Readings suitable for funerals
Taken from ‘Looking in the Distance’ by Richard Holloway
The Human Search for Meaning (2004)
‘A sentence is not finished till it has a full stop, and every life needs a dying to complete it. It is dying that finishes us, that ends our story.
‘We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography…’
When the map of our life is complete, and we die in the richness of our own history, some among the living will miss us for a while, but the earth will go on without us. Its day is longer than ours, though we now know that it too will die. Our brief finitude is but a beautiful spark in the vast darkness of space. So we should live the fleeting day with passion and, when the night comes, depart from it with grace.’
Reading by Margaret Laws Smith:
We are all, each one of us, a part of all the life which has gone before us and all that will come after us... We have each something of our own to add to the life of man which no one else could give. This uniqueness is the source of our sorrow and grief. Look through the whole earth and the one we have lost is not to be found: there is none like him. But he played a part in our lives; what he was still lives in our minds.
Our lives which are a part of his life go on and the ripples of his life are still passing outward in known and unknown ways. With those present, with those who have gone, and with those who are yet to be born, he has his place in the procession of humankind and the process of life.
'When the dark descends' Author unknown
When the dark descends so sudden...
remember the light that once shined upon you.
A light that still shines within you...
perhaps not so bright or with a different hue,
but a light that will never be forgotten.
Remember the warmth of the light as energy transforms...
A warmth that will always be part of your soul.
When the dark descends so sudden...
be grateful for the light that once shined and will always shine within you, as opposed to one that never shone at all.
Lines from the Rig Veda
(an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns)
May your eye go to the sun, your life’s breath to the wind.
Go to the sky or to earth, as is your nature;
or go to the waters, if that is your fate.
Take root in the plants with your limbs.
Author unknown
When someone lives a life that makes a difference here on earth,
Seeing each and every day as treasures of great worth.
When someone lives a life and comes to learn the gentle art
Of growing rich in wisdom while remaining young at heart.
That someone comes to mean much more than words can ever tell;
Not just because they’ve lived so long - but because they’ve lived so well.
On the day I die - John Pavlovitz
On the day I die a lot will happen.
A lot will change.
The world will be busy.
On the day I die, all the important appointments I made will be left unattended.
The many plans I had yet to complete will remain forever undone.
The calendar that ruled so many of my days will now be irrelevant to me.
All the material things I so chased and guarded and treasured will be left in the hands of others to care for or to discard.
The words of my critics which so burdened me will cease to sting or capture anymore. They will be unable to touch me.
The arguments I believed I’d won here will not serve me or bring me any satisfaction or solace.
All my noisy incoming notifications and texts and calls will go unanswered. Their great urgency will be quieted.
My many nagging regrets will all be resigned to the past, where they should have always been anyway.
Every superficial worry about my body that I ever labored over; about my waistline or hairline or frown lines, will fade away.
My carefully crafted image, the one I worked so hard to shape for others here, will be left to them to complete anyway.
The sterling reputation I once struggled so greatly to maintain will be of little concern for me anymore.
All the small and large anxieties that stole sleep from me each night will be rendered powerless.
The deep and towering mysteries about life and death that so consumed my mind will finally be clarified in a way that they could never be before while I lived.
These things will certainly all be true on the day that I die.
Yet for as much as will happen on that day, one more thing that will happen.
On the day I die, the few people who really know and truly love me will grieve deeply.
They will feel a void.
They will feel cheated.
They will not feel ready.
They will feel as though a part of them has died as well.
And on that day, more than anything in the world they will want more time with me.
I know this from those I love and grieve over.
And so knowing this, while I am still alive I’ll try to remember that my time with them is finite and fleeting and so very precious—and I’ll do my best not to waste a second of it.
I’ll try not to squander a priceless moment worrying about all the other things that will happen on the day I die, because many of those things are either not my concern or beyond my control.
Friends, those other things have an insidious way of keeping you from living even as you live; vying for your attention, competing for your affections.
