Death Symposium – The Revd Dr Peter Anthony

Death, be not proud’: Dying, Death & Destiny

A record of the Symposium held in The Abbey Centre, 34 Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BU on Saturday 18 November 2023, organised by The Society of the Faith.

The Revd Dr Peter Anthony: Death online – the care of the dying and the bereaved, last rites and funerals in the digital age

The Revd Dr Peter Anthony is Vicar of All Saints Margaret Street, having previously been vicar of St Benet’s Kentish Town, in the diocese of London. He has also served as Junior Dean of St Stephen’s House and Junior Chaplain of Merton College, Oxford. Having studied modern languages at Magdalen College, Oxford, his main theological interest lies in patristic scriptural interpretation.

REVD DR ANTHONY: My role at the end of this is to wrap up and shut up really, is it not: to draw things to a conclusion? I would like to address a rather curious but definitely noticeable trend that seems – to me at least – almost to have sprung out of nowhere over the past two or three years. I am talking about the sudden re-emergence of the liturgical catafalque. Do not worry if you do not know what one is, I will explain it in a moment, but I have been asked to address questions in this slot on the care of the dying and bereaved, and especially to think about how we respond to them liturgically in the light of the new phenomenon of online worship. I think the renewed popularity of this thing called the catafalque, in some quarters, tells us a lot about how people want to commemorate the dead and make sense of loss liturgically, in a post-modern context, but also about the potential that some forms of online worship have to participate in that process and contribute to people’s experience of bereavement.

So, let me begin with a question: what on earth is a catafalque? It is a liturgical custom in the western Latin Church that seemed to have been almost entirely abolished in the 1960s during the liturgical reforms that took place during that period. A catafalque is essentially an empty coffin set up on trestles. The coffin itself is usually covered with a funeral pall which is a large black piece of silk that can sometimes be very beautifully embroidered although others can be quite simple and unadorned. The aim is for the construction to look like there is a coffin present.

Some of the grandest catafalques into the 19th century were enormous confections with baroque sepulchres and columns and urns all tiered up on a ziggurat with a fake coffin on the top. It is how I hope I will be commemorated in my parish after my death! Some of the simplest, in poorer parishes and more austere municipalities, were sometimes just a few orange crates nailed together to look like a coffin, with a pall covering them up in an act of theatrical make believe, disguising the fact that they are just a few old boxes. No matter how exalted or how lowly the catafalque is, it is usually surrounded by at least six candle sticks with unbleached candles in them.

A catafalque was generally used at a solemn requiem at which either the remains of the departed were not present. or where all the faithfully departed were being commemorated on an occasion like Old Souls’ Day. At the end of the requiem the priest offers a rite described as the Absolution of the Dead, in which the soul of the departed is prayed for and as a sign of the intensity of that prayer the catafalque itself ‑ this empty box ‑ is sprinkled with water even though it contains no body. I suppose you could say that the departed is honoured symbolically through use of a catafalque that contains absolutely nothing at all.

This may sound to some of you a bit like something from a gothic horror show or a funeral director’s pantomime. Indeed, that seems to have been the reaction of the liturgical reformers in the 1960s. The catafalque came to be regarded as something, I suppose you could describe, as liturgically fraudulent. It was pretending to be something it was not. It was also felt, I think, to be over tincturing the requiem rites with a sepulchral mawkishness that appeared to be at the expense of an emphasis on the Resurrection and Christian hope. It was got rid of. Requiems using the colours violet and white were introduced and other ways of commemorating all the faithfully departed on occasions like All Souls’ Day such as reading out long lists of the names of the departed.

But I would like to suggest that there was a positive and useful side to the catafalque which it might be good to explore for just a few moments. I would particularly to like to draw on our experience at All Saints, Margaret Street, which is the church where I am the vicar. The idea behind use of a catafalque, I think, is that we often pray best when we have a visual or physical focus for our prayer. This is even more the case on occasions when words do not really come easily or where we are overwhelmed by sadness or emotion and cannot find the language to express to God what we feel.

A good example of this in another context might be kissing the Cross on Good Friday. On a day when it can be difficult to explain in words our emotions and thoughts, that kiss during the Liturgy of the Passion, can express our thanks and our praise more eloquently than a thousand words could. We know we are not kneeling at the foot of the actual Cross that Jesus died on, but God uses our imagination to take us there in spirit, as we use our physical posture of kneeling and kissing to express our devotion and thanks to Christ. Through that act, the mystery we celebrate on Good Friday somehow becomes alive in a particular way, and is made personal and real to the individual worshiper.

