Rites of Loss
On our rituals of grief
[[Just some house-keeping before today’s post. With 146 posts and counting, it can be hard to keep track of things around here. So I've implemented a tagging system. That means that all my posts, past and present, are tagged for some of their major themes, and you can see all posts on a given topic by clicking on the appropriate tag at the top of this index page. Useful if you want to read everything here I've written on a particular topic, or if you're looking for a particular post. The system isn't perfect though.]]
I am currently taking a class on folklore, which is not an area of study I have ever found myself in before. Like most people, you probably have zero idea of how folklore is defined, so let me enlighten you - folk lore is cultural knowledge shared by any particular social group, whose transmission is shared person to person, and so it's marked by variation (there's no one definitive version) and tradition (it's handed-over person-to-person, not transmitted one-to-many).
In this class we recently spent some time looking at the traditional practice of keening - a ritualised form of singing/wailing led by (professionalised) women for the dead. This has parallels, naturally, to many other cultures in which loud, expressive wailing is what you do for the dead. You can still catch glimpses of this every time the news plays footage of public funerals in the middle east.
In the Scottish Islands this practice died out in the last 18th century. The bagpipes took over, men took over the social role of dealing with funerals, and the impact of protestant Christianity caught up with things, deeming it inappropriate.
All of which is a long introduction to today's topic, funerals and our rituals of grief. Rites and rituals (can) have tremendous power, to the extent that they are habituated practices imbued with meaning. And gathering to send off the dead is one of those points where everything matters.
Which is why Priya Parker, in her The Art of Gathering, spends time telling you of a funeral go wrong. If the first words out of the officiant's mouth at a funeral are logistics, you have done it wrong. Because you have dissipated and squandered the expectant energy.
What is a funeral? Is it primarily a gathering to mourn the loss, or to celebrate the person's life? Those are two very different purposes for gathering, and those gatherings have two different shapes. I suspect that broadly speaking most funerals (in my social context) have shifted towards "a celebration of life". Which, honestly, I'm not entirely on board with. It seems to me part of our avoidance of death. Even when the person is dead and gone, we want to not think about that but rather think of what is positive and life-affirming.
As a Christian, however, I think the good news of Jesus ought to change, and have changed, our funeral practices. That is, we do not grieve as those without hope. Precisely the hope of the resurrection transforms our view of death, and transforms our funeral rites. Balancing the comfort and hope of resurrection life in relation to the real grief of death is a hard ask. So I am not suggesting we all wind the clock back and wail like it's the end of the world, but I am suggesting that Christian hope doesn't reduce death to an afternoon nap, "oh well, don't be too sad, you'll see them in an hour".
What we lose, though, in our informal age where we lack corporate and enduring rites, where we lack liturgies1 for these kinds of things, is that we lack rites and rituals imbued with meaning that help us signpost and signal to each other what's going on and what it means.
When mourners dress in black, for example when Amish women dress in black for prescribed periods, this signifies something others. It says, "this person lost someone and is mourning". Which tells everyone else to treat them accordingly.
In contrast to the thanks a friend expressed recently, for "seeing them in their grief". Which was totally appropriate, but made me wonder if one of our problems is rendering grief invisible and privatising mourning. Our rituals of loss end at the funeral, and then we (publicly) act like the show is over and life goes on. We know this isn't true, but we don't have or utilise the cultural tools to say otherwise.
If I'm offering anything here today, it's the suggestion that other ways of doing and being are possible, and that we ought to be intentional about creating rituals, rites, liturgies, practices, habits. We are not just products of culture, nor consumers, but also producers. Every 'quaint little custom' began somewhere with someone doing something. That someone could be you.
When I say "liturgy", don't think that I mean we lack forms of service - we have plenty of them; nor that we need to be necessarily having something that looks like a more traditional service. I mean "liturgy" in a broad sense as meaning-invested cultural practices with transcendent significance.