The consolations of faith: on leading on non-religious funeral

Today I led a funeral service for my grandmother; in accordance with her views, and the wishes of her children, the service was devoid of any ‘religious’ content.

I found this odd. Not difficult, but odd. Obviously, when asked to do it, I said yes; it did not take any thought to decide to help family members at such a time, and I rapidly worked out that, whilst I could not lead a ceremony speaking words I did not believe, I have no problem (indeed, a fair amount of experience, one way or another) in acting with integrity in public whilst not saying certain things that I do believe. What difficultly there was lay in working out what the service was for, in order to construct an appropriate form of words (I keep saying ‘liturgy’ in my head, although that’s the one thing it definitely wasn’t…). But for a funeral that was not so hard: we come to remember; to say goodbye; to stand together in grief. There is little trouble in finding words that speak well to these purposes.

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.

My mind went to various nonreligious weddings/civil partnerships I have attended. They were far worse; duty was heaped upon duty, and responsibility upon responsibility, and not a finger was lifted in promised help. The offering of prayer for a couple newly-wed; the humility and confidence expressed in the confession, ‘by God’s grace, I will’; the sense that these open-ended and absolute promises are undergirded by benevolent divine power – all of this, for me, is necessary to the uttering of wedding vows, or their equivalent. To commit oneself in one’s own strength to such things is an act of promethean courage, of which I at least would not be capable.

All of which makes me reflect: for me – I do not generalise – the point at which I find God’s grace to be necessary for existence, and not merely a wonderful bonus, is not in thinking about what happens beyond death, but in thinking about how it is possible to live before death. I desperately need grace and strength and assurance of the forgiveness of sins not for eternity, but for tomorrow, and for tonight, and indeed for this moment right now.

I respect and admire those like Nietzsche who, with eyes wide open and with no self-deception, can live and die in their own strength; at the same time I know that I am not one of them (and I recall Nietzsche’s own last years). That said, I suppose that dying will be relatively easy; everyone seems to manage to do it adequately in the end. Living is the challenge. I do not propose a general rule, but, as far as I know my own heart, for me the reality is this: I need grace to live more than I need it to die.