They rob you of the joy of this unrepeatable, uncontainable, ever-evaporating Now with those who love you and want only to share it with you.
Don’t miss the chance to dance with them while you can.
It’s easy to waste so much daylight in the days before you die.
Don’t let your life be stolen every day by all that you believe matters, because on the day you die, much of it simply won’t.
Yes, you and I will die one day.
But before that day comes: let us live..
Reading by A. Powell Davies:
Let us be honest with death.
Let us not pretend that it is less than it is.
It is separation. It is sorrow. It is grief.
But let us neither pretend that death is more than it is.
It is not annihilation.
As long as memory endures, his influence will be felt. It is not an end to love –
humanity’s need for love from each of us is boundless.
It is not an end to joy and laughter —
nothing would less honor one so vibrant
than to make our lives drab in counterfeit respect!
Let us be honest with death, for in that honesty
we will understand him better
and ourselves more deeply.
Reading from “The Prophet" by Khalil Gibran
‘You would know the secret of death. But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the health of life? The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light. If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and sea are one. For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?’
'Christopher Robin explaining the concept of Death to Pooh' by A.A. Milne
Christopher stood up and took one last look over the Hundred Acre Wood. The sun was setting in the orange autumn sky and the trees were beginning to lose their leaves.
It was time he went home.
Christopher gathered all of his friends together and began walking back down the hill. They were all busy discussing the memories they had had with each other.
“Christopher?” Pooh said, looking up at Christopher as they walked hand in hand. “You aren’t coming back, are you?”
Christopher looked down at the ground and took a moment before he responded.
“No Pooh. I won’t be coming back this time.”
They walked in silence, listening to the sound of the crunching leaves underneath their feet.
Pooh suddenly stopped and looked intently into the ground.
“I believe I am going to miss you Christopher,” he said with a soft, broken voice.
Christopher leaned down and took his lifelong friend into his arms.
“I will miss you too Pooh. I will miss you very, very much.”
Also from Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
‘If ever there is tomorrow when we’re not together…. There is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we’re apart…I’ll always be with you.’
Nicholas Evans from `The Smoke Jumper’
If I be the first of us to die,
Let grief not blacken long your sky.
Be bold yet modest in your grieving.
There is change but not a leaving.
For just as death is part of life,
The dead live on forever in the living.
For all the gathered riches of our journey,
The moments shared, the mysteries explored,
The steady layer of intimacy stored,
The things that made us laugh or weep or sing,
The joy of sunlit snow or first unfurling of the spring,
The wordless language of look and touch,
The knowing,
Each giving and each taking,
These are not flowers that fade,
Nor trees that fall and crumble,
Nor are they stone
For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstand
And mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand.
What we were, we are.
What we had, we have.
A conjoined past imperishably present.
So when you walk the woods where once we walked together
And scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow,
Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land,
And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand,
And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you,
Be still.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Listen for my footfall in your heart.
I am not gone but merely walk within you.
Written by Winston Churchill
Let us be contented with what has happened,
And be thankful for all that we have been spared.
Let us accept the natural order of things in which we move.
Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythms of our destinies,
Such as they must be in this world of space and time.
Let us treasure our joys but not bewail our sorrows.
The glory of light cannot exist without its shadows.
Life is a whole, and good and ill must be accepted together.
The journey of life has been enjoyable and well worth making.
To everything there is a season,
A time to plant, and a time to harvest;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to live and a time to die
There is a time for every purpose on Earth.
Perhaps we can say this on his behalf:
I have lived my life
I have done my job
I have done it by my own lights
I have done it the best that I could
Now I can go in peace
Written by Sir Herbert Read,
English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, wrote about death as follows:
The death of each of us is in the order of things. It follows life as surely as night follows day. We can take the tree of life as a symbol. The human race is the trunk and branches of this tree, and individual men and women are the leaves, which appear one season, flourish for a summer, and then die. I too am like a leaf of this tree, and one day I will be torn off by a storm, or simply decay and fall – and become part of the earth about its roots. But while I live, I am conscious of the tree’s flowing sap and steadfast strength. Deep down in my consciousness is the consciousness of life, of which I am a part, and to which I make a minute but unique contribution. When I die and fall the tree remains, nourished to some small degree by my manifestation of life. Millions of leaves have preceded me, and millions will follow me, but the tree itself grows and endures.
