laudable Practice

The loss of religion makes real loss difficult to bear; hence people begin to flee from loss, to make light of it with Disneyfying ornaments ... - Sir Roger Scruton, ' The Work of Mourning '. If there is one word that cannot be reconciled with the Prayer Book's The Burial of the Dead , it is 'kitsch'.  There is no room for kitsch in a Prayer Book funeral.  The seriousness of death and the reality of resurrection are sharply set before us: sentimentality, which attempts to obscure the first and ignore the second, is banished.  In the very midst of death, The Burial of the Dead proclaims a robustly Christocentric vision.  Here "Disneyfying ornaments" have no place for they are exposed as trite and insubstantial. Here hope is firmly rooted in the truth and substance of Christ. 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...

In mortality there is a sharpness / of perception - everything made bare and elemental. 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...

On this penultimate day of November, and on the cusp of Advent, we draw to a close this short series of posts meditating upon the month of the departed through the words of Jeremy Taylor. In this extract from his sermon at the 1657 funeral of Sir George Dalston, a Cumberland Royalist, Taylor turns to what are, I think, the most significant words in the Prayer Book Order of Burial : I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: Even so, saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labours. Introduced by Cranmer in BCP 1549, this remained an enduring feature of burial rites in the Prayer Book tradition. Said at the graveside immediately after the committal, it defines the quiet and gentle hope which underpins the Prayer Book's Order of Burial: the faithful departed are now at rest . No post-mortem pains await them. No urgent prayers need be offered for them. We are to carry no fears for them. They are, in Christ, at res...

From Bishop Bull's sermon ' The Middle State of Happiness or Misery ', an extract which can function as an exposition of the quiet, trusting piety of the Prayer Book Order for the Burial of the Dead, expressed in the invocation of Revelation 14:13 at the graveside, the Lord's Prayer, and the prayer following: Almighty God, with whom do live the  spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, are in joy and felicity ... It is this "place of full security" that Bull sets forth, to our comfort: This discourse is matter of abundant consolation to all good men, when death approacheth them. They are sure, not only of a blessed resurrection at the last day, but of a reception into a very happy place and state in the mean time. They shall be immediately after death put in the possession of paradise, and there rejoice in the certain expectation of a crown of glory, to be bes...

When Judges were instead of Kings, and Hophni and Phinehas were among the Priests, every man did what was right in his own eyes, but few did what was pleasing in the eyes of the Lord ...  And so Jeremy Taylor begins the Preface of his A Collection of Offices . Published in 1657, when any notion of a restoration of the monarch and episcopacy was not seriously entertained, Taylor was providing liturgical texts to be used in the place of the prohibited Book of Common Prayer: But because things are otherwise in this affair then we had hop'd, and that in very many Churches in stead of the Common Prayer which they use not, every man uses what he pleases, and all men doe not choose well, and where there are so many choosers there is nothing regular ... how much better the Curates of souls may help themselves with these or the like offices, then with their own extempore. In addition to divine service, Curates of souls, of course, also administered the occasional offices. This being so, A ...

From Bishop Bull's sermon ' The Middle State of Happiness or Misery ', an extract illustrating how Wisdom 3:1 was understood as summarising the Scriptural hope for the post-mortem state, over and against the teaching of purgatory: even in the Old Testament, we have a full testimony given to this truth, that the soul subsists after the death of the body, by Solomon, where, describing man's death and dissolution, he saith, "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."  Whereas man consists of two parts, body and soul, the condition of these two, when a man dies, will be very different: for the body being at first taken out of the dust of the earth, and so of a corruptible constitution, shall go back into the earth again, and moulder into dust; but the soul, as it is of another and more excellent original, (as being at first inspired immediately by God Himself into the body,) shall not perish with the body,...

Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying is a text for November days, the month of the departed. The final section of the work is "A peroration concerning the contingencies, and treatings of our departed friends after death, in order to their buriall, &c.". Addressing our duties to the departed, it sets forth what we might term a Prayer Book piety with regards to mourning. This is immediately seen in the exhortation against ostentatious ceremonies for the departed - which would, of course, be the very opposite of the sparse, reserved nature of the Prayer Book Burial of the Dead : When we have received the last breath of our friend and closed his eyes, and composed his body for the grave, then seasonable is the counsell of the son of Sirach: Weep bitterly and make great moan, and use lamentation as he is worthy, and that a day or two, lest thou be evil spoken of; and then comfort thy self for thy heavinesse. But take no grief to heart; for there is no turning again, thou shalt not ...

From Bishop Bull's sermon ' The Middle State of Happiness or Misery ', an extract rejecting both the doctrine of purgatory and speculative theories about the post-mortem state, resting instead in a conventionally Reformed understanding of "the plain doctrine of the Holy Scriptures", with no need to go beyond the "modesty of the apostolic Doctors". Bull here echoes how the Prayer Book Burial of Dead - a graveside prayer of which is quoted in this extract - rests in the promises of Scripture and eschews fanciful speculations: I have shewn you, that the Apostolic writers were wont to express the different place and state of good and bad men presently after death, by this and the like phrases, that they went to their "own proper, due," or "appointed places": that is, to places agreeable to their respective qualities, the good to a place of happiness, the wicked to a place and state of misery ... I have now said all that I can think necess...

When they come to the grave, while the corpse is made ready to be laid into the earth, the Priest shall say, or the Priest and Clerks shall sing: Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow ... To walk in a churchyard during a dark, cold November day is to walk upon ground sanctified by a liturgy offered numerous times over the years, in some cases over centuries. What is more, it is a liturgy offered in the very face of mortality and death, as Comber describes in his commentary on the occasional office s:  Being come to the grave, which is by the Jews called "the long habitation,” and by Christians "the bed of rest;" whilst the corpse is made ready to be put into it ... our Church hath drawn up a most pious meditation for the blessing and sanctifying of our own souls, and the application of this example to our spiritual advantage. And it is there, in the ve...

November is a month for churchyards. As Autumn declines, the days shorten, and the splendour of the leaves falls, the season's intimations of mortality are a reflection of the churchyard, the place where "In the midst of life we are in death" is spoken at the graveside. It is also the month of the dead: beginning with All Saintstide and the commemoration of the faithful departed; moving into the sombre observances of Remembrancetide; and ending on the cusp of Advent, when the great collect will again proclaim "he shall come again in his glorious Majesty to judge both the quick and the dead". It is indeed a month for walking around churchyards, reflecting on the hour of death and the life of the world to come. The meaning of the churchyard finds liturgical expression in a prayer approved by the Lower House of Convocation in 1712, from a form for the consecration of churches : O God, Who hast taught us in Thy holy word that there is a difference between the spirit...

It is the day after All Saints' Day.  But, no, this is not All Souls' Day.  The classical Prayer Book calendar has no place for such a commemoration, for sound, coherent theological reasons .  The faithful departed are not a category apart from those whom we celebrated yesterday, "thy blessed Saints" who have entered into "those unspeakable joys, which thou hast prepared for them that unfeignedly love thee". This conviction finds its defining expression in the commemoration of the faithful departed in the Prayer for the Church Militant: And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom. The quiet, abiding hope of these words, entirely without urgent petition or fearful concern, encapsulates the Church's prayer at the graveside , quoting Revelation 14:13: "for they rest from their l...

As we entered into late-October, the parish choir sang for the anthem, during the administration of the Holy Communion, Purcell's 'Thou knowest, Lord': Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; Shut not thy merciful ears unto our pray'rs; But spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty. O holy and most merciful Saviour, Thou most worthy Judge eternal, Suffer us not at our last hour, For any pains of death to fall away from Thee. The words, of course, are from the 1662 Burial rite, said by the priest "when they come to the grave". It is, then, a prayer rooted in and flowing from a stark recognition of our mortality, of our dependence upon "God most mighty" at the hour of our death. Purcell's setting, however, ensures that we understand this prayer to be the prayer of faith, not of desperate, uncertain pleading. There is nothing harsh or incessant about the setting. It embodies the quiet, reserved but abiding hope of the Prayer Book Burial rit...