Another example of the same process at work is the Cenotaph in Whitehall. The Cenotaph is in fact a catafalque. Its name come from the Greek for an empty tomb. The empty space, which we know is not an actual grave, symbolises the presence of the fallen, and in referencing it and saluting it and marching past it, we honour the war dead and call them to mind.

I would argue that a catafalque has a unique capacity to do a number of things when we gather to pray for the dead which still chime with the culture in which we live. The first is to make the genetic particular. By this I mean when we gather to pray for the departed on All Souls’ Day, we are praying for all the departed and we are also praying for our own departed loved ones. The catafalque manages to embody and represent both those things. It stands as a sign of our universal mortality, representing all those who have died, yet at the same time it can symbolise the memory of specific people whom we have come to pray for. Most churches nowadays create a long list of names for All Souls’ Day. We have them read out at the parish requiem. It is an almost universal practice. This seems to be the rite that has replaced the catafalque as a way of holding all the departed before the Lord.

In my experience, the process of collating the names is a grim nightmare, fraught with problems, which most vicars dread every single year. Most of us clergy will have this delight every year of double checking the list before it is read out just to make sure, and to sift out the names left by jokers and crackpots. I myself at various requiems over the years have had to cross out the names of people like Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader, the Tooth Fairy and, on one Remembrance Sunday, Adolf Hitler. We will have to discuss later as to whether we can or cannot pray for Adolf Hitler, but I think we can all agree he is not to be mentioned on Remembrance Sunday in most churches. One also has to prune entries made by people who have researched their entire familiar tree in preparation for All Souls’ Day. The kind of person who has taken great delight in filling the entire side of an A4 sheet of paper with the names of a whole host of people they have never actually met but have dredged up at the Public Records Office. The names are always left at the back of the church in a particular form of shaky spidery handwriting that is impossible to read, and you are always terrorised by the prospect of mispronouncing somebody’s name, or accidentally leaving somebody out.

The long list of names is the liturgical response of individualistic modernity. Each person is remembered individually, and not corporately. In its symbolic capacity, a long list of names is actually very exclusive. It can only call to mind those who are mentioned. A name can only signify one particular person. Anyone who is not listed seems not to have been commemorated. A catafalque, however, seems to be the more generous and expansive imaginative response of liturgical antiquity, for the catafalque represents and symbolises as many people as you want. It represents those who are named and remembered and those who are known only to God. It can stand for an individual as well as for a whole crowd of departed loved ones, just like the Cenotaph does on Remembrance Sunday.

At All Saints, Margaret Street, the catafalque with its rites and absolution at the end of the All Souls’ Day requiem, was restored just before I became the parish priest at the tail end of the Covid epidemic. In those first few months of permitted public worship, it is interesting that the parish made a decision to abandon the long list of names approach and revert to this earlier liturgical tradition. The really interesting thing is ‑ and the decision was not mine, it happened before I arrived – that to this day I have not had one single complaint from anybody about the disappearance of the long list of the dead on All Souls’ Day, not one single complaint.

The first All Souls’ Day I celebrated at Margaret Street was really quite extraordinary. So many people were present who had not been able to attend the funerals of their loved ones. So many people had been starved of the experience of seeing the physical coffin of the departed, of being able to touch it, and see it carried into church. After so many months of online worship and being deprived of access to the Sacraments, they wanted a commemoration of the faithful departed that was physically tangible: in person, concrete. The catafalque, this weird, curious, strange relic of the liturgical past, seemed to be what people desperately wanted, and not a long list of names.

That brings me now to the question of online worship. I am not going to try to give a theological account of what online worship is and what it is not. I think for the purposes of this talk we can all simply accept that it is here to stay and is a characteristic of many parishes’ lives, whether we like it or not. Every single person in this room experienced a very big online funeral in the past 18 month or so, namely of that Her Majesty the late Queen. Only the tiniest proportion of the people who followed that funeral service did so in person. The vast majority of the millions who participated did so online and by television. At All Saints, Margaret Street we noticed a number of rather curious things happen, which seemed to revolve around the fact we had set up the catafalque in church for the whole of that period of 10 days of mourning so that people could come to the church to pay their respects.

First, it was really interesting to see how popular it was and how positively and uncomplicatedly it was received. It was not confusing to anybody, or alienating or spooky. It was intriguing how many people intuitively knew immediately what was going on with the catafalque, for the very simple reason that we could not possibly have had the Queen’s dead body at All Saints, Margaret Street. As an aside, we did have one rather irate phone call from an individual who saw the catafalque and accused us of having kidnapped the Queen’s coffin as part of a Masonic plot around the Coronation. At a time when it was very difficult to pay your respects to the Queen in person, lying in state, because the queues were so long, a very large number of people found being able to pray by the catafalque at All Saints a very moving way of praying for the Queen and paying their respects to her, in a similar way but in a different location.

