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Taking our last rights
The Church's best deal is the Anglican drama of death
Unaccustomed as I am to sympathising with exciting new initiatives from the Church of England, I do think it is right about funerals. At the General Synod last week the diocese of Southwark introduced a motion expressing regret at the way that undertakers tend to put pressure on bereaved people not to have funerals in church. This ushered in a spirited clerical debate on the Anglican way of death, which appears to be under threat; either parish priests tend to rely too heavily on the answerphone, or they seem indifferent or unimaginative, or commercial undertakers want to cut out the religious middleman, or many people don't know that they have a legal right to use their local parish church for funeral services. So this great service - not to mention this great industry ( pounds 13 million a year) - is slipping away from the church.
It is a laughable excess of zeal, typical of Anglicans these days, to suggest an 0800 hotline on which the bereaved can dial-a-vicar. Nor do I really like the tone in which the general secretary of London dioceses suggested setting up "Church of England Funerals Ltd". These faint flickerings of misdirected commercialism and half-hearted vulgarity are perhaps the most depressing aspect of Anglican attitudes today. But I do strongly agree with the synod that the convention of Church of England funerals ought to be preserved, for everybody, and even - horrible thought - promoted. I think there really is no better way in this country, unless one belongs firmly to another faith, to mark and to accept somebody's death.
I am rather surprised to find myself feeling this so strongly. I have always been an agnostic, so much so that I felt I couldn't get married in church or have my children christened. But recently, according to her wishes, my mother was buried in the churchyard of her parish church, which was also our parish church when we were children, heathens though we were. She was not a church-goer either, though always very much concerned with parish matters and the PCC. So it might have felt odd for her to have a proper funeral service, and odder still for me to arrange it, since I haven't darkened the church's door since the Sixties. Yet it was exactly right.
To say that might seem to say very little, but actually it is to say all that matters. No matter what she, or we, have thought about the teachings of the Church, or the existence of God, or the impossibility of life after death, this old and beautiful service was exactly right. The harsh poetry and the plain ceremony are right. It was right too to be able to choose our own readings, and to find that we chose what countless others have chosen before us. It is our tradition, and a tradition that has continued to accept us, no matter how little we have accepted it. And it is a tradition that sustained us, no matter how little we have sustained it. And otherwise, what do the Godless do? My unbelieving late father-in-law insisted on no fuss. His sons took his body to a crematorium alone, and then scattered his ashes on the finishing line at Newmarket; as alternatives go, that was pretty good, but I have never felt this gave a proper sense of an ending.
I had no idea that everyone has some sort of legal right to a parish funeral: I suspected the opposite, and felt awkward about asking the vicar, whom I hardly knew. And the first time I called him I did indeed get his answering machine - hardly surprising when he has five other parishes to look after. However, he soon called back and could not have been more understanding. He also, fortunately, is a man; I don't think my mother would have felt she had been properly buried if the vicar had been a woman. He made it clear that the funeral could be arranged exactly as we wanted.
I don't see why there needs to be any unseemly competition between the vicar and the undertaker. Our vicar in the country village and our undertaker in the market town appeared to know each other well, and to be in tactful communication, more or less unknown to us; they seemed to have things well arranged between them, with the undertaker as banker. Both parties must have made some money out of it, and I feel certain they had the satisfaction of having done something important well. I don't suppose there has been a funeral yet without a moment, at least, of black comedy, and we had ours - a little glimmer of Alan Bennett - but it hardly seemed to matter. The right spirit was there, the tradition was there and the awesome solemnity of the service was there; it made what was such a difficult thing seem oddly easy. It works so well, and I don't see that it shouldn't work equally well in cities too.
If the Church wants to keep all this alive, it should abandon the ring-a-rev scheme. It should concentrate on reminding undertakers of the advantages, to them of co-operating; there is no better and no more emotionally satisfactory deal the Church can offer than the Anglican drama of death. And it should keep reminding vicars of the advantages to them; a funeral is the one time when a good vicar is unequivocally needed by people who are usually indifferent and, I would guess, the one occasion likely to incline them, at last, to the Church.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, November 22, 1998
