The Funeral Look
I recently attended the funeral of a longstanding friend in a rural community. I had known the lady for nearly forty years, and as I stood there, I recalled that we had first met when I was helping with arrangements for her mother’s funeral.
Naturally enough, I reflected for a moment on her mother’s funeral as opposed to the funeral I was attending. The earlier funeral was in the church with the customary rites and forms of an Anglican Funeral. Today we were in the shade of a bushland chapel in the funeral park, with a clergyman in a suit and tie, and a loosely semi-liturgical form, though largely secular.
At the first funeral, probably nearly all the men wore a coat and a tie; today, apart from the minister, there may have been two or three ties. Dress standards have changed in our society in the intervening years. Both funerals would have had about 150 people, and I don’t think it is that we care less, but rather that we don’t dress for the occasion.
Of course, you don’t go to a funeral to look and see who is there or who is not; yet we have to look somewhere.
Perhaps the first place we look at a funeral is back over the years we have known the person, perhaps with sadness at the end of life, perhaps with gratitude for the road we shared with the deceased. More likely, it will be some of each together with other emotions.
Having looked back at where we have been, we will also look forward to what is ahead. For most Christians, we look forward to life in a new dimension, the hope of heaven and the glory of the resurrection. We may have different ways of expressing the hope that is within us.
The last lines of the Nicene Creed express what unites this belief in these words:
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.
On the one hand, we look forward to what lies ahead for the person whose funeral it is. We may see that in terms of release from struggle and suffering, the beginning of a new day, and the hope of heaven, of being at one with the Creator, and those who have held the person close in time past.
We also look forward to the road ahead. Sometimes the grief we experience seems overwhelming, and essentially all we can see. Someone might even suggest that ‘time heals’. I think it is more like when you stand next to a tree, it seems huge; however, as you move away from it, you get a better perspective of the tree and its context.
We will also look around at those around us, and know that along the way, we need to support and nurture one another on this journey of grief, and that we also need to allow others to nurture us. Grief is undoubtedly, despite being intensely personal, best done in community.
We cannot expect everything to come from within, nor can we expect too much from others, so we also need to remember to look up to God, who created and sustains all life, and who in his Son has shown us the way through death into resurrection light.