We also started to see a number of exceptionally high participation figures for the sung requiems we offered which offered a catafalque and which were broadcast online. Our first Solemn Mass of Requiem, offered on the Saturday after the Queen’s death has to date had 34,000 views of whom we estimate something like 2,500 people have watched it from beginning to end. We significantly outstripped the official Church of England’s online liturgy led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the official Church of England online Sunday service that weekend led by the Archbishop of York.

I would say there was something significantly more attractive to people worshiping online about the visual character of that catafalque, as representing the departed, but also acting as a memento mori for those who were watching. I think there was also something profoundly more rewarding and meaningful in our broadcast with it being a livestream of an actual act of worship rather than a spliced collection of pre‑recorded prayers, theological platitudes and meandering thoughts and stilted readings, which is what the official Church of England communications people were churning out. There was something about that deeply traditional liturgical response that everyone understood, that chimed with what people wanted, that spoke to them better than words alone. It got to the point where we found out that a radio station in the Australian outback had started to use an image of our catafalque at All Saints, Margaret Street to advertise their coverage of the Queen’s obsequies in London. They thought this was the place where most people were going to pay their respects, and we had to get in touch with them and tell them that it was not in fact Westminster Abbey!

I have definitely noticed that since these two generation‑defining events ‑ Covid and the Queen’s death – more and more churches, particularly those in an Anglo‑Catholic tradition and also those who livestream their worship, have brought back a catafalque to their requiems offered on All Souls’ Day.

I do not for one minute claim it is the right answer for every parish and there are many places I imagine it would not work, but it might be good for us to ponder what the tradition of the catafalque has to teach us, and what it tells us about post-modern culture, and why, post Covid and in light of the Queen’s state funeral, it suddenly seems to speak to people’s liturgical needs very profoundly.

When a catafalque works well, it is, in the truest sense, an inclusive sign of God’s love for all. It embodies, in a liturgical symbol, the names and faces that we all bring on our hearts to that requiem. The catafalque helps make our general prayer for the dead to be personal as we think of individual friends and family whom we remember there. It takes our mind out of the hustle and bustle of everyday life and acts as a reminder of our own death; a reminder that we will all have to come face‑to‑face with that experience and the fact that the only hope we have in the face of it, is Jesus Christ. Thank you. (Applause)

THE CHAIR: Thank you, Fr Peter, I have learned a lot about a catafalque which I ought to have known. Thank you. With regard to the list at All Souls’ Day, I think I had in my mind a name from my days at the requiem on All Souls’ Day at our college, where somebody called Ruby Doe was always remembered. I had no idea who she was, and it made me wonder how you would think a mindful thought of the people you do not, yourself, add to the list, and how that list does not become, as you described it, the individualism of modernity, but becomes the whole potential link to the cloud of witnesses, and how we go beyond modernity into eternity?

REVD DR ANTHONY: I hope it is evident to everybody present I have made an exaggerated case in order to prompt people to think. It is a really tricky conundrum, is it not? We all bring really personal, clear, visceral memories to requiems of those we are specifically wanting to pray for, yet at the same time there is something about the All Souls’ Day requiem in its solemnity which may prompt us to reflect that our own personal thoughts and emotions are as nothing when compared to the enormity of what we do in praying for all the faithfully departed and contemplating our own judgment.

I think different scenarios prompt different responses, do they not? When I serve at a requiem, I often have people in my mind that I go through. To my shame I should be able to remember these people more clearly, but I always pray for everyone whom I have buried, and again I bury so many people I cannot remember most of the people whom I have buried, certainly not from 20 years back, or whatever. It is this curious paradox of holding — there is something about our experience of the Communion of Saints that is deeply personal and which is deeply impersonal, which is beyond us and takes us into the enormity of the judgment that we are preparing for when we meet God, and which is handled in different ways in different places.

 I am slightly joking with the frustrations of what it can be like to be a parish priest at times but there are these moments when one rattles through this long list of names, and might there be other ways of expressing what this list is trying to do? I am also very aware that if people come to All Souls’ Day requiems with a particular death in that year, it is very difficult to get beyond the very personal grief and bereavement that you are experiencing.

REVD CANON TILBY: That was really, really fascinating, and thank you. I am thinking about the Armed Services, and the way in which the rituals that surround Service life which are so well rehearsed and so incredibly and carefully orchestrated, also strike something deeply personal in people. That was very evident at the Queen’s funeral and lying in state and all that went on around it. It’s a slightly odd thing, English tradition, is it not – we can somehow cope with it if it comes from the Armed Services, but we are a little bit nervous if the Church starts doing it? I do not know what that is about. I once preached at Sandhurst, which was a strange invitation. I was not really expecting that to come my way. It was a Sunday morning and I was very struck because a lot of these very young people were extremely aware of their friends and contemporaries who were in Afghanistan at the time. The names were read out of people who had been killed and the ritual enabled that to be done in a way that was not overwhelming. I can see that in the dangerous life Service personnel often have, you need ritual to get you through it, but, in a way, we are all living dangerous and unpredictable lives, and ritual helps us to solemnise the moment without being overwhelmed by it. We do not understand enough about how this works. You are in a place where you do it brilliantly and all the time, as I well know, but not all Christian communities are comfortable, and what is the discomfort about? And how can one help bridge that gap?

REVD DR ANTHONY: One thing I tried to communicate in what I spoke about is more to acknowledge that sometimes the formal, the liturgical, the regimented, the ritual, is not emotionally dishonest – a liturgy does not have to be informal and gushing for it to be emotionally honest. Through a slightly hyperbolic presentation that is the kind of thing I am trying to point to. Some of those dead certainties of the 1960s and 1970s liturgical reforms are not quite the certainties we experience now. In the present age we are living with deeply individualistic culture of choice and whatever any person feels is right is what is right for them. There are some scenarios where a more traditional liturgical response can feel more emotionally honest sometimes.

REVD CANON TILBY: Can I quote David Stancliffe in one of his books about liturgy, who quoted a child who said, “I believe in God whereas the people in church walk about in patterns.” That was very interesting. It says something about the geometry of worship which made the beyond possible.

REVD DR ANTHONY: The way the universe is ordered in Church.

REVD DR JONG: I hear the worry about the individualised piety of submitting names, particularly on All Souls’ Day. We were talking about it earlier and not long ago I Googled “How much does it cost to buy a catafalque?” Bearing in mind that my parish church, the church in which the catafalque would go, has a turnover of about £3,000 a year and has 20 people on a Sunday morning, we have no business buying such a thing. Nevertheless, I agree with the idea there is an appetite and a need for something like this. I hear that with All Souls’ Day in particular. I share the view that it would be better to have a catafalque than a list of names partly because all kinds of random names appear. By the way, I do it on Google Forms, so I do not hand them out. But for monthly requiems, I do encourage people to send in names. What I found was that for the non‑religious parishioners, as it were, their only engagement with the church on a regular basis is coming to the requiem to hear someone’s name read out. So, you do take the names at requiems?

REVD DR ANTHONY: It is intriguing how personally it feels a lot better to me. We have a monthly requiem, too, and a list of names, and it is for people whose anniversary of death falls within that month plus any new names that have been sent to us. That short, more focused list characterised by the time constraint for that month feels more realistic and natural and apposite and in the moment. It is really intriguing; my training incumbent had this neurotic thing about people who left names on the list and then can’t be bothered to come to the requiem themselves. It drove him absolutely mad that people would put dozens of names down and not bother coming to mass. I used to think well, that is kind of half the point. That is fine, that is what I am here to do. I can see both sides. But yes, I think there is a role. Personally, naming someone is, in some sense, to conjure up their name: it is to name them, to see them as God sees them as an individual. The naming of someone is important. I think, at times, it can get so exaggerated it loses its significance almost, but there are also other occasions where it feels a lot more natural.

REVD DR BELL: I have got an add‑on to Jonathan Jong’s question. At an All Souls’ Mass this year we prayed for someone who was still alive – a slightly unfortunate evening! He was at the back as well and he raised an eyebrow when his name was mentioned. We were not quite sure what happened. One thing I used to do when I did more confirmations of death in hospital was always write the person’s full name in the notes, because it felt to me that was one of the final times that person would be named. It just happened and ended up being my tradition to do it. I am very torn because I feel that the naming of someone helps to remember them in a particular way, but at the same time I think All Souls’ is doing a number of different things. One of those is remembering particular people. The other one is announcing our solidarity with the Communion of Saints, with those who have gone before and so on.

You mentioned monthly requiems and I wonder whether, on reflection, the All Souls’ Day commemoration is enough. I was really interested this year by the response to All Souls’. I think it has become more vivid since Coronavirus and since the death of the Queen. I was preaching somewhere else and thought there would be about 15 in the congregation, and there were 190. What on earth is going on here? There is something about All Souls’ -but it feels like we need to do more. I wonder whether that yearly remembrance is enough now or whether we need to bring back other things. For example, a lot of Catholic churches are praying for people by name on the anniversary of death and a mass is offered for that particular person and all the rest of it. I wonder if there is an opening for us again to consider remembering in that sense, and intentionally turning our worship towards remembering rather than just mourning. It feels like there are a quite a lot of things happening during these liturgical events that we squidge into All Souls and hope it will do, and which possibly need a bit more thinking about if the Church is going to take death more seriously.

REVD DR ANTHONY: I think that is one of the fruits of the Catholic revival in the Church of England and bears renewal all the time. One of the fundamental things that was restored to life in the Church of England by Tractarianism and by the later ritualism of the Anglo‑Catholics was the really crucial importance of praying for the dead as part of an expression of our belief in the Communion of the Saints. All Souls’ Day raises complicated questions. There are some occasions where you just think it is almost animist ancestor worship, and then there are other moments where it seems to be one of the most profound liturgies of the year. It all depends on who is there. It requires the liturgical skill of the parish priest to judge that carefully. A list is good in some places. It might not be good in others. A list that is well pruned in some places might be better than a list that is just going on and on and on. I think the death of a loved one is a classic moment at which all sorts of people suddenly start thinking in ways they had not before about questions of faith and their own fate and so on and so forth. If we had something to offer that is coherent and makes sense and which seems to have Christ at the heart of it, I think that is much more likely to actually do some good.

REVD DR TILBY: I think the other thing which offers an important opportunity is that there seems to me to be less resistance in the middle and low end of the Church of England towards thinking about this than there was at one point. There was a very key moment – and I cannot remember the names now – when a leading member of the General Synod’s son died of cancer prematurely when he was at Cambridge. He was an evangelical and very much at the firm end. He was a legal expert in Islamic law. Anyway, his son died and he spoke to us at a Synod liturgical debate about praying for the dead and said, “I just pray for Hugh, I pray for him every day”, and that produced a ripple that ran through the evangelical world, because of this very respected, sound, orthodox person who was moved in that way. That is only one sign, but I think there has been a little bit of a lessoning of that sense of the taboo of mentioning death in the more Protestant edges of the Church that could speak into this.

REVD DR YONG: Fr Peter just said something about how no one complained about the catafalque. No one complaining about something in the Church of England is amazing. Amazing! Equally, in my parish I have brought back black. In more modern churches they have white or purple for funerals but I brought back black. Equally, nobody has complained. I think there is an appetite for the visual reminder that every death is important and special. There is something going on that is interesting but I cannot quite get my head around it yet, but I think you are right; people want it.

REVD DR ANTHONY: If you go to a working-class funeral what will everyone be dressed in? Black. It is as simple as that. I personally think there are a number of elements of a more traditional way of celebrating some of the rites of the departed that are coming back because they speak quite profoundly to people. Unquestionably. A parish priest spends most of the time manning the complaints desk. It is a very significant message from God when that ceases to be the case.

THE CHAIR: We come on to questions.

REVD DR HELEN ORCHARD: Thank you very much, Peter, absolutely fascinating, and whilst I could have seen myself perhaps in my previous incarnation as vicar of an Anglo-Catholic church introducing a catafalque, and in fact when the Queen died, we did something that approximated that, in my current incarnation as a chaplain of a college in Cambridge, I do not think sending out an email saying I am about to construct a catafalque in the college chapel would have gone down very well. But what I did do was, for the first time for a number of years, a requiem mass at which I invited students, fellows and staff to submit names and wondered what would happen. Baby steps at Christ’s College! But I was surprised and delighted – because, of course, grief is a great leveller – at the number and range of people who emailed me saying that they wanted the name of my mum, my brother, and so on, read out at the requiem, and many of them came. The list is a great entry level exercise in terms of enabling people to come and be part of a pastoral experience in which they are administered to. Yes, okay, you can say it is very individualistic, they are waiting for their name and they hear their name, but of course they are also gathered up into the bosom of the Church or the college community all together and ministered to as a group, so yes.

REVD DR ANTHONY: I think when a list works it works great and also when it does not work well, it does not work well. I could not agree more. The clue is to do it sensitively. I think if the names are really meaningfully left there, that is really powerful.

REVD STEPHEN TUCKER: Angela mentioned that praying for the dead was originally a huge problem for the Church of England and that debate in the 1980s was quite a significant moment in the life of the Church of England. But when I used to take funerals in crematoria where the congregation were not often churchgoers, I would always, as part of a short address, try to explain what we are doing when we pray for the dead. How would you explain what we are doing, because you made a joke about Hitler, but how would you explain?

