I attended two funerals today (in a professional capacity). Both were well attended, very moving, very personal (and I remember with some sadness and shame how impersonal funerals tended to be when I started out as a minister many years ago). Both were very well taken, one by a humanist celebrant, the other by an Anglican priest. Both, I think, addressed the need both to celebrate and affirm a particular human life and the person who lived it, and also to look, each of us there, at our own life journey and how we are using what we have and are.
I have great sympathy with humanism, which at its simplest states that it is not necessary to believe in God in order to live a fulfilled, useful, moral and caring human life. I can't really argue with that, even though personally I do believe in God. The fact is, I don't connect well to the pedantry that seems to be a feature of much theology, and have never been conservative, still less fundamentalist, in my approach to the Christian faith, since my sense is that to do that takes me away from the example of Christ, rather than leading me to him. As I read the Gospels, what I discern there is that how I live is clearly more important than what - in detail - I might claim to believe.
Yet I am a Christian. Ultimately, I do take that leap, or sometimes just a step, of faith, so that if I am a humanist, I am a Christian humanist (and isn't that where humanism began?). My non-believing friends may accuse me of weakness, needing to have God there as a backstop or advisor or imaginary friend (that last being a taunt that gets thrown around quite a lot by those who believe that atheism and growing up are one and the same. I don't).
I on the other hand find myself feeling sorry for those whose limitations as regards vision, imagination and spiritual awareness mean they can't take that step into a wider and deeper sense of things that includes, ultimately, not only a sense of myself as spiritual but an awareness of God that, with time and practice becomes not only idea and philosophy but also relationship. Is it that I can't live without that prop or security blanket? It certainly does not feel like that to me; indeed, I sometimes think it would be such a whole lot easier all round if I didn't believe (and, by the way, I could do with the Church making things easier for me sometimes; I read the letters page of Church Times, and despair).
Of course, there is the whole heaven and hell thing - well, heaven mostly, we'd rather think that we go somewhere nice, wouldn't we? One funeral today spoke firmly about this life being all we have; the other included a rather lovely story that was intended to steer us toward a belief in life after physical death. I am sufficient of a mainstream Christian, despite the Church's best efforts, to have a living and settled faith in the resurrection of Christ, and this not as a one off but (quoting Paul) a first-fruits; but life after death doesn't play that much of a part in my personal thinking. I tend to want to live as though this life were all, and hope perhaps to be surprised by the hereafter. Anything else, and perhaps I run the risk of losing or wasting those precious days and hours and minutes that - for me - are God's gift, born of his creation, and given to me to use lovingly, wisely and well.
Having said all of that, even the first funeral, the humanist one, spoke of the ways in which we live on in memories, in our genetic inheritance if we have children and grandchildren, and in the impact we have made on others by our friendships, our work and the way we have lived. From a Christian perspective, I say amen to that, and would hardly want to say anything more; after all, I know I can't earn my way into heaven, nor do I want to be scared into being good by the threat of hell. I want to live well and lovingly because I believe that is the highest calling on me - to live as though other people matter as much as I do (and other creatures, too, I think I'd want to add). The Bible tells us that if we love God, we prove and demonstrate that by loving our neighbour as ourself - these two loves are the one and greatest commandment, according to Jesus. And to love my neighbour as myself would also seem to me to be a profoundly humanist thing to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment