Pugnacious priests and supine celebrants
A little while ago a United Reformed Church minister wrote this:
I’ve had a bit of a narrow escape : I’m doing a funeral today and went to see the family three days ago. As I was leaving the house, something they said suggested that they had requested that “the curtain should not be closed”. I checked, and it was true. The funeral director had not passed on this important bit of information, and they had not specifically asked me. It sort of slipped out by accident ... So we could have had a situation where they suddenly found themselves, at the most sensitive point of the service, facing a closing curtain they didn’t expect. I was not happy, and have raised it with the funeral director concerned.
I suggested to the funeral director that rather than putting the idea of leaving out the Committal into people’s heads they should leave it to the family themselves to suggest it - at least, as long as it is a Christian funeral to be conducted by me as a Christian minister. The response was that ‘some families prefer it’. Choice is everything . . .
As far as I am aware, there is no Christian funeral liturgy or service that misses out the Committal : I feel the funeral directors are overstepping their boundary in deciding what the content of a Christian service should be. The funeral director was under the impression that ‘the Committal’ was the name given to ‘the whole service’; I think that ‘the Committal’ is that bit of the service (around which the whole thing revolves psychologically) which starts with the words “Therefore . . we commit his/her body to . . etc.” and is followed by the lowering of the coffin or the closing of the curtain.
Take out an act of committal of any sort and, it seems to me, you’re left not with a funeral service but a service of thanksgiving. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s not a funeral. In a funeral we stare death down in the light of faith. The curtain, for me, has particularly strong resonance ... It is very appropriate to be left staring at a curtain.
For myself I have said to the funeral director concerned that if they know they are going to ask me to conduct the funeral
> that they do not suggest to the family that they leave out the Committal, or offer it as a ‘choice’. It is my job, not the funeral director’s, to discuss with the family the content of a Christian funeral, and though I’m happy to accommodate their wishes, I would rather they made an informed decision.
What I am uneasy about is funeral directors deciding what is and what isn’t a Christian funeral and then either presenting me with a fait accompli, or (worse) creating a situation where I unwittingly cause pastoral hurt.
It’s bad enough that they sell printed orders to people and are pressing me for the order of service before I’ve even had a chance to meet the family. It seems they want it both ways :
> they assume that the order of service is predetermined such that I can tell them what it is before consulting the family. (As a URC minister I can be a lot more flexible than that). But . .
> feel that they can offer the family (but not me) choice over whether to include an essential element of a Christian funeral.
On the same theme, I have just come across this in the Australian ChristianToday:
Mark Tronson, a Baptist minister, was recently asked by a bereaved family to conduct the funeral as a Christian service ... However, Mark Tronson was distressed when the family told him that the funeral directors had contacted them twice, trying to persuade them to have a civil celebrant conduct the service. Further, the funeral home representative had made several calls to different family members in an attempt to control the service program.
Christian ministers had been reporting this sense of this 'being pushed aside' for some time now, saying that they, too, had been surprised and in the end had to establish their stamp of authority.
In his particular case, to spare the family any more stress in their delicate situation, Tronson had to make it very clear to the funeral home representative that the service was now in his hands, full stop. Moreover, no further contact on this subject was to be discussed by the funeral home representative to any member of the bereaved family other than himself as the Minister.
It appears that the civil celebrant industry may be tied to the management of the funeral homes, who may therefore like to retain control. In this way, the funeral directors have a more straightforward task, in that they do not have to contend with the requirements of the wide and varied forms of community farewells, as expressed by ministers or leaders of the other religions from around the world.
The Christian community needs to be made aware that they can insist on whatever service they like, they do not have to accede to the suggestion of the funeral directors.
The rise of the secular celebrant, whether humanist or semi-religious, is regarded as a good thing, but complacently so. In the UK funeral directors have been incredibly slow to understand that a good secular celebrant makes them look good (for all that a bad funeral director could never make a good celebrant look bad). In the dawning light of that understanding, they have been incredibly slow to bring them utterly under their control.
The relationship between funeral directors and priests was always based in deference—rather like that between sergeant major and commanding officer. They occupied different classes and so, this being Britain, separate worlds. Status was firmly established, as were boundaries. There may or may not have been mutual respect, but that’s another matter entirely.
That demarcated relationship has clearly begun to break down. Funeral directors no longer know where their job ends. Secular celebrants, too, get fed up with them telling them what their clients want in the ceremony. Mind your own bloody business!
More sinister, though, is the way that celebrants in Australia, where the secular movement has been going longer, are now being subsumed and enslaved by the funeral homes.
Given the supine and sycophantic way in which our own celebrants behave, it’ll be happening here any time soon.
Labels: celebrants
posted by Charles Cowling at
14:26
13 Comments:
Interesting post, as always, Charles.
I'm not going to comment on what a Christian ceremony should be - it's a little out of my remit, but I would offer that I quite often say committal words without closing the curtains, if this is what the family would like.
I have only conducted one ceremony where the family didn't want any committal words at all (and being supine and sycophantic, I agreed). The family were happy with the ceremony, which is all that counts; personally, I thought it felt a little "unfinished", but as it wasn't for my loved one, it doesn't matter what I felt.
The Australian situation is more worrying. It's a shame the family didn't change FDs, if they weren't getting the service that they were expecting. I hope and think that the church at least would kick up against this sort of behaviour, but I have been known for being overly optimistic.
I didn't mean that it's s and s to have no committal words at all. Like you, I let people choose -- and reckon silence to be potentially at least as eloquent as words.
No, I am critical of the way that secular celebrants subordinate themselves to funeral directors. They have created their own dependency culture. Celebrants should at the very least collectively insist that they are chosen, not allocated. Caring for bodies and creating ceremonies require completely different skills. Each is as important as the other. Very few funeral directors are remotely capable of creating a ceremony (just as most celebrants recoil from wet death). The tiny number who do tend to call themselves undertakers and are the best it gets. There'll only ever be an enlightened handful of these.
