Grumpy Old Priest

Usually I lose patience with Christians complaining how the modern world is directed infernally via a manual wagon, and how nobody understands them. But I've gibbed at one thing today. For the first time I'm getting draft orders of service for funerals direct from the undertakers' preferred printers rather than working out the running order with the families of the dead and then relinquishing any influence over what happens next. This afternoon the printer sent me a draft with 'Service of Thanksgiving for the Life of X' on the front, and for the first time I am emboldened to challenge it. I very much suspect it isn't the phrase the family themselves have asked for, but that it's the printers' or undertakers' default title for what happens at the crematorium, probably because it will fit all religious traditions.

But it isn't just 'thanksgiving' that happens. All sorts of things are, or may be, going on at a funeral service. From a Christian viewpoint there's the business of 'commending the dead to God'; but even putting that to one side there is loss to be acknowledged, pain to be comforted, and perhaps ambiguous feelings about the 'loved one' that will be bubbling under the surface (I've offered funerals where the congregation has had cause to be very divided in their attitude to the dead person). To take all that and wipe the bland word 'thanksgiving' over it is, even on a humanist reading, a weak, bloodless impoverishment of the truth, a truth which is multifaceted and layered. We are giving thanks, but not only giving thanks.

My suggested amendment of 'thanksgiving and commendation' isn't really much better, but it's something until I can think of an improvement. What it should be is simply a 'Funeral Service', or best of all a Funeral Office, which is what I put in the church service register - the officium proper to a funus, the corpse. But perhaps we are too squeamish to acknowledge what's really going on.