Novel ideas - death, crisis and transformation: or not.

"(the funeral director) told me that most people who come to arrange services don't believe in anything. He said that if he's leanred anything from doing his job, it's that if you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to sudddenly develop one during a moment of crisis. He said we're told by TV and movies and Readers Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change - and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes. Having a few default hymns and prayers at least makes the lack of crisis-born insight bearable.

The man was a true shepherd of souls." (Douglas Coupland 'The Gum Thief')

still thinking this one through...

Been to any good funerals lately?

It's good to hear that the CofE is extending the work it did on the Weddings Project to baptisms and funerals. There's a (false) assumption that, just because vicars do a lot of baptisms, weddings and funerals, that we're good at them. Now the CofE is to find out what people really value (or otherwise) in the way we handle these important and sensitive times in people's lives.

The Independent has a slightly more jaundiced take on it. Yes of course, if the church starts doing things better, one side-effect may be an increase in demand, but I hope that's not the main reason. With around 140,000 baptisms and 175,000 funerals done by churches each year, it makes perfect sense to look at how we can do better, and identify 'best practice'.

It would also be fab if some decent new baptism preparation resources emerged from this. There is precious little out there at the moment - I've long since given up on the CPAS baptism video, and am still experimenting with different approaches to help people talk about what baptism means to them and what kind of faith they have.

Having a third party gather feedback will be invaluable - I try to find out how people engaged (or otherwise) with the services I lead, but to be honest you're not going to tell the vicar to his face that he was awful are you? Are you?

PS in respect of the title, I think you can have a 'good funeral', and that's its possible to die well and grieve well. All of it is painful, but it can be an occasion for grace too. I'm not sure where exiting the crematorium to Tom Jones singing 'Sex Bomb' falls in all of that, but I certainly remember it...

Paying Respects

BBC4 has a 'Fatherhood Season' running at the moment. A programme last night looked at fathering styles in the early 20th century, and tried to make the case that the 'strict Victorian dad', with children seen and not heard, was a caricature.

I was most struck by an old mans recollection of his own fathers funeral. As he rode in the cortege as a boy he saw people stop by the road, remove their hats or touch their heads, and he remembers feeling a great pride that people were stopping to respect and honour his father. So, he said, whenever I see a funeral procession go past I stop and pay my respects, just in case there's a another little boy in there looking out.

No, Please, Anything but that!

This from the CofE's national advisor on mission and evangelism. The bit in italics is most worrying:

In the light of several recent disdainful and dismissive comments by clergy about modern culture and funerals, here's a positive and encouraging article from that source of essential reading for anyone interested in what lots of England actually thinks, the Daily Mail.

(Seriously. If you have the word "mission" in your job title and your office doesn't buy and read the Mail, the Mirror and the Sun daily, please hand in your cards immediately - you elitist fraud.)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1222301/Dean-Martin-fitting-send-Uncle-Sid.html

rumbled!

Death and All His Friends

The BBC website currently has a vid of the 'UK's first Festival of the Dying'. The Transitus Festival, held yesterday in Sturminster Newton, Dorset (just down the road), comes with a strong New Age agenda. One of the sponsoring bodies is very keen on 'sacred sites' around Glastonbury, and many of the festival workshops feature guardian angels, psychic artists and the like. The Christian chaplain from Dorchester was also down to do a workshop, so good for her for getting involved.

The main themes of the Festival included palliative care, green burials, and helping with the dying process. Our culture has lost a lot of its rituals and beliefs around death, so it is open season for pretty much anyone who can help to steer people through it. One challenge for the church is how do we engage with New Age beliefs around death, and how do we engage more meaningfully with people than simply delivering the funeral service.

Intriguing that the BBC reported on the festival without any sense that it was coming from the 'wacky fringe'. The core of the report is that the NHS is percieved to be failing people at the point of death in the care it gives to patients and their loved ones. It also mentioned spiritual values around death.

