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The Commentary

A secular funeral

The person who had died would have called herself a humanist. She was in many ways a lovely person and always concerned to be fair and just in all her dealings, and a person to whom we owed a great deal as a family.

Originally, the plan was for the funeral to be conducted by a member of the Humanist Society, but as it turned out it was simply a civil ceremony. The waiting room at the crematorium in which we assembled prior to the ceremony in early September had a sentence etched in the glass of the large window which read: ‘There is only one religion although there are many expressions of it.’ In this case it would mean avoiding any reference to God altogether.

Thanking who?

As Christians in attendance we knew that others there might well have felt awkward about us and what we believed, but we wanted it all to go smoothly and for it to be a helpful time for everyone concerned, which we hope in a way it was. But what struck us, amid our tearful grief, was the upbeat tone of ‘thankfulness’ which the official who led the ceremony tried to set.

Thankful to whom? By and large the family and those attending were secular people. To the secular mind, there is no creator God, the giver of life, so whom were we meant to be thanking? The idea of ‘thanking’ the impersonal forces of physics and chance, which, according to the atheist, have brought life into being, certainly isn’t reasonable. Thankfulness only makes sense when it is expressed to someone not something. The only other possibility is to think in terms of thanking the deceased in retrospect for all the kindness and helpfulness of their lives. But in secular terms, after death that person has ceased to exist; so once again you are engaged in a rather meaningless charade. Unless, of course, you are expressing thanks to the deceased which you really should have given to her while she was still alive but failed to do so. And, if that is the case, it makes the service hardly a time for being upbeat but for self-recrimination and regret.

In sum, it seemed to us that our dear secular friends did not know what they were about. Something within them was telling them they ought to be thankful for a kind and (by comparison with other people) a very good life, but they had no one to thank. Such is the sad and contradictory lot of those who are ‘without hope and without God in the world’.

Love in a recession

Meanwhile, all this was taking place against the background of the severe economic downturn which is beginning to hit Britain. To our secular society life is about prosperity. But the great god Mammon is betraying us. There are hard times ahead, and during the recession money-rich Islamic Gulf states are likely to take over much more than our premiership football clubs.

But the predicted hard times, with food and fuel bills rising by leaps and bounds, may well provide local churches opportunities to care for our neighbours of whatever race or religion and perhaps to have new opportunities to share the good news of God’s love in Christ as rarely before. Now is the time not for churches to turn inward, but to start planning how to be helpful to their communities. Recently a government think-tank predicted that the recession will bring more crime and tension in society. From the churches it should bring more love.

John Benton