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...

Researchers have found evidence that small brained hominins buried their dead and carved engravings into cave walls associated with the deceased - behaviours thought to be unique to large-brained humans and their ancestors ... Engravings on the wall of the cave system could be between 241,000 and 335,000 years-old, and consist of geometric shapes on surfaces that appear to have been smoothed in preparation for a pointed or sharp object to make the markings. Intentional designs of this kind that communicate a ‘message’ are considered to be a significant cognitive leap in human evolution, and it is seen here for the first time in small-brained human relatives. The recent discovery of such burial customs amongst our distant ancestors is suggestive of how care for the dead is 'natural' to our species. Indeed, it is such natural duties which Hooker first emphasises in his discussion of the Prayer Book burial rite: The end of funerall duties is first to show that love towardes the p...

Above all we praise you for the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, the true paschal lamb who was sacrificed for us; by dying he destroyed our death; by rising he restored our life ... The above is the proper preface for Easter in the Church of Ireland BCP 2004.  There are a number of significant contrasts with the 1662 preface but what has particularly caught my attention this Easter is the final line.  1662 ends with "and by his rising again hath restored to us everlasting life" (emphasis added).  Indeed, this is also seen in the equivalent preface in the CofE's Common Worship, TEC's BCP 1979, and Canada's BAS.  Ireland 2004, however, appears to be embarrassed by the idea of connecting the Resurrection with  everlasting life. That said, perhaps Ireland 2004's Easter preface does have the merit of more accurately reflecting the contemporary emphasis in much theology and Easter preaching, what we might describe as the 'we believe in ...

God's singu­lar bounty hath advanced some days to a superlative bright­ness. On Easter Day  I quoted from a Restoration era Easter sermon by John Torbuck, part of a collection of his sermons for feast days under the title Extraordinary Dayes .  In the preface to the collection, Torbuck defended the practice of observing festival days on the basis that God "hath made some days twice" through some signal and pe­culiar mercy".  Such, he says, "are the Festivals of Christs Incarna­tion, Resurrection, Ascensi­on, &c.".  He notes that such "days above days" are grounded in "Articles of our Creed".  These days, in other words, set before us the redemptive events which have secured our salvation.  This is why these days have "a superlative brightness". Torbuck's account of the festival days is suggestive of why it is good liturgical practice to describe the Sundays of Eastertide, contrary to conventional contemporary Anglican p...