Reflection 7th March 2010
The ‘Age’ on Saturday (20th Feb.) carried an article by Louisa Deasey. It was about the death of her mother. Louisa was not happy with the ‘way of death’ that was presented to her. She longed for the days of a village, where she would be known, and people would have cared that her mother had died. Here are a couple of extracts from the article.
There’s a reason why in the old days a church bell would ring in the village when someone died. Without a second thought, people would bring food. Stories would be told. Services would be held. Someone would take over domestic matters. Nobody said “let me know if I can do anything” - they just knew. But when my mum died, no church bells rang...later on she comments In the days of villages and community storytelling through grief was a natural and instinctive way to appreciate life, to heal, to move on. Now I must pay someone to counsel me. Yet another stranger who didn’t know my mum.

As I was reading this article I thought ‘But Louisa what you are missing is exactly what we do! All you needed to have done was to have to have been a member of your local Church and not only would you have had the church bells rung, you would have had people bringing you food, you would have been able to swap stories with people who knew your mum, and the celebrant would have been someone who would have known you.’
It is puzzlng to me that Louisa mourns the loss of such community, without knowing that such community in the form of the Body of Christ is alive and well!

Although death is a sad time, I think that some of the most significant times that we have shared as a congregation have been when one of our members has died. More than that, how we lay to rest members of the congregation is sometimes a valuing of them in a way that otherwise would not be possible. Think, for example, about the people who have died who have lived alone. What kind of a funeral would they have had were it not for the love and care of the other members of Christ’s Body, of which they were also members? Think of Dom, for whom ‘all the stops were pulled out’, partly because I wanted to compensate for the otherwise meagre funeral that the state might have given him.

Then there is the matter of the funeral service itself. When I began paid work in the Church, I used to go with the vicar to watch as he did funerals. In those days we used the 1662 book, which pulls fewer punches than do the modern prayer books. Nevertheless, I was impressed by the ‘no mucking about’ style of the prayer book attitude to death. Here there is no soft music, and soft focus photography. There is the plain reality of death and loss (Ashes to ashes, dust to dust) but also the plain reality of God, and God’s love for us ‘If we live we live to the Lord, and if we die we die to the Lord...so then whether we live or whether we die we are the Lord’s”

In the days of increasing individualism there is greater freedom of choice. This can be seen by the greater amount of individual work that goes into preparing funeral orders of service. This is a good thing. But the down side of increasing individualism is the loss of those communities that can provide an embracing set of arms for those who are in need. This extends too, to the holding of a person that a liturgy provides.

A liturgy is a strong set of walls, made up of actions and words that hold a person within the meaning of those actions and words: and a liturgy is held by the tradition of a community that has continuity.

This is both the strength and weakness of the Anglican ways of doing things. Those who appeal to certain groups of the population by stripping the Church of all its liturgy and internal furnishing, or who only do ‘Café Church” or “House Church” have no solid basis of an ongoing tradition upon which to build forms of commemoration of those who have died. You can’t do a funeral in a Café. In my experience the services conducted by celebrants, or other forms of ‘made up’ services, tend to be ‘fluffy’ and tend to avoid the hard realities that need to be attended to. Such groups, while distancing themselves from the Church depend upon the Church, especially at extreme times as a source of ongoing living use of the liturgy in order to continue.

This does not mean that we do not need to continually keep the liturgy alive by making the connections between its forms and our own life, and by updating them. That has happened with the prayer book, and with the way we celebrate Easter here, for example.

It does not mean either that there are not some clergy who do a terrible job of the liturgy and who are not very pastorally sensitive at times of grief. But one thing we learn from the liturgy is that worship of God is bigger than those responsible for putting it on. A prayer book funeral will hold you, even if it is done badly! Being in God (and a part of the Body of Christ) is always a conversation. I think that Louisa has stopped the conversation with the Church and in so doing has denied herself a source of reality in her grief.

As a person who feels the blowing of the winds of anxiety and feels the insecurity of life, I have clung to the liturgy as a way of holding myself within the love of God. I wish that Louisa could have availed herself of that same ‘holding’

Your companion on 'the Way' and priest.

 

 

Paul Dalzell.