REVD DR ANTHONY: Whatever I say I am damned now! I think remembering the dead changes those who remember and remembering the dead changes the dead. I think that is a good way of thinking about it. It is actually about expressing our communion bond with another. I think you begin from the point that there is no witness in scriptural tradition that the dead somehow cease to be and are stuck in aspic. The dead still, in some sense, must be growing and making their way to God in the sense that it is never possible to exhaust the beatific vision of Heaven. In every single moment, it is both a complete, wonderful experience of the divine and yet also something in which we can participate ever more deeply, and ever further. And I think remembering the dead changes us. It reminds us of our own mortality. It connects us with those who have gone before and it makes us more thankful. For me one of the things that goes on in praying for the departed is actually a process of growth into God, within the communion sense, the more growing into God on different sides of the grave, in different ways. You do not look convinced. Say more.

REVD STEPHEN TUCKER: I think what you are saying is the dead are somehow aware that they are being prayed for and that this is assisting them in the process of coming into God’s presence and acknowledging the Divine judgment and recognising what they have to repent of, what they should grateful for: to assist in the process of seeing themselves as God sees them, in Paul’s words?

REVD DR ANTHONY: Yes, and if you want to put the label of “Purgatory” on that, fine.

REVD CANON TILBY: I think you have always to remember the reasons why the Reformation was so terrified of praying for the dead, because it seemed to turn the entire universe into a moralistic game where the more effort the living put in, the more the dead would be let off their torments, and that God could be bribed by our own action and money: building a monastery, or whatever it was. As long as we put lots of money in, it would somehow reap the benefits to the dead. If you put it that way, you can see why there was a reluctance to continue that system, and once Luther had broken it with justification by faith, the whole thing collapsed. I think that does not affect the fact that we continue to hold the dead in love, as Richard Hooker coming from our tradition, would say. I think if you go to a Greek village or somewhere where Orthodoxy has taken hold and is the spirituality of the place, you will find there are rules about what you do at 10 years, what you do at 30 years, what you do at 40 years for somebody who is deceased. It all quite mapped out. On the human scale we remember for a certain time while in a way the next generation are alive and it gets less as you go on. I find that really on a human scale it is quite sane really.

REVD DR ANTHONY: I think in certain ways it is quite important just to think about praying for the dead in no way different than you pray for everyone else. I think that is quite an important role.

REVD STEPHEN TUCKER: We are not now trying to change God’s mind; we are assisting in the changing of the mind of the departed?

REVD DR ANTHONY: Thank you very much.

DAVID LYMINGTON: I was going to ask if you have read Thomas Laqueur’s “The Work of the Dead”.

REVD DR ANTHONY: Tell me more.

DAVID LYMINGTON: It was published 2015. He says we are now in the age of what he calls necronominalism which I think, if I remember rightly, dates back to the First World War but it means we like the dead to be named, so that is really interesting.

REVD DR ANTHONY: I would agree entirely and that sums up a large amount of what I am saying. There are different levels and it is expressed differently in different cultures. Very interesting.

A SPEAKER: Peter, I would also likely speak up in favour of tradition. I am the keeper of a funeral pall belonging to the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks. One of the things in one of our spare bedrooms is indeed the Company’s replica pall, and it is turned out from time to time for parish councils. Since Covid there has been a slight upturn in the number of outings, not in terms of deaths but in the number of acceptances of the offer of the pall for funerals. I would like to draw that to your attention because it seems to me the pall being on top of the coffin during a funeral brings together the grief and feelings of the family with those of the parish clerk’s wider family.

REVD DR ANTHONY: This is excellent news. It is really intriguing that these are some of the only bits of late medieval Catholic traditions that survived the Reformation where the wealthy corporation or family had a pall.

A SPEAKER: This is a replica from 1977. The original has the words Repaired 1686 ‑ and I mean repaired not made – on it.

REVD DR BELL: One of the things that has struck me in recent years is the redevelopment of the candle as the use-all at every possible life event. The candle is lit at a funeral. The candle is lit at All Souls’ Day. The candle is lit at a wedding. The candle is lit at a same‑sex blessing. You name it, the candle is in there. Why do you think that is? Do you think that has some benefit to it, or do you think it is actually an unhelpful thing given there are better and more helpful symbols that the Catholic Church, or rather, the church catholic might be making use of?

REVD DR ANTHONY: I think it is because symbols have ceased to have their meaning; so that symbols are then capable of taking on any meaning and are then brought out at all sorts of liturgies, particularly primary school assemblies, and all those sorts of areas where if it is done badly the lowest common denominator liturgical symbol needs to be used. A symbol ceases to have its meaning when it has to be explained. It is like the ring in the old rites: ‘with this ring I thee wed’. By doing this, by giving you this, I marry you. The modern rite says, “I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage.” It explains the symbol which shows you in modernity you are not transacting with the symbol. The symbol is explained as a way of saying, “I have signed this document to show that I consent to it.” It is really intriguing. Sometimes there are symbols that have ceased to have their meaning or symbols that are so malleable and meaning is so fraught and contested, you need a symbol that is entirely malleable that can be used at any opportunity – as in a lit candle at just about everything.

