Hopeless funerals

Do we each have souls, i.e. the real you which, since conception, will exist independently of a pumping heart and a functioning brain? Put another way, when we are buried 6 feet under the earth or incinerated at the local crematorium, is that the end?

I’ve attended a couple of humanist funerals where there is no singing of hymns, nor prayers said. The celebrant, who acts as compere, won’t mention God. For me, such funerals are soulless and quite literally hope-less.

And yet… when friends and family bravely step forward at a humanist funeral to share their carefully prepared tribute we may hear things like, ‘I bet Grandad’s looking down now and having a right chuckle with us as we share these memories’ or ‘Mum, I know that you’ll still be watching over us’. Do such expressed sentiments, spoken at a time of sadness, indicate an ingrained sense that we have souls?

Henry Scott Holland’s poem, ‘All Is Well’, is sometimes read at funerals. It includes these lines: ‘All is well, Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped into the next room... there is unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner.’

By what authority is this writer speaking? The words may meet an emotional need of the moment but do they speak truth? Do all the souls of the deceased exist in rest and peace and are they indeed awaiting us just over the way?

There are many voices which want to speak ‘peace, peace where there is no peace’. God calls such people false prophets. If there is more after we die, we need to be reckoning with it now. Is there an authoritative word someone can give us and if so, who is it?

It is Jesus, who is the embodiment of truth. Following his death, God raised him from the dead and so validated Jesus’ own identity and also his words of teaching and instruction. This means we’d do well to weigh up his words on matters like life and death, heaven and hell, peace and anguish, forgiveness and just punishment.

In summary, Jesus tells us to trust that he alone can forgive us when we turn to him; he is the way to a life with God for ever.