The first humanist funeral I attended was bad enough. A funeral is not a philosophy lecture. Yet the humanist who oversaw the service saw fit to give what I came to realise is the almost obligatory advertisement for humanism, by reading out a passage from Lucretius which argues that, since we don’t worry about the time before birth when we don’t exist, neither should we worry about the time after death when we don’t exist. I almost stuck my hand up to make a comment. ‘Please, Miss,’ I wanted to say, ‘surely that’s because the time before birth is in the past? We don’t worry about the time we went to the dentist last year. We worry about the next time we are going.’
I might also have added that I used to teach this very text in a philosophy course on life and death, and that although of interest historically, taken out of context like that, the points made were full of flaws. But that would have been of secondary import compared to the other source of my discomfort. The bloke in the box had studied Greats at Oxford. ‘Oh, appropriate to quote Lucretius, then’, one might think. But that’s not what I thought. How inappropriate, for someone who gave no apparent sign of insight into the text, to be speaking at the funeral of someone who’d studied ancient philosophy and who would surely have some interesting things to say. No, that was not the point, to honour this particular person. The point was to ram humanism down our throats.
‘I’m quite sure he wasn’t a humanist’, I thought to myself all through the service. I’m not even sure he was an atheist. Maybe just an agnostic. But he never showed to me any trace of much if any grand faith in the human race and its progress, quietly sociable as he was. He just did an honest day’s work, provided for his family, and sat in the corner getting quietly sozzled in a charmingly genial, hospitable, cultured sort of way. Low key suburban kind of humanism, if it was humanism at all.
The next humanist funeral which looms large and horrible in my memory was one in which the person leading the service more or less pointed to the coffin and declared, with a kind of defiance which made ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ sound like a soothing lullaby, that in the coffin was simply a corpse; the person was gone; there was no life after death, no continuation whatsoever of the human soul, no such thing; that was it, finito. Well, that’s what a lot of people believe, as we all know, and maybe it’s true, but no need to rub it in. If someone says ‘in sure and certain hope of the resurrection’ one is at least free to dismiss this as a more dramatic version of Father Christmas coming down the chimney, and little harm is done. To chortle in front of the grieving that ‘yes, you’re right, he’s dead, dead, dead as a fucking dodo, deal with it’ had me for one running from the crematorium to the nearest glass of sherry.
Uncle John had a humanist funeral as well. Funny he lived to the age of 94 without mentioning his beliefs to us. I knew he was a very committed head teacher. I knew he was a fanatical lover of classical music. I knew he was extremely interested in Welsh history, that he’d also travelled to historic sides in the near east. Never knew he was a humanist, though. Must have been too shy to tell us.
The most distressing of all was the funeral of a friend who’d been a life-long Catholic, whose family gave her a humanist funeral. Maybe there’s something she never told me, but even had she had a reversal of the last minute death bed conversion, and had a death bed loss of faith, it was quite a stretch of my imagination to see her as a humanist. I mean, I thought humanists had great faith in the human race. This friend was always and unstoppably interested in people. In fact, she told me that she didn’t want to die because she was nosy and always wanted to find out what happened next. But a humanist? Great faith in people? She had a great love for many people, but a love that endured despite being extremely conscious, extremely perceptive, of the flaws of the human race. Is that humanism?
What distresses me about all these particular cases that I have known of – and there are more – is that in most of these, it seemed to me that those organising the funeral had fallen for the claim that a humanist funeral was simply some neutral alternative to a religious service. But this is false. In many cases, the celebrant or whatever they are called, used the occasion to proselytise humanism. It’s just not appropriate at any funeral. It’s certainly not appropriate if the person who’s dead wasn’t a humanist; it distracts from the real purpose, to honour their life, their particular being. A quietly self-effacing vicar, who more than likely will understand full well if the deceased had no steady faith, or even none at all, is a better bet for a discreet service that allows us to focus on the person, and not on some new semi-articulated, semi-creed. Forgive me if I sound cynical, humanists, but you’re the guys who insist on having such high hopes of the human race, so if I let you down, you’ve got your over-high expectations to blame.
Moreover, it seems to me that in many cases, those who have lost the faith of their upbringing, or who never had a faith, don’t just seem to replace that with the faith in humanity that humanism seems to require. Just as likely, perhaps more likely, faith is lost, or never found, because of a general agnosticism and uncertainty, or because of a general failure to find faith in anything grander than the domestic and other smaller comforts of life. That surely can’t be humanism – ‘he loved his wife and kids and enjoyed their annual holiday, and thought his job was sort of okay really’???
Paula Boddington