Leaving

Someone once said that our whole journey through life is really just the process of leaving. Obviously, this must have been a very wise person, since I'm left wondering exactly what his words really mean! For the believer, life, even as a vale of tears, can be seen as a preparation for the life beyond, for eternity; he or she will be aiming to live this life with the leaving of it very much in mind ("Live this day as if thy last" - as the morning hymn reminds us). For the unbeliever this life is all there is: after death, nothing; yet even so, the journey of life is again and again about leaving. We move from place to place, and from relationship to relationship (and even within a relationship, its essential nature will change over time). We leave behind the things of childhood, the excesses and passions or youth, and, eventually, the certainties, clear vision and strength of body that in our middle years we thought we'd keep for ever. There's much else we leave - that's in the nature of a journey.

The funeral I attended and assisted at today was a secular one, though much of what it contained suggested a hope if not a firm expectation of an existence beyond this one, and of being re-united with friends. It was well taken, and it was both a celebration of a life and of the person whose life it was, and a statement of the love and affection within which that person will live on, at least in memory. And of course, it was also a leave-taking; we leave people and places and circumstances - and they also leave us. And we need to mark that, to take time to consider, reflect, pray if that's what we do, in order to cope with the change.

We need ways, ceremonies, words, music that enable us to cope with leaving, and with being left. Religion can provide these, but sometimes, perhaps too often in the past, what it has provided has been impersonal at a time when the personal is most important, demanding at a time when people have least to give, dogmatic at a time when people are least sure about what they believe. Thankfully, most of the church funerals I have recently attended have been better at that - but, dare I say, they have been better at least in part because they have sat lightly both to the liturgical material and, more importantly, to some of the liturgical instructions. It is better for the Christian minister to give a sense of his or her own faith without requiring too much of others, than for a service to insist that all who attend pretend to a faith they may not share; and it is better for a family to feel received, supported, nourished, cuddled even, than to be sermonised at or to have imposed upon them a liturgical exactness sure to pass over most heads.

It's pleasing and reassuring to find there's been a fair amount of change for the better - certainly from the days long ago when as a green young curate I was advised not even to mention the name of the deceased in the service, and certainly never to use affectionate family or nick-names. In those days, it seemed (or was made to seem) to us more important to be doing the right thing liturgically - and therefore requiring people to conform to that - than to be creating sacred space in which family and friends can do the leave-taking they need to do, in a way that makes sense where they find themselves to be.