Jeltje Gordon-Lennox - Crafting Meaningful Funeral Rituals A Practical Guide : A Practical Guide.

CRAFTING
MEANINGFUL
FUNERAL

RITUALS

A PRACTICAL GUIDE

Jeltje Gordon-Lennox

Foreword by Margaret Holloway

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia

CONTENTS

RITUAL TOOLBOX

LIST OF TOOLS WITH THEIR ICONS

Pages marked with a can be downloaded from www.jkp.com/catalogue/book/9781785923890 .

FOREWORD

Funerals go back a long way. Evidence of the living burying the dead exists from pre-historic times, accompanied by ever more elaborate associated practices. Central to these was, and is, the funeral. We discover a curious conundrum when we study funerals and memorials over time and across civilizations: the present frequently mirrors the forms and practices of the past yet significant cultural shifts can also be observed at particular points in history (Inall and Lillie 2018). One such shift began in the developed world in the second half of the twentieth century. In Britain, for example, mourners began to express dissatisfaction with the traditional religious funeral, alienated by pronouncements and rites which they found meaningless and a ceremony which provided neither comfort nor a reflection of the person who had gone (Littlewood 1992). In 1980, Barbara Smoker, President of the National Secular Society, set out the purposes of a secular funeral to the UK Cremation Society Conference, including the requirement that it should provide the opportunity for ceremonial and ritual leave-taking of the lost loved one.

Decades later, very few families and friends choose to conduct the funeral themselves (in the way Smoker had envisaged) and a leading UK journalist expressed dissatisfaction with the celebration-of-the-life funerals that have become the twenty-first century norm, describing traditional rituals as, infinitely more cathartic (Coward 2002). The reason for this unease, we discover, is that bereaved families and friends may need help to translate their deepest feelings into words and actions that meet those needs (Holloway et al . 2013). It is this void that ritual practitioners, like Jeltje Gordon-Lennox, seek to address.

The notion of the life-centred funeral, in which the funeral address (if there is one) takes the form of a eulogy, is now firmly established in secular culture and has largely replaced theological content in funerals taken by a Christian religious minister. Personalized, customized funerals, with funeral directors keen to facilitate choice and celebrants of all persuasions committed to providing the funeral that the families want in content, style and tone, presenting the person who has died through the recollections of those who mourn them, may seem exactly what contemporary society requires.