Christopher Yokel, 'Life-In-Death', in Autumn Poems (2019).
November.
It is the month in which intimations of mortality are particularly evident .
With the glories of Autumn past, the landscape dulls, quietens, and prepares for Winter's arrival. The trees are bare, the days shorten and grow colder.
Another year of this earthly life is passing.
It is a month when my mind turns to the fitting character of the Prayer Book's The Burial of the Dead.
Yokel's words, written of Autumn's end and November days, could have also been composed to describe the Prayer Book's Burial office.
In mortality there is a sharpness / of perception - everything made bare and elemental.
The starkness of The Burial of the Dead is, contrary to its liturgical critics and their desire for something much less bracing, its great strength.
All else is stripped away. Death is confronted, not denied, not hidden behind liturgical clutter, not politely ignored.
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can take nothing out.
For I am a stranger with thee : and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.
In the midst of life we are in death.
It is this very making "bare and elemental" which opens us to the hope of the Resurrection proclaimed in The Burial of the Dead.
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
... in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.
It is because we confront "the bitter pains of eternal death" that we are brought to know that "this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality".
And this in Christ alone.
O merciful God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the resurrection and the life; in whom whosoever believeth shall live, though he die; and whosoever liveth, and believeth in him, shall not die eternally ...
A funeral liturgy that is cluttered, that presents other concerns, that seeks to be a celebration of the life that was, that avoids the reality of mortality - such a funeral liturgy fails to proclaim the hope of the life everlasting in Christ, the sharp focus of The Burial of the Dead.
Sentences, psalms, scripture, committal, the prayers and collect: this suffices for a funeral liturgy, with its unrelenting proclamation of the Resurrection in the very face of death.
Additions are too often chaff, unnecessary, empty distraction.
The Burial of the Dead is uncluttered and therefore profoundly centred on the the Resurrection hope, piercing the darkness, loss, and knowledge of our own mortality brought by "the last enemy".
In an age when insubstantial emotional froth characterises many funerals (secular and religious), Anglicans should learn afresh to again value the great strengths of the Prayer Book's The Burial of the Dead.
Cutting as it does through the froth and the urgent desire to deny our mortality, we confront the "bare and elemental" in The Burial of the Dead, that we might thereby encounter afresh the power of Christ's Resurrection.
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality; then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.
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