Narrow Perspective

When I was a "trainee" priest an older wiser colleague said that the trouble with Funeral Directors was that they thought they were 'directing' the funeral and that ministers thought of them as 'undertakers'. This bears some thought.
One director/undertaker runs an ad in the paper which says

• My Death Wish
• Don't go to Church
• Don't like wasting money
• Care for my partner and my children
• Don't want all the pomp and costs of a full funeral.
• I am choosing a short. simple, non religious
• MINI-FUNERAL at a cheap price

I actually think that this is socially inept and bereft of understanding what a funeral is actually about.
While I think it is possible for funerals to be an outrageous financial burden, this is not the only factor that needs to be taken into account.
I say this not because I wish to preserve the religious component when clearly many people are alienated by this, but I don't actually believe that many undertakers are better qualified to 'direct' funerals.
In fact I could give you any number of instances when undertakers have been blasé with their charges to the point of an affront, treating the dead as if they were hunks of concrete to be carted around.
They often lack the subtlety or capability of dealing with people who are actually grieving. Too many funerals fail to confront grief, and become sort of like birthday parties where the particular celebration is that the guest of honour happens to be dead.

At the very least, the religious (any religion really) helps us to confront our mortality.

What does this particular ad mean when it says it doesn't want all the pomp of a "full funeral"?
Is it somehow promoting a part-funeral, or a less than complete obsequy and why?
If I know anything after 30 years of taking funerals it is that you don't get a second chance to get it right.
Unfortunately the narrow viewpoint that this sort of company promotes,

• as cheap and as quick as possible,
• preferably without any grief or sadness
• an alleged celebration of life but no appreciation of death

I suspect does more damage than good. This doesn't need to be expensive, or religious but it shouldn't be cheap and nasty. Funerals are important. Important enough to get right.

momentous momentum

In a week which has seen all sorts of things happen it will be interesting to check back and see if it has all made much difference.
It has been for me a great mixture. From the grand scale of the beginning of of the presidency of Barck Obama, to dinner with friends last night...a sort of annual check up.
Which, in my scheme of things, is more important?
Yesterday,too, I took a funeral of the mother of a parishioner. A momentous and unexpected event for that family; from teary ten year old grandson to teary 40 something year old devastated daughter.
Heath Ledger was nominated for an academy award for a film I can't bear to see, on the first anniversary of his death by drug overdose (whether deliberate or accidental) which I blogged about this time last year (here)
I went to the doctor yesterday to get a couple opf routine referrals and came away anaemic and feeling that I had a hundred things wrong with me.
The Premier was in rapture on radio because Tour Down Under was being reported on the front page of the New York Times.
I noted at dinner last night that the much touted economic woes seemed to have been allowed to drift into the back of our minds. It was not that they have gone away it is that we are easily distracted, even desirous of being so.
It's a lot of stuff for one week.
And the tomatoes have just kept coming!

The Hectic Life

There is always one week a month (at least) when life is really hectic and I am in the middle of it.
It is in the midst of these weeks that funerals often seem to occur, or maybe I just notice them more.
A funeral is an engrossing experience, even low key funerals demand of those of us who take them and of those attend a degree of participation that is significantly above our normal attention. I suppose it must be so.
What does it mean? I think it partly suggests that we pay less atention to our day to day life than we should, and we all intuitively know that we can't do that in the presence of one of us who is dead.
It may also mean that death awakens an innate fear in us, and we must not sleep lest the Grim Reaper some how catch us napping.
Any how, I am glad I don't have funerals every day

A quite excellent but difficult funeral

It was a very long funeral for Andrew (here). I have become more tolerant of longish eulogies and it was long. But he was a most excellent man, and there was much to say.
Apart from seeing his eldest son James take on the mantle of the eldest male, I was struck for the first time by how much he looked like Andrew. More than that, there was a very deft touch and insight which was like the ghostly mantle being passed on.
There was a tribute from a priest friend, who, I suppose, was the one of us who was sacrificed to the humiliation of crying and snorting his grief in front of the few hundred people therein gathered. I have been caught before by sudden overwhelming, unexpected grief; so it was not surprising to see numbers of us so afflicted.
Dear friend! We shall miss you. What a gift you have been to everyone who knew you! What a challenge to those of us who struggle to be a priest after the order of Melchizedek but find it too hard! If I could just be as good a priest, or half as good..or a quarter..as Andrew then I would ahve done well.
But I am nowhere close.

