Pretty much what White Star said… I grew up Massachusetts Catholic, and perhaps I was just lucky with the various churches that family/friends/neighbors belonged to, but I have never, ever encountered the “get right with God” speech at a wedding or funeral until moving down here to the South. Yes, they often talked about the strong faith of the deceased, but it was typically buried (pardon) amongst the other good things about the person. My grandmother died two years ago, and the funeral consisted of readings given by my oldest sister and I, a eulogy given by my brother whose main theme was the celebration of life that a funeral should be, and a few prayers/hymns.
Of course, at the last funeral I went to with my husband, his own daughter had the decency to tell him she hoped he’d gotten a good long look at the deceased, as he was never going to see her again since she would be in heaven and he would be burning in hell, so I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised by anything.
I really need to make a will to avoid this happening if my sister outlives me. I can only imagine.
My mother, who is 71 and in “meh” health, has not attended church services on a regular basis for over 25 years, isn’t particularly religious beyond an “I believe in God and parts of the Bible and I hope He’s nice and thinks my brother was as big an asshole as I think he was otherwise I’m in trouble” generic sort of way, wants her body used as a cadaver and then cremated (by this stage I doubt any of her organs or corneas are of much use). This is going to be a battle with my sister who I know is going to want a Wilderness Rock Blood Fire Tabernacle of Holiness style preacher to have an epileptic seizure over the coffin and who believes that cremation is an abomination (though she and her husband did once use their pontoon boat to scatter a friend’s ashes- seek not consistency with her). My mother has also said specifically and in no uncertain terms “I will haunt anybody who tries to put my body or my ashes anywhere in Elmore County, Alabama and specifically anywhere near your father- our contract was quite clear, til death us do part, and he’s dead and we’re parted and I don’t want to spend eternity with him in heaven or underground”. I’m willing to compromise on the cremation part perhaps but I will honor her request not to be buried near my father (who my sister wants to build a replica of Andrew Jackson’s tomb in the family’s pasture) as she couldn’t stand the man or his farm.
I attended a funeral of a co-worker who had two illegitimate children. While I can understand why somebody would, much as I hate to use this phrase, “disapprove of her lifestyle”, she was a wonderful funny intelligent gianthearted person and a fantastic mother. Her oldest child was a schoolteacher in her mid-20s, married with small children of her own, and the youngest was about 10 (big gap) when she died. The minister, who not only knew her well but called on her services frequently everytime the church had a function (and she always helped- and she was far from the only unwed mother in the church) ranted and raved about her lifestyle and actually said something like “Jesus was friends with a harlot, so let us not judge Sister Angela”.
NOBODY WAS YOU PIOUS PUSBAG! AND EVERYBODY HERE KNOWS YOU’VE SHACKED UP WITH AND MADE PASSES AT WOMEN IN YOUR CONGREGATION AND YOU’RE ABOUT 100 POUNDS OVERWEIGHT BUT CAN’T SEEM TO FIND THE PASSAGES IN THE BIBLE ABOUT GLUTTONY CAN YOU?! (The minister later was named in a divorce suit by a parishioner and forced to resign.)
When and if I expire I want a simple memorial service, friends and family I was close to only, telling stories and reminiscing and laughing and drinking if they like before sealing me in my tombs with my computer and books and favorite possessions and action figure ushabtis and however many of my concubines wish to accompany me into the afterlife. Hopefully by this time most organized religions in America will be based on STAR WARS (the major division those who do and do not subscribe to the midichlorian heresies- I’ll be in the latter) and my friends will have centuries of memories due to various life extension technologies as well as a downloadable version of my consciousness to keep them company and therefore funerals as we know it will be a part of the past, but the ultimate point is that I can’t stand judgmental preachers.
Well, I am quite happy to hear that so many other dopers have different funeral experiences than I. We’re Unitarian, and when Mom and Pops Mercotan passed, we made sure to have a service celebrating their lives and where the local Calvinistic theology didn’t even get mentioned, that I’m aware of.
It went over very well each time with all their friends and most kin, but Pops’ branch of the family had some members quite shaken up to have been at such a “non-christian” service.
It’s the same way here in Iowa. With one exception, all the funerals I’ve been to have been treated as Come to Jesus opportunities by the ministers.
