I was watching last week's 'Later...with Jools Holland' on BBC 2 and watched/listened to the performance in this video clip with some amazement. The Imagined Village seems to be a collection of people from the folk, rock and world music scenes. Its members include Martin and Eliza Carthy, Paul Weller and Billy Bragg. My friend Ollie, who posted this clip on YouTube (where I got it from), says that they are the best thing to happen to folk for years. He also says that the album is fantastic. I might just check it out. If you get fed up with the buffering speed of this clip then go to YouTube http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3QC2av7-_Ik#GU5U2spHI_4 I haven't quite sorted out how to embed YouTube in the blog. Enjoy...!
Monday 18 February 2008
Saturday 16 February 2008
Scattering more roses...
My ear was bent the other day about the current fashion for music at a crematorium funeral as the coffin descends from the catafalque. Apparently it has become noticeably more common over the past 6 months or so. My friend got quite angry about it - 'It's sentiment, not grief', and 'People want it because that's what they see on the TV in the soaps.' I couldn't possibly comment on the last as I don't watch soaps and don't have a TV most of the time anyway. (Although I can watch again via the internet, I suppose.) Technically it adds to the complexity of choreographing a funeral, both for the crematorium staff and also for the officiant, who has the job of making sure that eveything that is needed happens without rush and with dignity within the timeslot allocated, which can be as little as 20 mins at some crems.
I have some sympathy for the first point my friend made - I suspect that we have become unused to death and funerals in real life compared with our forebears. But we see a lot of them on the TV and in films and then we can only respond with sentiment, not grief as it isn't 'our' funeral. In fact, it's no one's funeral but a depiction of a funeral. So it wouldn't be surprising if sentiment gets mixed up in our real funerals more than perhaps it should. And these fictional funerals become our model for real funerals.
Picking up from a previous post, our local freebie paper recently carried a comment column by David Self this week about funerals. Quoting from it:
'Some of the saddest sights in Fenland are the wayside shrines at the scenes of road accidents. What [they] prove is that we no longer know how to mark a death. We've forgotten the old customs and resorted to ordering teddy bear or wreaths of yellow chrysanthemums and suffer uncomfortable half-hours in crematoria. Less than 100 years ago the death of a girl was marked by a procession through the village, her white-painted coffin carried by her school friends dressed also in white. Lads were buried in black-painted ones, carried by their mates dressed in their darkest clothes and black sashes. It was what you did. It gave you something to do.'
And David finishes with 'And if we revived the custom of having the coffin in the front room until the funeral and making the children visit it, they would grow up understanding the reality of death...'
I must be geting old because I think that he might be on to something here.
I have some sympathy for the first point my friend made - I suspect that we have become unused to death and funerals in real life compared with our forebears. But we see a lot of them on the TV and in films and then we can only respond with sentiment, not grief as it isn't 'our' funeral. In fact, it's no one's funeral but a depiction of a funeral. So it wouldn't be surprising if sentiment gets mixed up in our real funerals more than perhaps it should. And these fictional funerals become our model for real funerals.
Picking up from a previous post, our local freebie paper recently carried a comment column by David Self this week about funerals. Quoting from it:
'Some of the saddest sights in Fenland are the wayside shrines at the scenes of road accidents. What [they] prove is that we no longer know how to mark a death. We've forgotten the old customs and resorted to ordering teddy bear or wreaths of yellow chrysanthemums and suffer uncomfortable half-hours in crematoria. Less than 100 years ago the death of a girl was marked by a procession through the village, her white-painted coffin carried by her school friends dressed also in white. Lads were buried in black-painted ones, carried by their mates dressed in their darkest clothes and black sashes. It was what you did. It gave you something to do.'
And David finishes with 'And if we revived the custom of having the coffin in the front room until the funeral and making the children visit it, they would grow up understanding the reality of death...'
I must be geting old because I think that he might be on to something here.
Tuesday 12 February 2008
Everything for your glory...
