The members of the Deanery Chapter were sitting around the rural dean’s kitchen when the talk turned to funerals, as it inevitably does after about 20 minutes of any clergy gathering. This vicar and that vicar were discussing what they would and wouldn’t permit in their churches: no recorded secular music for the entrance and exit of the coffin. No singing of “Jerusalem” (“Not a Christian hymn!”). No eulogies. Then someone spoke up: the birdwatching vicar of St Cassian’s.
“Our mother was the church cleaner. Every week she was there with her mop and her duster. She knew every tile of that floor. When she died we asked the vicar if he would say a few words about how much she loved the church. He said, ‘I don’t allow eulogies.’ So now I give mourners whatever they want, and offer it up.” For a moment, I enjoyed imagining him uniting his irritation at the boombox at the back of the church playing “My Heart Will Go On” with the suffering of Christ on the cross, asking Jesus to use that tiny affliction for the good of this messed-up world. It’s an old-fashioned Catholic way of dealing with hurt. Just forward it on to Our Lord on the Cross. He can bear it.
After a while I stopped being bothered by popular music and sentimental poems. I learned to recognise the presence of God in the readings that comforted my parishioners’ children and the music that they loved listening to. It no longer seems strange to process out of church to Johnny Cash singing “Tennessee Flat Top Box” or the Pet Shop Boys’ version of “Go West”; instead it’s entirely proper and fitting. These are moments when the sacred suffuses the profane.
For me as for many others, ministry to the bereaved takes up a lot of the week. There were two funerals last week, a burial of ashes and three visits to bereaved families this week. Everyone in the village can have a funeral in their parish church and everyone’s entitled, if there’s room, to be buried in the churchyard. Anyone can ask for their parish priest to lead a service at the Crem or at the graveside. So, while many people are opting for a humanist celebrant these days and the market for direct cremations is growing, I’m still called upon to do a lot more funerals than weddings or baptisms.
This is why clergy always wind up talking funerals. We don’t generally have anyone else to talk to who understands what it’s like. It’s humbling to sit with someone and listen as they tell you about this person whose life they have shared. You remember their names and stories—in fact, you become a treasury of people’s stories, you apply your intelligence and your imagination to give an account of those lives in relation to the eternal. You remember that every person’s life is, to some degree, a mystery even to someone who shares their pillow, and that God only knows what’s in someone’s head when they lie awake at night. You gradually learn something about how to comfort the numb and the broken-hearted.
You learn that it’s generally wise not to go on to the wake. This is because, after you’ve dropped your handful of earth on the coffin with the triple rhythm of “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” or walked through the exit door at the Crem, you realise that you’re drained.
This is one of the things that we clergy don’t talk about at our Deanery Chapters. What do we do with all the grief we take in? “Ring theory” is the name of the strategy I was taught for dealing with the stresses of pastoral care. Imagine a set of concentric circles. In the middle is someone dying or newly bereaved. Family members, friends, colleagues and neighbours occupy the other circles by degree of closeness. The rule is that the people further towards the centre receive only comfort. Your negative feelings get passed out towards the perimeter. “Comfort in, dump out” is the rule. Guess what? We’re usually at the furthest remove. The priest at a wedding is an essentially comic character: a cross between the Nurse and Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet. The priest at a funeral has no margin for error. And the priest who does every funeral in the same bored sing-song, slotting names, locations and places of work into a generic address is a disgrace—or possibly someone who has walled off their own grief.
When we’re together, we talk about the size of the coffin and the colour of the plumes on the horses pulling the hearse; we compare notes about music and undertakers. But what should we really be talking about? I’d like to hear what my colleagues do when they get home from a funeral. On to the next thing? Make a cup of tea? Go for a walk? Comfort in, dump out. Where to dump it? Offer it up.