Funereal reality

AJD's funeral went well yesterday. It was good to be critiqued by M for my former entry, which as I said was maybe a bit harsh (here).
I did think about what I wrote in that entr,y conscious of the fact that not everything that can be said needs to be said. But I did need to say what I said since he figured as a large part of my life and my formation as a priest. He was not responsible (for good or for ill) for the way I turned out, he did have some influence.
Part of the therapy of a funeral, however, is not to be bombarded by a litany of glory but to hear different perspectives.
So I heard this difficult man's wife (an amazing person by any standards) say of him that she was thankful for the unconditional love he had for his family. I think this was true and good to be stated. She talked, too, of how the awful Alzheimer's Disease had been a gift to this family. She is always open to the challenge and growth of impossible situations. I wonder if her fine children (as difficult a bunch as any) had her deep commitment to this. "He enjoyed chocolate biscuits and holding hands" seems a fine statement to make
It was good, too, to catch up with the cohort of people who share the same space with me that this man shared. We look older, we are dreading the next time we meet...it may be one of us. Indeed some of us were not there for that reason. One is on his deathbed and his daughter was there, but not his wife who needs to be with him.
Others were just not there. I needed to go, and it was really good for me. I feel a 25 year old spectre has been let go of. I hope that is true. There have been times when I just could not bear to go to a funeral, and go to so many that I could easily justify not going to another. It has not been so bad of late. I am glad I went.
No Bishop was present, a shameful statement of the Church's pathetic abilty to care for its own. Fortunately the deceased would regard this as something of a victory! This is something he taught me...the first instruction of my funeral requests reads....no Bishop will take any part in this service! I am not yet at the stage where I feel that I can endorse the shameful abnegation of oversight that the episocpate has perpetuated in recent times.....another blog all together!!
So, on the whole, this difficult funeral weaved its magic. WE should settle for nothing less than a difficult funeral!

Sitting lightly

It is not always that you hear lawyers speaking gently or positively so I was impressed when chatting with one of my friends, a lawyer, last night about a seemingly unalterable difficult situation that he said "Of course grace abounds".
It all depends on the way you choose to view situations, he suggested; so often the sytem invites us to look negatively or selfishly but we can choose to look differently. I sometimes call this "sitting lightly".
So in the last few days I have seen some difficult stuff, and am chastened by those who sit lightly in the face of adversity, and a little saddened by those who find themselves unable so to do.
Chastened by the mother who wraps her dying son in the quilt made for him while he was in hospital; chastened by the friend who so looked forward to being a parent that no when she lost that baby she is finding this Christmas time really hard; chastened by another one dying and in great pain who simply wants to come home for Christmas. Chastened by a lovely daughter or three who is just edging into the season and gently trying to make everyone's life good today and the next day.....aaah too melancholic I feel, too sermonical. But grace abounds.

Chris's funeral

I left home at 10, went to the dentist, had an hour to kill so had a coffee, said prayers in the shopping centre (always a good thing to do); bought a copy of the "God Delusion". Had lunch with my deanery colleagues. very nice and pleasnat. And popped back to see that the little one was OK (12 episodes of Will & Grace later....she was supposed to be cleaning her room)
The funeral began at 2 and the Church was packed and into two overflow spaces as well.
It went well. He was a remarkable gift of a person. A man who found out when he was 17 that he could easily die and decided to throw himself into living. This so electrified those whose lives he touched that they lived a bit better too. Very Christlike.
It makes one wonder why we don't throw ourselves properly into life, and why we always presume that we have tomorrow.