What are we doing at this funeral?
Monday's state funeral for the Queen is a scaled-up version of what we do at any funeral, writes George Pitcher
Anyone who has presided at a funeral service will be familiar with what greets them when they turn around from the head of the procession in church. Sad faces, of course, pale and bereft in desolation; some serious and resigned, others looking towards the minister in expectation and not a little hope that we may have a magic answer.
But there’s another part of the expression on those faces and it’s one of bewilderment: Why are we here? What is happening? What’s all this about – this flummery, these flowers and these black ties, this person at the front in robes, reading sentences from scripture?
This bewilderment and these questions are playing out at a national level and on a grander scale ahead of the Queen’s funeral. I’ll come to that in a moment but, first, what is the purpose of any “ordinary” funeral? Because we may be able to scale-up the answer to that to grasp what we’re trying to do next Monday.
Any priest will have their own way of trying to address the bewilderment of mourners, including the nearest and dearest of the deceased, at their funeral. Anglicans are fond of absorbing three points from their clergy, so here is my trilogy of funereal purposes:
Offering up grief
Firstly (and perhaps principally), we quite obviously come to mourn our loss. This means, for those of us of faith at least, offering up our grief to the one who longs to bear it with us and for us. A more tangible metaphor that might be used is that we lay our grief at the foot of the cross – a visually physical act of joining our grief with the desolation and darkness of the crucifixion.
The important thing here is that we try to let that grief go – we still own it, but we acknowledge that it’s a very real part of Christian life since the very beginning of our story.
Secondly, we gather to comfort one another in our grief. This isn’t just an important part of sharing it, it also enables the love of God to overflow into the world through us. Of the many words for love in ancient Greek, this is agape, or caritas in Latin, which gives us our word “charity” – the human instinct, or spirit, to show love and comfort to those in distress.
Thirdly, we gather to resolve to use the time we have left in this world to shine as a light of love in the hearts of those who love us, as the one who has just departed this life so shone in ours. If you like, we come together in the hope that, when we are gone, we can justify a gathering-in-love of mourners too.
Metafunctions
All of these are what we might call metafunctions of the state funeral for the Queen. It’s an opportunity for a collective outpouring of national grief for who and what we have lost – and a safe and controlled opportunity for it. It’s also an opportunity to share and comfort one another in that grief – and to witness to the love of God in doing so. Finally, it’s a chance to follow her example in any way we can – serving others, pointing our lives towards a service of something that is greater than all of us.
That’s all about healthy grief. The management of grief is a complicated exercise. The human body and mind miraculously manage it, for most us, by dripping its symptoms gradually into our system – to suffer the enormity of it all at once would surely kill us. So it is that sometimes we will feel deep sadness (bursting into tears suddenly in the supermarket), anger (an irrational fury that they’ve left us) or denial (expecting them to walk through the door; taking two cups out of the cupboard for coffee).
Survivor guilt
But there can be unhealthy aspects to the processing of grief too. One of potentially the most harmful of these is survivor guilt. This will manifest itself most obviously in torturous mental sentences that start with “what if..?” or “if only..”.
In relation to a state or royal funeral, this symptom of grief may have been most apparent after the untimely death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. It’s dangerous to make unqualified generalisations, but the emotional seizure of the nation then may have had not a little to do with collective guilt: What if we hadn’t treated her as a form of media entertainment? If only we had seen her as a person rather than a character in a soap opera.
Again, however, note the physical and metaphorical response in those strange days , some 25 years ago. As the crowds laid a mountain of flowers outside Diana’s home, they may as well have been laying that guilt at the foot of the cross.
That will be a public urge that is missing from the Queen’s funeral, one hopes. By contrast, her time had come, after a life well lived. She is at grateful rest. It’s just that we who remain need to know what we’re doing, as we look on at her obsequies.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest
A version of this column appeared on PremierChristianity