by Dish Staff
Steve Holmes, a Baptist minister, shares what it was like to lead a funeral service for his grandmother, who requested that services include no religious content:
Inevitably, I looked around for help; I’ve done enough liturgical work to know that there are always riches from which to borrow. That said, the Humanist material I discovered surprised me – although on reflection the problem was predictable. Like most contemporary ‘humanism’, it all failed rather badly to be nonreligious. I looked at half-a-dozen or more published patterns for a humanist funeral; every one borrowed central Christian texts, deleted the obvious references to God, and then used the filleted remains to shape the service. (Even Scripture was not immune; Eccl. 3 was several times in evidence. John Donne’s Divine Meditation XVII was also referenced more than once.) This of course reflects the reality – and the tedious banality – of too much contemporary Western atheism: take a philosophically-rich account of things; delete surface references to the divine; and assume that what is left will be meaningful or coherent or interesting. Nietzsche, the world hath need of thee…
The experience itself was interesting; the defiant rebellious joy of a Christian funeral was of course absent (‘Where, death, thy sting? Where, grave, thy victory?’ (a phrase I recall Graham Tomlin describing as the liturgical equivalent of ‘You’re not singing, you’re not singing, you’re not singing anymore!’); ‘Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son – endless is the victory thou o’er death hast won!’), but that did not feel like a huge problem. We came to say goodbye, and goodbye was said; if I personally could have said so much more, that was the absence of a wonderful bonus, not the presence of a yawning absence. I know the philosophical stuff on the obscenity of death, but my grandmother died old and full of years, and it did not feel like that.
The Dish 