Written by Parker J Palmer
Sooner or later everything falls away.
You, the work you’ve done, your successes
large and small, your failures, too. Those
moments when you were light, along-
side the times you became one with the
night. The friends, the people you loved,
who loved you, those who might have
wished you ill, none of this is forever. All
of it is soon to go, or going, or long gone.
Everything falls away, except the thread
you’ve followed, unknowing, all along.
The thread that strings together all you’ve
been and done, the thread you didn’t know
you were tracking until, toward the end,
you see that the thread is what stays
as everything else falls away.
Follow that thread as far as you can and
you’ll find that it does not end, but weaves
into the unimaginable vastness of life. Your
life never was the solo turn it seemed to be.
It was always part of the great weave of
nature and humanity, an immensity we
come to know only as we follow our own
small threads to the place where they
merge with the boundless whole.
Each of our threads runs its course, then
joins in life together. This magnificent tapestry –
this masterpiece in which we live forever.
Written by Charlie Chaplin
'I have forgiven mistakes that were indeed almost unforgivable. I’ve tried to replace people who were irreplaceable and tried to forget those who were unforgettable. I’ve acted on impulse, have been disappointed by people when I thought that this could never be possible. But I have also disappointed those who I love. I have laughed at inappropriate occasions. I’ve made friends that are now friends for life. I’ve screamed and jumped for joy. I’ve loved and I’ve been loved. But I have also been rejected and I have been loved without loving the person back. I’ve lived for love alone and made vows of eternal love. I’ve had my heart broken many, many times! I’ve cried while listening to music and looking at old pictures. I’ve called someone just to hear their voice on the other side. I have fallen in love with a smile. At times, I thought I would die because I missed someone so much. At other times, I felt very afraid that I might loose someone very special (which ended up happening anyway.) But I have lived! And I still continue living everyday. I’m not just passing through life… and you shouldn’t either. Live! The best thing in life is to go ahead with all your plans and your dreams, to embrace life and to live everyday with passion, to lose and still keep the faith and to win while been grateful. All of this because the world belongs to those who dare to go after what they want. And because life is really too short to be insignificant.'
excerpt from the book 'A Hatful of Sky' by Terry Pratchett
‘Once we were blobs in the sea, and then fishes, and then lizards and rats, and then monkeys, and hundreds of things in between. This hand was once a fin, this hand once had claws! In my human mouth I have the pointy teeth of a wolf and the chisel teeth of a rabbit and the grinding teeth of a cow! Our blood is as salty as the sea we used to live in! When we’re frightened, the hair on our skin stands up, just like it did when we had fur. We are history! Everything we’ve ever been on the way to becoming us, we still are. Would you like the rest of the story?
I’m made up of the memories of my parents and grandparents, all my ancestors. They’re in the way I look, in the colour of my hair. And I’m made up of everyone I’ve ever met who’s changed the way I think.’
excerpt from the book 'The Way Back Home' by Freya Norh
I wish I had understood this better when I was younger – that humans do, in fact, emit light. We glow, faintly, not seen to the naked eye but still there. If I had known back then that I could exist in this world as light, then perhaps I would not have found so many ways to stay in the darkness. If I had known that all the joy, the happiness, and healing already lived inside of me, then I would not have spent so many days searching for it. We are born to illuminate in darkness; we are born to find our way.
Words from Bertrand Russell
An individual human existence should be like a river –
small at first, narrowly contained within it’s banks,
and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls.
Gradually, the river grows wider, the banks recede,
the waters flow more quietly, and – in the end –
without any visible break, they become merged in
the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
The man or woman, who, in old age,
can see his or her life in this way,
will not suffer from the fear of death,
since the things they care for will continue.