Category: Funerals/Burial
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Yale Offers Summer Course in Music for Funerals
Professor Markus Rathey of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music will be offering a virtual one-week summer course on funeral music through the ages, as part of the Yale Divinity School summer programs. The course will be offered June 7-11, and is open to anyone, anywhere. Here is the title and description: Sounds of Death…
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“I want Westlife played at my funeral”
Many people outside Ireland still tend to think of Ireland as a Catholic country. However, I think that the days of identifying Irishness with Catholicism are long gone. I was listening to the radio yesterday morning and a report on a news program brought this home to me once again. The dignified funeral of England’s…
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Church and State, Remembrance and Commendation: The Funeral of HRH Prince Philip
Watching the funeral of Prince Philip today (like so many people around the world) elicited a sequence of often-conflicting emotions in this liturgist. In my case, I was glued to CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company). The funeral played on multiple channels in Canada, not surprising, recalling that Canada is a member of the Commonwealth, (and a…
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Why Commemorating the Dead in November Matters
I like to believe that titles are important. Not necessarily heraldic titles, though these can be equally amusing and impressive. Titles for books, however, need to capture both the attention of the potential reader and the essence of the narrative or the theme of the text in a way that draws one into them. The…
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Singing for the Dead: Pie Jesu
Soul-searing beauty has the power to permeate the places we so often guard, to allow the grace of God’s love to enter.
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The Liturgies Marking the Passing of a Loved One
9/16/2019 – One Year Later It was one year ago this evening that I received an unexpected call from Life Alert saying that my mother had activated her button, thinking that she was having a stroke. Her own mother and sister had died of a stroke and she was always worried that this would be…
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A Virtual Vigil and Wake in the Time of the Coronavirus
A Virtual Vigil It was a Monday morning when I received the news that a dear friend of mine had become “unresponsive.” She had battled multiple illnesses in recent years and had just stopped her cancer treatments after being told there was nothing more medically that could be done for her. She had known that…
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Ought we to consider readopting the catafalque?
At the moment many of us are at the survival setting and we just want to get through another day. However, whatever the resolution of the Covid-19 crisis, the time will come when we have to pick up the pieces and continue. However attractive it might seem, we can’t simply think that we can go…
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Life is Changed, Not Ended
What we celebrate liturgically speaks to our actual lived experience