In short, celebrants need to assert their independence - as a matter of some urgency.
The obvious difficulty with insisting on being chosen, not allocated, is that you have to be visible as a choice outside of the influence of the funeral director, who is the first port of call, and only source of information, after a death. Perhaps it's something we celbrants need to co-operate on?
The advantage of not being a religious minister is that you always have to discuss the ritual around committal, and you're bound come up with something meaningful to the family between you and them, curtain or no curtain, without making assumptions.
I'd say that funeral directors need more to discuss with a family the implications of an informed choice between celebrant and minister than comply with a list of demands from either.
I really can't see what the ceremony has got to do with the undertaker. Plonk the coffin on the catafalque and knock off.
I should have said above 'the tiny minority who do BOTH'.
"Choose your coffin from this catalogue... Choose your celebrant from this one." funeralcelebrants.org.uk mkes this very easy.
Different horses, different courses. Chalk and cheese. Blood and sand. Donner und blitzen. Little and Large.
Sorry - I was being a bit playful when I suggested that I was happy to have no committal because I was S & S. I was happy to have it, because it's what the family wanted - they rule.
Charles and Jonathan - you're right, we are too supine re: FDs, but it is difficult not to be when, as the process stands, we are reliant on them for work.
I am happy to be on funeralcelebrants.org, but to date, nobody has ever contacted me through it.
Keep up the good work, Charles. I'll support you as much as I can - but I do have to pay the bills in the meantime!
Peace and Love
X.Piry
But Charles, we (by which I mean of course I) WANT the undertaker to take an interest in the ceremony. If he (/she) has divorced himself from it, the loss is his, as well as that of our families, and ours too. He may already be a lost cause, but let's not use that as an excuse to give up on the poor fellow, or see his involvement as necessarily an interference. His role is not so perfunctory, from the family's point of view, as your comments suggest, or they'd buy their funerals from Argos. Families can get very sentimental about their funeral directors.
Has he been getting up your nose lately?
Coffin and grave; deceased and mourners; life and death; celebrant and concomitants; holistic - er - schmolistic?
P.S: I agree with you about paying the bills meanwhile, X.Piry. By the way, is that name a pun on Expire, or a reference to outdoor cremations?
I see it as my responsibility as a celebrant to explore and clarify with the bereaved the psychic environment they want to co-create. This enquiry would naturally extend to the mechanics of the ceremony: when and how the coffin should be brought into the space, what the mechanics of the separation process should be, etc.
No way would I see any elements of that conversation as something to leave to the so-called funeral directors. As a courtesy, I would inform the FD of the decisions made.
It's precisely these differences of perception of one another's roles between FDs and celebrants that compels them to work together. As a funeral director, I wouldn't want to be 'informed' how I'm going to do my job, any more than I would as a celelbrant. I do both jobs, sometimes at once, sometimes separately; and I see only disadvantages in trying to isolate them from each other.
Jonathan,
It's just a pun on Expire.
Damn, I wish I'd thought of the outdoor connection!
The roles, Jonathan, are, I think, discrete but (of course) complementary. As a celebrant, there's nothing I like doing more than going to see my local fab FD Judi after seeing a family and talking about how it went. Judi is very interested in the families she looks after. We din't interfere in each other's work, we simply share. This is exceptional in these parts. The rest aren't a bit interested. I am customarily greeted by the conductor on the day of the funeral - as the mourners climb out of the lims - with the words (uttered from the side of the mouth)"Which one's the widow?" Once the doors have been closed and the music begins to fade, the ceremony time to them is chill out time. I never fail to be tickled by this juxtaposition of emotional intensity and laid-back profanity.
This is not to say that they are not lovely people. They are. But they are not in step with what's going on. The ceremony is the climax of the process. Why wouldn't they be there? They're not. A funeral director of this sort can inspire great fondness, but I don't think there's any doubt, when the day is done, who gave greater emotional value.
FDs ask the question about curtains at the (one-off, if possible) arrangements interview because it's a box to tick on the cremation forms. Given the symbolic importance of the curtains, this is too early for the question to be asked. Whatever their response, people may change their minds during ongoing discussion with their celebrant.
I was chatting to a local FD the other day. He said, "If this business I'm in goes belly-up I'm going to do what you do." He was basing his career choice on the practice of the one-rite-fits-all ministers he deals with. I didn't have the energy to explain to him that it's not as easy as that - and in any case there isn't a living to be made from it. He simply doesn't have a clue what a secular celebrant does. He is not alone. And that's a shame.
Interesting discussion. All fuelled by the rise of the 'personal funeral', where all traditional roles are being questioned and revised (what is a modern day funeral director?) and new roles are being created (such as the secular celebrant and funeral consultant).
Referring to your later post, and the practice of addressing the body as 'you' during funerals it seems to me that a committal that begins 'Therefore . . we commit his/her body to..' is at odds with us mourners feeling that until the committal is done the body is not 'he/she' but most definitely 'you' - the committal is the point of no return where we [have to] accept that the person is dead and marks a very significant stage in our processing of the grief. If we're going to have the curtains close, let it be to words that make sense to us and recognise where we're at.
What is clear in the discussion so far is that there is a huge gulf between a good FD and a lacklustre funeral conductor who hasn't met the family.....there is also a massive gulf between a good celebrant/vicar and the many truly appalling ones that are the bane of good FDs lives.
The good ones can rub together very nicely - but do I detect a note of arrogance creeping in on behalf of territorial rites Charlie? lol I would never leave a family alone in a chapel....with or without a good celebrant - you never know what might happen watch and listen is my motto!!!!
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