Funerals and Death

I have just written, as I do every year, to our local funeral directors to inform them of the revised fees for funerals in the church building.  Funeral fees come in two parts: there is the statutory part, fixed centrally, of which the funeral directors are informed from 'the centre'; then there is the parochial part, fixed locally, and which covers such costs as organists, vergers and the like.

In addition to imparting this information, I also made a plea this year.  Over recent years, and probably traceable back to the time of the funeral of Princess Diana, there has been a move towards the description of a funeral service as 'A celebration of the life of...'  There has been an increase in the number of humanist/secular funeral services for people who want to avoid any religious context for the laying-to-rest of their loved ones.  I have no complaint about this; whilst I would like people in our culture to be fervent in faith, I recognise that this is generally not so, and that a non-religious service is more appropriate and has greater integrity for many.  But a service which is simply 'a celebration of the life' of a person is, in fact, a very different thing from a Christian funeral service, in which the departed person is commended to God in faith, accompanied by prayers offered in the Christian hope of God's mercy.  There is a 'vertical' dimension to any religious service which is absent, by definition, in a secular rite.

So my plea to the funeral directors was to avoid the phrase 'A celebration of the life of..' whenever they are asked by a family to prepare an order of service (such 'orders of service' are generally not orders of service at all; they just contain the words of the hymns chosen).  Instead, I've asked them to describe the service according to what it actually is: a 'Funeral Service for..'.  I understand that the 'celebration of the life of' model is now prevalent everywhere, even within the church, though i have to say that it amazes me that the Church so easily lapses into a secular default position instead of upholding its principles.

'A celebration of the life of...'speaks to me of the secular understanding of death as the complete negation of what 'life' is about, and of the way in which death remains a kind of taboo subject in modern western culture.  This understanding, incidentally, also underpins the common practice in our hospitals of pumping into terminally-ill patients large doses of very aggressive (and expensive) chemotherapy with no prospect of cure but only the hope of a slightly lenghthened life lived in misery because the treatment is so unpleasant.  For Christians, though, death is understood as a part of life and as the gateway to the ultimate fulfilment of life.  This doesn't mean, of course, that there is no place for sorrow when a loved one dies; but it does throw the emphasis upon the virtue of hope in the midst of sorrow, loss and death.  Happily, it is nearly always the case that there is a place for thanksgiving (to God) for the life of a person who has died, and this should and must find a place in the funeral rites.  But there is a lot more to a Christian funeral service than this.  To describe such a service as a celebration of the life of a person is reductive in the extreme, and a tendency that all Christian priests, ministers and people should resist.