It's significant that the reporter talks of 'new rituals' springing up around death and dying, and that people want a 'more personal approach'. At a recent research day at Church House there was talk of a 'Funerals Project', which might engage with how people percieve church-led funerals. The outcomes of a similar project on marriage spoke of how much people valued the personal touch, rather than a conveyor-belt approach. The challenge is how we create time and space for that to happen alongside so many other things which seem like priorities.

For info, here's part of the Transitus philosophy:
The Network comprises a growing group of people working in a way that honours all aspects of life - mind, body, spirit and emotions - that are involved with the sacred process of dying. Our aims are: to release fears and taboos; support those dying and bereaved; raise awareness of 'green' and family-based approaches to death; and to encourage the acceptance of the concept of continuity of consciousness. The Network also supports its members so that none of us feels alone. Members include those working with: midwifing the soul; music thanatology; alternative funerals and celebrations; natural burials; grief counselling; life after death; related workshops; and more.

At one level this is a typical New Age paragraph about death. But apart from a couple of strange bits of jargon, why isn't this seen as part of what Christian faith offers? Death as a sacred process, the treatment of the whole person, life after death, enabling people to die well, grief counselling, etc. Maybe the problem is that our engagement with death has become so professionalised - through the clergy and the clergy alone - that creative and personal approaches which could come from the wider body of Christ have been crowded out.

What do you think?

Church of England 2001-7: Baptisms, Blessings and other stats

For the sake of completeness, here are the figures and changes for some of the other Church of England data released this week.

Figures are totals for 2007, with the percentage change (in brackets) since 2001.

Infant baptisms 88,400 (-17.3%)
Child baptisms* 40,300 (+5.2%)
Adult baptisms 10,200 (+25/9%)

Infant thanksgivings 4,700 (-9.6%)
Child thanksgivings* 1,700 (+6.3%)

Confimations 27,900 (-16.4%)

Marriages 54,600 (-5%)
Blessing of marriage 4,500 (-26.2%)

Funerals in church 96,500 (-7.3%)
Funeral in crematorium 98,700 (-20.3%)

Easter day/eve attendance 1,469,000 (-7.8%)
Christmas day/eve attendance 2,656,800 (+1.8%)

*i.e. ages 1-11.

Comments:
1. The process of change away from 'Christian Britian' continues: from 1900-1950, roughtly 65% of children born in this country were baptised, and 1/3 of those went on to be confirmed. That figure is not less than 20%, with 1/6 going on to be confirmed. Of course, the Church of England is not the only show in town, but it's generally smaller churches (Pentecostal, black-led churches) which have grown in this time, whilst larger ones have shrunk.

2. Marriages and funerals are becoming more secular. Though funerals (thankfully) aren't now a marketplace for venues in the way that marriages are, more are being taken by non-religious celebrants.

3. Marriages, Baptisms and Funerals are becoming a smaller part of the clergy workload, though with a reducing number of clergy, there's probably the same number per head as there was 10 or 20 years ago. This is a double-edged sword: on one level it means fewer pastoral contacts outside the church for church leaders, but on another it means there's more time to do proper preparation and follow-up for the people we do have contact with, or time freed up to be more pro-active.

Behind the Collar: Funerals

Taking a funeral is one of the hardest things I do. Having two in one day on Tuesday all but wiped me out for the rest of the week.

It starts with a phone call from the undertakers - we have some very good ones in Yeovil, and it's no reflection on them that my heart sinks every time they ring up. Taking someone's funeral is an immense privilege, but I'd be lying if I said it was my favourite part of being a vicar. A few details down the phone, then you ring the family to arrange to meet up. Having to ring someone you've never met, out of the blue, to express condolence and to fix a meeting normally means I put the call off for a day. I'd be hopeless in telesales, ringing people up isn't something I find very easy, never mind judging exactly what to say.