REVD CANON TILBY: It is the fear of the symbol having a power of its own. It still goes on. You cannot bless the oil on Maundy Thursday. You have to say oil is for the sick. You have got to somehow take the mystery out. This is the lurking Enlightenment, rationalist, Protestant, Puritan tradition that we cannot quite deal with yet. It seems to me that Catholic symbolism overrides that and it allows you to say, “With this ring I thee wed”. It can be incredibly powerful. It makes sense of us being bodily transactional, relational creatures; this cerebral driven explanation reduces us just to verbal logical machines in a quite alienating way, I think.

I have been on the Church’s Liturgical Commission, for my sins, for many years and I get so fed up with these dreary introductions which tell you exactly what that means. I always used to say if I was training in the liturgy, you can say something, but make it what you want to say. Do not just read the stuff because that is so awful. “We are gathered together today at the beginning of Lent because there are 40 days of Lent …” It is embarrassing.

A SPEAKER: I was very surprised to hear about the revival of black for funerals. I certainly feel that it does help to express the sorrow. When I do get round to writing my own instructions, I feel like saying black if you are mourning; white if you are glad to see the back of me!

A SPEAKER: This is not a question, it is just an observation. I think there is a deep hunger generally in society which is somehow trying to be met by people almost making their own symbols. I think symbols are hugely important and I think they are being grasped. A simple example is the huge increase in people laying flowers at sites of death. What is that if not someone saying, “This is what I can do as a symbol. I don’t have the words, I don’t have the language, but I can do this and this is my sacred thing I can do”? That is how I see it anyway. I think actions can in so many cases speak so much louder than words. I think in our church services we tend to rely far too much on words and not enough on symbol and silence and the power that that can give. It is just an observation but I think we can make much more of symbols and rituals.

REVD DR JONG: It is interesting about flowers in particular. Laying flowers and goods of any kind at graves, at sites of death, and this (speaking with my anthropological hat on), is plausibly the oldest human ritual ever. We have found grave goods from 60,000 years ago. In that sense no one is making up a ritual. They are just doing the things that human beings have done as long as homo sapiens has been on the planet. That is significant.

REVD CANON TILBY: They are not making it up; they are enacting a deep-felt thing.

REVD DR JONG: Exactly, participating in a really human symbol. That is in some ways the opposite of the candles for every possible occasion. There is something very specific about putting flowers, beautiful things, living things where people have died. I think that is really important and needs to be acknowledged and dealt with.

REVD DR BELL: This is why I am not surprised that people did not complain about wearing black. In a sense, it feels like we in the Church of England, have spent too long being desperately concerned about our use of liturgy, or our use of symbols, or our use of these things, and yet actually, these things tie in so much more with the innate human desire and the way that we are as human beings. We are ritualistic human beings. We were talking about things like the last rites. People are not quite sure why but they want them. This is part of who we are, and I think that is one of the great benefits of the Catholic movement, which is you are just hooking into what people already do. They may not have the language for it and the symbols may not mean the same as they have always meant, and we may need to help people back into that way of being, but I think we are pushing at an open door, and I think people are not as unable to work out what is going on as we sometimes do not give them credit for. If people come into a church and see a catafalque, they probably know it is something to do with death. But we are almost back to Angela’s point, we patronise people beyond belief with our introductions to things. Because we say this is this and that is what this means. and sometimes that is because we have to, but so often you could just shut up and do it and people would say, “Wasn’t that nice, it was like coming to my grandmother’s funeral”, and we say, yes, that is what it is. I really feel there is an open door and the Church of England remains slightly terrified about pushing it, but I think that is a shame because I think it is there to be pushed.

REVD DR ANTHONY: When we set up this enormous catafalque for the Queen’s death we went back and looked at photographs of former Royal catafalques at All Saints, Margaret Street, and we discovered George V’s had on top of it an entire huge imperial State crown and orb and sceptre. I hunted high and low for them. Not a single cupboard was not scoured. We suspect in the end they probably went to a theatrical outfitters, but it looked absolutely spectacular. What did we do in the end we put the catafalque with a picture, which struck me as a traditional thing but there was quite a modern naming with the picture of the Queen in front of it. It all worked quite well. It is intriguing just the power of the symbol in that way.

