What is in Kelvin's Head?

All Souls

02/11/2015

All Souls Day is a rehearsal for my own funeral.

I realised this a few years ago when someone commented that the All Souls Requiem at St Mary’s seemed to be a particularly important time of the year and was appealing to more people than it used to. When I sat and thought about it, I realised that what I was doing each year in preparing for it was preparing for my own funeral and that at some level, part of what gives me life and energy at St Mary’s is building a community that would know exactly what to do if I dropped down dead.

Some people might think that rather morbid but it isn’t. I don’t think that much about death. Keeping All Souls is actually a way of helping ourselves let the dead be dead without fixating constantly about them. After last night’s Requiem for All Souls it simply felt to me that all was as it should be. Those whom we care for had been commended to God’s love, we had prayed alongside one another in our remembering and we had done so in the most beautiful way we could do.

There are many things about All Souls which touch me. One is the use of the Eucharistic prayer for Easter. That’s what we do whenever there’s a funeral that is a Eucharist too. When someone dies there’s a snatch of Easter Day about the proceedings. In the first light of Easter, glory broke from the tomb, after all.

Last night’s requiem was sublime. The simple tunes of Rutter’s Requiem taking us on a pastoral journey. We saw that death is real. We saw that grief is raw. And we knew that God is love. The music was incredible – the choir literally singing to raise the dead.

At least, that’s how it was for me.

The double Feast of All Saints and All Souls is one that always takes my mind abroad too. I was in Sweden for it one year, the year before I was ordained. My memory is of people going to the graveyards and lighting candles on the graves. A little of the first snow of winter had fallen and there was mist swirling around the graveyard trees as people wandered the quiet pathways thinking about those who had died.

I remember someone telling me that they always lit candles for their parents and then crossed the graveyard to light another one on the grave of Dag Hammarskjöld – All Saints and All Souls always mingle.

And then three years ago I was in America at this time of year.

It seems to me that Hallowe’en has suffered rather at lot in its return trip back across the Atlantic to these shores. It seems now to be an excuse for very poor fancy dress bought from cheap outfitters by people who want to get drunk looking like a pirate or Wonderwoman.

Rather more interesting in the US these days is the set of traditions that the Latino people bring to this time of year. Some of the solemnity that northern Europeans cultivate when thinking about the dead is challenged by those who want to celebrate their dead with an enormous party.

This is what this time of year looks like in one of the churches that I visited during my sabbatical – All Saints’ Church in Chicago – a place which knows how to party.

In the midst of life we are in death.

And vice versa.

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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