07 September, 2014

The consolations of faith: on leading on non-religious funeral | Shored Fragments

The consolations of faith: on leading on non-religious funeral | Shored Fragments:

I’ve done enough liturgical work to know that there are always riches
from which to borrow. That said, the Humanist material I discovered
surprised me – although on reflection the problem was predictable. Like
most contemporary ‘humanism’, it all failed rather badly to be
nonreligious. I looked at half-a-dozen or more published patterns for a
humanist funeral; every one borrowed central Christian texts, deleted
the obvious references to God, and then used the filleted remains to
shape the service. (Even Scripture was not immune; Eccl. 3 was several
times in evidence. John Donne’s Divine Meditation XVII was also
referenced more than once.) This of course reflects the reality – and
the tedious banality – of too much contemporary Western atheism: take a
philosophically-rich account of things; delete surface references to the
divine; and assume that what is left will be meaningful or coherent or
interesting. Nietzsche, the world hath need of thee…