A SPEAKER: Just moving on to consider the political context; with the political and climate emergency, the world disintegrating, the world shifting, it is not a world where there are answers any more. It strikes me there is an existential aspect to it, and people’s appetite for symbols I think it is wider than what we have discussed so far.

REVD DR ANTHONY: So, do you think at a time of anxiety and despair, symbols become more fraught? Is that what you are saying?

A SPEAKER: I think one becomes more open to them.

REVD DR ANTHONY: Yes, I can see that, yes. Symbols do not lose their power but they become very malleable. We live in a world where what anyone thinks is right for them and, therefore, the symbol can represent whatever it can to that person. The number of true universal symbols I think is reducing, would be my guess.

THE CHAIR: Thank you everyone for asking those questions. I am now going to try giving a brief closing commentary.

It was my day off yesterday and I got the whole of the afternoon, rather surprisingly, and I connected with Netflix and I watched season 6 of The Crown. Yes, it is Marmite, is it not, people hate it and people love it around the world. One of the most extraordinary things that occurred, and I do not want to give too much information in case you are going to watch it and you haven’t yet, is two people who died appearing as characters after death to speak to the people who have lost them.

This was a very interesting experience for me, in a theatrical televisual programme, saying something about how grief and how engagement with death can actually lead you through to be ready for your own. It was quite moving, because I think that series has had lots of things wrong in it and it has made lots of silly suggestions and it probably still is doing so, and it does not really describe our Royal Family, even though we have recently mourned the passing of a long‑serving Queen and celebrated the Coronation of a new King. Even in that context of confusion and incorrectness it was moving in what it had to say about death.

We have had four speakers today, and they have each brought different things into the discussion and how we can think about death and how we can move on and learn and be ready ourselves to deal with the challenge.

Angela’s talk very much reflects the whole of culture, and the way in which the writing of such persons as CS Lewis was able to address our imaginative needs. She addressed the support needed when communities face death, when families face death, when individuals face death, and how our present social culture needs to connect both with history and with our hope for the real future that we have in God.

Another matter that came up in my mind as I heard these talks, is that extraordinary now very popular opera by Francos Poulenc called Dialogue of the Carmelites, which this year was performed at Glyndebourne and also at the Albert Hall during The Proms. “Dialogue of the Carmelites” is actually about the death on the guillotine of the Carmelites during the reign of Terror in the French revolution. In the experience of the death of the prioress of the Carmelite community, we find one death which is horrific, and then the death of all those nuns and even a woman who is terribly fearful of death, going forward in absolute tranquillity and commitment to God. It is an extraordinary work, not the easiest opera for people or the happiest one, but one that actually, in the world of opera, communicates faith.

Then we come to Fr Jonathan’s talk and we heard about science and about the psychological continuity of memory consciousness. And that reminded me of the Powell and Pressburger season that is on at the moment at the British Film Institute. If any of you have seen A Matter of Life and Death, you will remember the character Peter, who almost dies but does not. He is operated upon surgically in the brain, and it is during that operation that his trial takes place in heaven. It is an extraordinary film. It is historic, but oddly, I think it is quite futuristic, and it sits in our time as well as talking about eternity.

Charlie’s talk about being a medic and about the way the Church has to face death in the context of hospitals and hospices is something that I have recently also experienced for the first time, in connecting with the Trinity Hospice in Clapham where I now work. I have been going to give the last rites far more often than I ever have in my ministry. I have found it personally highly significant. I myself have experienced grace in a way that I never thought I would in doing that.

The last person I anointed only a week and a half ago was someone who turned out to have been a totally evangelical Anglican at Holy Trinity Brompton HTB and to have acted for Archbishop Rowan Williams as head of the management committee at Lambeth Palace. His wife who called me up and asked me to do this, had never seen this kind of anointing near death, but she received it with great relief. He had already slipped into a permanent sleep, but to do that and to help someone, not only the person dying but the family, was for me highly significant.

And finally moving from the culture that Angela talked about through the science that Jonathan talked about, through the medicine that Charlie talked about, to get back to liturgy which Peter has shared with us is really significant when we think about our own calling to the Church and our own ministry.

So, thank you all four for doing this and making such sense in a world of mystery. I was asked to end my talk just by quoting the quote from John Donne:

“They shall awake as Jacob did, and say as Jacob said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and this is no other but the house of God, and the gate of heaven’. And into that gate they shall enter, and in that house they shall dwell, where there shall be no Cloud nor Sun, no darknesse nor dazling, but one equall light, no noyse nor silence, but one equall musick, no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession, no foes nor friends, but an equall communion and Identity, no ends nor beginnings; but one equall eternity.”