I’ve never had the experience of a judgmental minister though, even with the child-molesting, dumpster-diving, alcoholic, wife-beating uncle who drank himself to death.
If I did, I’d probably write the minister a letter and let him know how I felt. Not that it would do any good.
Of course the exact opposite happened at my paternal grandmother’s funeral. The minister barely knew her, he’d seen her a few times when she showed up for free food at the church some years before and since then she’d been a senile stroke victim for years and never a regular church attendee at any place, but since was minister of the church closest to her house in whose cemetery most of her dead relatives (husband, son, in-laws) were buried and somebody had to do it, he was chosen.
My grandmother was about as self absorbed and uncharitable and greedy and stingy and generally weird as a person can get. My father was her only child and once in mourning him she literally made a comment to the effect of “Oh how I miss that boy… I remember he said to me one time, 'Mama… or Mother… Ma… whatever the hell he called me”
Me: Muh.
Grandmother: Yeah, that sounds about right… Muh, he said, if anything ever happens to me, I want you to be sure that my kids take good care of you. He was one of a kind that boy. I swear I’d give up to fifteen hundred dollars to see him alive again.
My sister: Of course if it was fifteen-hundred and fifty, f*ck it.
Grandmother: Well I have to have something left to live on.
At the time Grandmother had more than $20,000 in one account that I knew of and God knows how much in her house.
Anyway, at her funeral the minister said “She was on Earth for 90 years and all the people that she helped, all the people who loved her, all the good that she did, all the lives that she touched for the better… they would be too many to count. She was blessed with long life for the wonderment of her deeds…”
My mother’s comment was whispered but could be heard by everybody (which wasn’t many) in the funeral home chapel: “Jon, go look in that coffin and make sure we’re at the right damned funeral.”
This is the unfortunate but logical effect of denominations that believe one is going to experience the fires of eternal damnation if one doesn’t accept the Lord Jesus as one’s personal savior. If those are the stakes, then any and all opportunities to reach the unsaved and convince them to give their hearts to Christ must be taken advantage of, lest one person who might have been saved wind up in hell for eternity.
That’s the mindset. And it’s totally logical. But it’s evil. It reduces people to markers to be won from the Devil in some sort of cosmic game of Salvation Gotcha! And so the bereaved and mourners are treated in a hideous manner in case there are any markers to be won in the game at a given funeral.
Have I mentioned lately how much I like being an Episcopalian? That just will not happen at an Episcopal funeral. The Book of Common Prayer prescribes what the funeral shall be. Ok, we can make arrangements for some stuff, but not a whole lot. As a matter of fact, I have on file, my funeral service. It states (within the convines of the *BCOP prescribed order, of course) the scriptures to be read, the hymns to be sung, the Eucharistic Prayer to be used and the whole shebang. I’m being cremated and having my ashes plopped down in the already bought post office box sized rectangle of the columbarium at my current church, even though said church is in the process of building a new building and the columbariums will be moved to that site when it’s done.
Episcopal Priests do not even know how to get all “come to Jesus”. Good thing that. The only funeral I ever went to where the minister did that (and I live in the deep south) ended after the burial with said minister getting told off by a very pissed off widow. Suffice it to say, she didn’t hold back. Now that made the whole funeral worth it.
Another New Englander checking in to say no funeral I’ve ever attended has been polluted with a come-to-Jesus sinners-will-burn preacher’s rantings. In my family (mostly Congregational) they’ve been celebrations of life after the actual disposition of the body. Any ministers involved have kept it short, pertinent, and comforting, and most of the talking has been done by family and friends. If it’s held in a church, there’s usually a food and drinks and wakelike gathering at the family’s home afterwards.
At my uncle’s funeral a couple of years ago, those in attendance were invited to come forward and volunteer comments. His son told me as I was leaving how much he’d appreciated my getting up to share my off-the-cuff reminiscences of Harris’s quirks and wonderful qualities, complete with funny anecdotes.
I simply can’t imagine any of my friends or family wanting the kind of funeral the OP described.
I share the horror, and anger of the OP. If I knew the woman, and had been at the services, I don’t know that I’d have been able to keep quiet.
