This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Weeping at the grave, we make our song Alleluia - Lament and thanksgiving in Church of England funerals Brooks, Jeremy Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). 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Jeremy Paul Brooks DThMin 2006 Research Based Thesis Weeping at the grave, we make our song: Alleluia Lament and thanksgiving in Church of England funerals 1 Abstract The thesis considers the changing nature of funerals carried in England over the last twenty years and a possible response by Church of England ministers. Those changes are outlined in terms of the changes in venue of funerals, the changes in content and the changes in officials conducting funerals. As a theological basis for a response, the thesis examines the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, and in particular his book Mysterium Paschale. Balthasar considers each of the three days of Easter in turn, finding particular power and importance in Holy Saturday. It is this weight that he gives to the day in which Jesus is actually dead that is important in forming a liturgical response in the carrying out of funerals. One commentator describes a Christian funeral as a remembrance of an individual’s death in the context of the Easter event: key to what we do as Christian ministers is remind people of the hope that we have because of Christ’s resurrection at Easter. However, whilst the proclamation of the meaning of Easter Sunday is vital in any Christian funeral, just as important is a taking seriously of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. These days remind us of the importance of grief and mourning in funerals. The thesis examines both the formal and informal content of funerals conducted by church ministers in England today to see how they give an appropriate understanding of the death and resurrection of Christ. The appropriate liturgical response to mourning is lament and, having considered how the three days of Easter are reflected in the actual content of the funeral, the final chapter considers the biblical notion of lament and how it may provide resources for funeral ministry. 2 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Chapter One: Introduction 4 Chapter Two: Death and funerals in Britain today 14 Chapter Three: Death in Christian understanding 61 Chapter Four: Von Balthasar and the death of God 80 Chapter Five: Balthasar’s impact on funeral ministry 128 Chapter Six: Lament as a liturgical response to grief 166 Appendix One: An overview of the DThMin and subjects 195 studied within it Bibliography 202 3 Chapter One: Introduction Death, like the sun, is not to be looked at steadily1 The maxim of the French author, François de la Rochefoucauld (1613 – 1680) served as a warning to the twentieth century Briton, for whom death was seen as the great taboo. By the end of that century, Tony Walter argued that this attitude was beginning to change: indeed, in entitling his book The Revival of Death2, published in 1994, he suggests that this change has come about. This revival had derived from the contradiction that people felt between their own private experiences of the death of a loved one, and the public discourse surrounding death: they wanted the process surrounding death and the funeral made more personal and were therefore prepared to bring issues of death out into the open. Whilst acknowledging the truth of de la Rochefoucauld’s maxim, Walter comments elsewhere that the wise man lives in the light of death.3 Whilst Walter may have been premature in claiming in 1994 that there had been a revival in the willingness to discuss matters of death, the years since then have provided ample evidence for an increased interest. The Natural Death Centre was founded in 1991 by Nicholas Albery and Josefine Speyer who wanted to develop a concept of ‘do-it-yourself’ funerals, modelled on the concept of natural childbirth. Since then, it has grown considerably in its aim ‘to inform, empower and inspire the public in all matters relating to death and dying, and in particular to increase 1 François de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims (1678) No. 26 2 Tony Walter The Revival of Death London: Routledge, 1994 3 Walter Funerals and how to Improve Them London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990 p30 4 awareness of funeral choices outside of the mainstream’.4 It played a major part in ‘Death Fest’, a ‘Festival for the Living’ at the South Bank Centre in January 2012, in which its stall took its place next to coffins in the shape of electric guitars or convertible cars as an alternative to more traditional shapes. Its Natural Death Handbook5 has just been released in its fifth edition, providing advice on alternatives to cremation or traditional burial as well as advice on dying with dignity and ensuring that a funeral reflects the individual who has died rather than any imposed belief or value system. At the heart of the Natural Death Centre’s ethos is a postmodern approach to life which wants for each individual a bewildering assortment of cultural references and possibilities that claim to make that individual unique. It does not matter that the original context for coffins in the shape of a beloved object is the elaborate funeral rites of wealthy Ghanaians: the idea can simply be imported into a British funeral because it expresses something of the deceased’s individuality. Walter describes this as the ‘Sinatra Syndrome’ - ‘it is not so much that I have decided to do it my way: I am required to’.6 Faced with this vast array of choice, a traditional funeral conducted by a religious minister seems a poor alternative. Chapter 2 of this thesis outlines the changing patterns of funerals over the last twenty years in more detail, but it is clear that the changes in funeral practice have been at the expense of religious ceremonies, 4 Taken from their website at www.naturaldeathcentre.org.uk 5 The Natural Death Centre The Natural Death Handbook (5th edition) London: Strange Attractor Press, 2012 6 Walter Revival p37 5 particularly those carried out by Church of England ministers. Clergy who have been ordained for over twenty years tell stories of the weeks following their ordination in which their training incumbent showed them how to take a funeral in week one of their ministry and then went on holiday for a fortnight: by the time they returned, the newly ordained curate had taken four more. This is not a pattern that anyone ordained in the last ten years would remotely recognise: there simply is not that number of funerals conducted by the clergy any more. Parish clergy may sigh at this loss of business, but the Church has not taken much decisive action to reverse this trend. Yet death and religion have been inextricably linked for thousands of years. Thomas Long points to evidence from caves in Northern Iraq dating back fifty thousand years, which suggests that the beginnings of religion may well have been connected with death rites. Surrounding the bones of Neanderthals were found pollen grains, suggesting flowers had been placed around the bodies in tenderness and awe.