The Visit
Then we meet, and most of the time is spent scribbling down notes - often folk launch into their summary of the deceased persons life before you've even sat down, and it's vital to capture all of those words. I always breathe a sigh of relief if someone from the family offers to give the tribute, because if they don't then it's my job to stand up and tell the life story - usually a story of a person I've never known or met. Normally in the funeral service I'm very up front with the fact that I didn't know the person, and that I'm not going to pretend that I knew them.

At one funeral, of the youngest of 6 brothers, each of the other 5 had written down their own words for the vicar to say, and my job was to edit all 5 accounts together and deliver the tribute. They bought me a pint afterwards, so it must have gone okay. I try to use the words that mourners themselves use, rather than try to read between the lines - this isn't a time for guessing games.

At the funeral visit you're trying to gauge mood as well: emotions can range all over the place. Family splits come to the surface, and the occasional skeleton emerges from the closet. If everyone knows that the dead person was an absolute scumbag, who beat his children and swore at his neighbours, then you've got to acknowledge that somehow, without starting the funeral service with "we're here to remember John, who, as you all know, was an absolute scumbag...."

There's a whole mix of emotions: grief, relief, numbness, anger, exhilaration, guilt, you name it. And for the bereaved, questions. Did we do enough for them? Were we there at the moment of death? Is it ok to feel relieved that they're not suffering any more? Is it ok to feel relieved that we don't have to look after them 24/7 any more? And for the vicar, how do you reassure people truthfully when you don't really know the circumstances?

The Service
The funeral service is normally booked into a 30 minute slot at the crematorium. That actually means 20 minutes for the service itself. One of the first ones I took had so many mourners that we were still filling the building 10 minutes after the start time. Crem staff can get a bit twitchy, one former employee came into a service a few years ago and told them to get a move on as they were running late: that's why he's a former employee! Especially after it was picked up by a national newspaper....

There's normally both laughter and tears at a 'good' funeral - both are ways of releasing grief, and the incredible pressure and weight that can build up. Funny stories are great. It's a fine line - you want to celebrate the good things in someone's life, as well as recognise the deep grief and loss that people are feeling. Being remorselessly downbeat isn't helpful, being chirpy isn't helpful either.

There are some standard Bible readings for funerals, but where possible I try to find something new, which linked to the persons life: for a man who had worked on trawlers at Grimsby, we had an encounter between Jesus and Peter the fisherman. If folk have asked for a vicar, and a Christian funeral, then I want to set everything in the context of the Christian faith. Old, familiar words (Psalm 23, the Lords Prayer) often help, but also how you say them. Sometimes it feels like you're having faith and hope on behalf of other people who haven't got them, but need someone to have more faith than they do.

Over the years I've become more challenging - trying to pick out the things in the deceased's life that folk can be inspired by, trying to give some sense of hope or direction for the future. For many people a funeral reminds them of their own mortality, how long they might have left (especially at an untimely death), and how they're going to be remembered.

What are people going to say about you at your funeral? Alfred Nobel was one of the few who got to find out. He was surprised, to say the least, to read his own obituary in the paper one day. Even more shocking was the content: it described him as a 'merchant of death', who, by his invention of dynamite, had 'become rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.' Nobel decided this wasn't the legacy he wanted to leave, and changed his will to endow the Nobel Peace prizes.

And then...
The service is a threshold, a final farewell, a marker post in the grief journey, and if you botch it then you can really mess people up. I'm all for children being in the service if they want to come - kids who are kept away when they wanted to be there will often feel a strong sense of unfinished business. And it's over in no time, people are filing out, shaking hands, looking at the messages on the flowers, wondering quite what to say to each other. And for the vicar it's back to the little office to take off your robes, pack everything away, and head off to the next thing. My journey home on Tuesday morning took me via the parent and toddler group - from one end of life to the other in 5 minutes.

This is a cross-post from Touching Base, a weekly column hosted by the Wardman Wire. And thanks to the Britblog Roundup for linking here.