No series of images for Lent this year (at least not yet, maybe later). Meanwhile here is something for the desktop or whatever. The text is from a song that seems to stick in my mind at the moment - although, perhaps tellingly, I remembered it incorrectly. Should be 'everything I am is for your glory'.
Thursday 7 February 2008
'And scatter roses in her hair...'
As some of my fellow ex-Ridley curates have commented elsewhere, I seem to be somewhere near the top of the Ridley Leavers 2007 Funerals list, although I am only averaging just over 2 a month since I started taking them. Up this way anyway there is a tendency for mourners to turn up at the church and cemetery clutching single roses to throw onto the coffin once it has been lowered. Sometimes the funeral director provides rose petals to be thrown in. And recently I took a funeral at a crematorium where the mourners turned up with single roses to put on the coffin on the catafalque (wonderful word!) before it descended. (Which they either forgot to do, or there was no occasion to do as no one had mentioned it to the funeral director or me.) Some funeral directors here say that it has been unusually busy since Christmas. Others say that it's always like this but what is unusual is the large number of people up to about 20 years old who have died - many in road traffic accidents. And there are some very large roadside shrines around at the moment.
Add this marking a death by doing something like making a shrine or throwing flowers onto the coffin to what seems like an increase in people flouting cemetery and churchyard rules for decorating graves, and I start wondering if there is a pastoral need that isn't being met. Churchyard graves can only have a suitable headstone of a suitable size and material with suitable wording, plus an integral plinth that may have an integral flower holder. Anything else is forbidden - for the very practical reason that it makes it possible to keep the weeds and grass under control with the minimum of effort and cost. But people put all sorts of things on the graves. They use lawn edging to build a border and cover the grave with marble or gravel chippings. They put plants, wreaths, scarves, rugby shirts, toys, photos, and flower holders on the grave. And they get upset when the churchwardens remove all the forbidden things. There is nowhere in a churchyard to put the stuff legitimately and it would take a faculty to create anywhere - if the powers-that-be agreed anyway.
The obvious place for commemorative stuff is the church itself - after all there are plenty of monuments in churches already. There is space in many churches for a remembrance corner of some sort where people could leave flowers or momentos, light a candle, write a prayer, pray, whatever, just sit for a while. But many of our churches are closed and locked except when there is a service. So there just isn't anywhere for 'stuff' other than the grave. I suspect that some of the increase in people visiting cathedrals owes something to this need to remember or do something when someone dies. It would be interesting to provide a place for graveside 'stuff' alongside specific pastoral ministry for those who put it there and see what happened.
I've got the second funeral of the week tomorrow...
Add this marking a death by doing something like making a shrine or throwing flowers onto the coffin to what seems like an increase in people flouting cemetery and churchyard rules for decorating graves, and I start wondering if there is a pastoral need that isn't being met. Churchyard graves can only have a suitable headstone of a suitable size and material with suitable wording, plus an integral plinth that may have an integral flower holder. Anything else is forbidden - for the very practical reason that it makes it possible to keep the weeds and grass under control with the minimum of effort and cost. But people put all sorts of things on the graves. They use lawn edging to build a border and cover the grave with marble or gravel chippings. They put plants, wreaths, scarves, rugby shirts, toys, photos, and flower holders on the grave. And they get upset when the churchwardens remove all the forbidden things. There is nowhere in a churchyard to put the stuff legitimately and it would take a faculty to create anywhere - if the powers-that-be agreed anyway.
The obvious place for commemorative stuff is the church itself - after all there are plenty of monuments in churches already. There is space in many churches for a remembrance corner of some sort where people could leave flowers or momentos, light a candle, write a prayer, pray, whatever, just sit for a while. But many of our churches are closed and locked except when there is a service. So there just isn't anywhere for 'stuff' other than the grave. I suspect that some of the increase in people visiting cathedrals owes something to this need to remember or do something when someone dies. It would be interesting to provide a place for graveside 'stuff' alongside specific pastoral ministry for those who put it there and see what happened.
I've got the second funeral of the week tomorrow...
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