I’m another New Englander who’s never been to a funeral where the focus was anything other than on comforting the bereaved. That includes having my family (mother, sister and I are all Catholic, of varying degrees, my father is non-practicing.) made welcome at my grandmother’s Temple. Occaisional funerals have been generic, but that’s a different thing than offensive.
Midwest. I however am a displaced Canadian of Anglican origin. The majority of funerals I have attended have all been family. This was comptete culture shock to me. That and the open casket. Why on earth…? (It was odd my first thought was that I have made prop corpses that looked more realistic. I think perhaps I am going to hell.)
I have a note in my will about the disposal of my Airsoft P90, and its presence at the funeral. It will be pointed at the preacher’s ass, in case he goes off-message.
I was raised Catholic in south-western Pennsylvania and have been to all of three funerals in my life, all of them Catholic. (Surprising, since my father’s a funeral director.) Not one of them I can remember being all fire and brimstone.
I’ll have to ask my father if he’s ever had any like that.
Now that I’m getting to the age that going to funerals is a significant part of my entertainment (as in: there’s another SOB I won’t have to deal with any more) I have to say that I’ve not yet attended one where the presiding minister took the opportunity to remark on the state of the guest of honor’s soul or suggest that the survivors are spiders dangled over the Pit by a vengeful God. Auntie Pam’s experience may be because she in out in the Dutch Reform part of the state and those guys are still pretty hung up on Ol’ John Calvin. Maybe this is because I’ve been dealing with local congregations of Germans and Yankees and Norwegians in mainline churches.
The closest I’ve come to editorial comment from the pulpit was during the services for a particularly pugnacious and antagonistic lawyer when an intense prairie thunderstorm broke out. At the first flash and boom, one that rattled the windows, the priest looked up from his book and said, ”I think Ed just met St Peter.”
In all seriousness, the lack of basic human sympathy and level of self importance that has been described here is just appalling. It no more appropriate to sell the faith and proselytize at a funeral than to urge the congregation to buy a particular make of automobile.
Hmmm. Probably because in about 85% of the funerals I’ve attended, that was the major focus of the service. However, since all of these funerals were officiated by my sister, I guess that doesn’t give me a very good sample size to go on. She’s a Disciples of Christ minister, and has officiated (or co-officiated) at just about every funeral on my Dad’s side of the family for the last couple of decades (and since he’s 80, and comes from a large family, that’s getting to be a lot of funerals.) I noted that when she co-officiated with a Moravian minister for one service, I felt that the Moravian minister’s message was very dry, and uncomforting, and get-right-with-Jesus.
She does do a very good job of making the funeral a loving farewell and reassurance that the family member is going to be with God. I’m not at all surprised that all our family members have asked her to officiate. I’m just very glad I don’t have her job.
<hijack here> Can anyone offer a concise history of how open casket services became the norm in the US? And why?
And what steps can one do to end this abomination?
(Look, after I’m dead, take anything you can use - but breaking bones, cutting and stitching to simply make me look good I object to. Vehemently. I never cared about my looks while I was alive, so why the blazes should I condone you doing stuff that would be considered desecretion of the corpse if not done by a mortuary artist?)
No concise history, but I sorta think it’s always been the norm for the majority of the US and world population. In my family genealogical studies, I’ve encountered lots of photos of the deceased in the casket, pictures distributed widely to family and friends. Some date back to the 1870’s.
And I think it probably comes from the common need for the deceased’s family and friends to actually see the body to viscerally grasp that the person is really and truly dead.
I know that even with many closed-casket services, close family and select friends are given the option to view the body, for this reason.
As a physician, I learned very early on that it was important to let a mother see her still-born infant, rather than cover it up and whisk it away. It gives closure, and helps allay common grief-induced thoughts that the baby is not really dead, only stolen.
I have NEVER heard of morticians breaking bones, cutting people up or stitching them to make a corpse look good. If the deceased is not fit to look at, they go with closed casket (as what happened when my great aunt died in a fire).
I’ll ask my dad, but I think that’s an exaggeration.
Guinastasia, the bones may be an exaggeration, but I am willing to wager any amount of money you can name that most morticians have taken stitches to make the mouth stay shut, and appear to be smiling. Similarly, I’ve heard that tendons get cut, often, when rigor mortis causes unusual contortions in the body.
