Resurrecting Respect

Gazette -- week beginning 4 April 2004

Middle age is as strange a place as middle earth. At the same time as I feel content, fulfilled and full of energy, I find myself torn between the realisation that there are things I miss from society. It must be a sign of growing old when I realise I am somewhere between nostalgia for my parents' world and the realisation that I am an embarrassment to my children's.

The Lewis in which my children have grown up is (necessarily) different from the one in which I was reared. Increasing secularisation, the advent of the new technology and the changes of a new generation have combined to make the world a very different place. Not all change is bad, of course; much is inevitable.

Yet there are features of the past which we would do well to recover. That fact was brought home to me last week. It was a particularly busy time. We had a week of communion services, followed by a book launch. Somewhere amid all the services and other pastoral commitments I had to conduct three funerals and attend a fourth.

I have always regarded the burial of the dead as both one of the most solemn duties of my office and one of the greatest privileges of my work. It is solemn in that death and bereavement remind us of our own mortality and of the sovereign rights of the Creator over us. He has fixed our great appointment with death, and it is our dignity that, unlike the rest of animate creation, we are accountable to him. But it is a privilege to preside over such occasions; for those who mourn, the rites of passage associated with death produce the most memorable and most lingering impressions; for any family to admit me, as a Christian minister, into these private and intimate critical moments is something I have never taken for granted.

In fact, sometimes I wonder how much longer that privilege will be given to the church. With the increasing process of secularisation going on in our island, so that everything sacred is gradually being eroded and erased from our worldview, I would not be at all surprised to hear of humanistic funeral services taking place soon. The Humanist Society of Scotland has already appointed 'Officiants' to conduct family ceremonies on the occasion of the death of a loved one. Their brochure suggests that humanist services are much more meaningful than religious ones, and that church services are often insincere, cold and inappropriate.

Sadly, on that last point, the humanists may well be right. But they are wrong to imagine that the elimination of the supernatural is any more meaningful or 'easier' a way to cope with death than the religious alternative. When I conduct a funeral, I try to make it as relevant and significant as possible, and, unlike the humanists, I do not encourage weeping into the face of a cold, loveless universe, but in the presence of a caring and personal God.

However, there is something I miss from my childhood in connection with funerals; and with every such occasion I long to retrieve it even more. One of the first things our generation was taught in school was the need to respect a funeral cortege. That meant at least two things: standing still as a funeral passed, and remaining silent while the procession was passing by. It was a tradition, but it was one of the best.

Now it is more noticeable in the breach than in the observance. Take the funerals I attended last week. At one of them, in the town, I noted how few people stood still as the procession was about to leave the church. Pedestrians not only kept walking, but kept talking as the coffin was borne away. At another, I noticed children on bicycles following the cortege with hardly any distance between them. At another, as the men were lining the street ready to move away, a car simply turned the corner, drove past the coffin and through the line of men in the procession. And, increasingly, from within the cortege itself, on the road and by the graveside, I note how much talking there is among those who are attending the funeral.

Where has our respect for the dead gone? How have we reached the point where the funerals of our fellow-men and women fail to cause us to stop and be silent? If I have noticed anything in my journey from youth to middle age -- and especially from childhood to ministry -- it is that the business of death in Lewis has lost its impact, and perhaps even its value.

What are the factors which contribute to this? Could it be that our increasingly frenetic society, in which we have no time to stop, has affected this area too? Growing pressures which combine to make life a marathon of breakneck speed mean that, even though others may die, we will not stop.

Could it also be the case that with the breakdown of a genuine sense of community, funerals have lost their communal interest? If we do not care about others while they are alive, why should we care about them when they are dead? We are aware that we have neighbours only because we see movement as they leave home in the morning and return in the evening; but apart from that we have no interaction with them. It is a small step then to devaluing the significance of their death. If their lives will not cause us to stop, why should their deaths?

Or could it actually be that the humanistic, atheistic worldview that we are being sold, which has already led to the death of the Sabbath and the rise of an anti-Christian generation, has itself contributed to our devaluing of human dignity? Is it possible that the reason we have sold away any sense of solemnity, seriousness or silence with the death of others is because nothing matters but ourselves? Unless God is given his place in our thinking, we rob man of his dignity and life of its value. Having dethroned God, we have opened the door to abortion on demand, same-sex marriage and legalised euthanasia. The one thing we have not done is enhance the value of human dignity.

So the least we can do, when death makes its final assault on our integrity and our dignity, is to stop, stand still, and remain silent for the few moments that it takes to carry the mortal remains to their ultimate destination. And we would do well to use that interim to reflect on what it means for ourselves to have an appointment with death and a final, ultimate meeting with God.

? Iain D. Campbell 2004