Shivering In The Chapel...

'Cremation: no longer a burning question for Catholics'

...when was it I saw that wonderful headline in The Church Times? Must have been a decade or so ago that some editorial wag decided to slip that one in.

I am reminded of that sly dig at changing attitudes to cremation among the Romans by a gloriously difficult story today. For it seems that a crematorium near Manchester is proposing to recycle the heat from incinerations back into the Chapel heating, as so many mourners have been complaining about the cold!

Now I'm all for recycling - though I doubt it can really bear the weight of expectation placed upon it - but somehow I do doubt the taste or propriety of this latest wheeze.

There you are about to go in to say a decent yet low-key farewell to a hardly known Great Uncle Charles, or whoever, and out come sobbing mourners from the previous send-off. True sorrow streaming down their faces. A child lost perhaps.

And are you then to sit cosily inside, basking in the heat of that one's burning? Seems about as tasteless as a bunch of hypothetical Hindus gathered round a funeral pyre rubbing their hands at the flames to keep warm.

Not really the thing. Anyway, a bit of bodily discomfort at a funeral is not such a bad thing in itself to remind us all of the mortality we must all in the end face. ("As thou art now, so once were I. I am now, so shall ye be" - says the funerary statue to the living. That sort of thing.)

Let a good warming be kept for the wake preceding or the baked meats to follow, and let us all shiver a bit reflecting on the first of The Four Last Things we will in time be facing one and all.