradise buy cialis online melbourne island to an aristocratic stately pile. If a crematorium is deemed too soulless for your funeral plans, the alternatives are more limited.

Some non-religious folk opt for a church funeral followed by a brief committal at the crematorium, seeing this as the best way to do justice to the dead through words and music before the final farewell. However, while some liberal churches allow risqué eulogies and secular music, traditional churches remind us we’re in a house of God. When in Rome…

Some again opt for graveside ceremonies in woodland cemeteries, seeing this as solving the time problem of the crematorium, but with natural surroundings which might appeal more than incense-scented churches, with their icons making visible religious purpose.

Meanwhile, others are opting to get the cremation over with swiftly so they can plan a ceremony with the ashes rather than the body. This can, of course, be anything from the aforesaid memorial party, with urn of cremains in attendance, to something more ritualistic such as the scattering of ashes in a favoured, natural beauty spot.

Time and money are important considerations in life, and both can be found more readily with pre-planning. But there’s more to meaningful ceremony than advance scheduling and financial planning. Whether it’s a hit-the-spot celebration-of-life speech or a requiem mass, providers must provide, and receivers must be open to their cathartic potential. It’s a two-way process. Or is apathy as relevant a consumer choice as any other?