Every one matters

Blow the trumpet in Zion (Joel 2:1)
Today I am taking my first funeral of the lockdown. There will be no mourners. The funeral director will arrive, carry the coffin to the grave and lower it immediately. I have prepared a short ceremony. I will bless the grave, pray, commend our friend into the hands of the Almighty and commit his body to the grave. But it is going to feel very odd not to be able to do more. I just trust that all that will come later in more normal times.
Such minimal ceremonies have become quite common at crematoria, I am told. Indeed often it is quite literally a 'drop and run' funeral, where the body is brought around the back and quietly slipped into the furnace with no more ceremony than you would incinerate your household waste.
As a pastor, this gives me great concern. It is vital to our future mental well-being that we mourn well. We have to be allowed to go through the processes of grief, which may include shock and disbelief, denial and anger, guilt and despair, so we can allow ourselves to travel on, to find a new way of living. The fried egg theory of grieving, as my tutor used to call it. We don't move on but we can build on all that our loved one has meant to us. Without the moment of mourning offered by a funeral service or a commemoration, we can get stuck along the way. It is as if we are trying to short circuit the process, and that doesn't work. We need to be able to mourn fully so that later we can learn to laugh again.
What struck me in our reading today, was something a little different. Joel calls on his people to 'blow the trumpet...sound the alarm'. While I am concerned with the effect of the avoidance of healthy mourning on the individual, I am also concerned with the effect on the country. When we reach a point where we drop our dead into the grave or furnace with little recognition of their passing, then we are doing something bad not just to ourselves but to society as a whole. We are treating people as numbers on a sheet of paper, as statistics to be pored over, and this is not a good thing.
I was encouraged and made anxious in equal measure last night by the documentary about an intensive care ward in the midst of this crisis. It would have been easy for the medics to treat each desperately ill patient as an object. Indeed they were moving them around like rather delicate sacks of potatoes at one point. But somehow it didn't feel that way at all. The signs that every patient mattered were everywhere. The limited time they were able to operate on the ward was not just the result of challenging protective equipment. Some simply couldn't cope and had to go over to desk duties. And this was not only the obvious personal anxiety of the risks they were taking. It seemed clear that every patient was important. Every one that failed to make it through counted not as a statistic but as a person. The patients, mercifully, know nothing of the fight as they are heavily sedated, but the doctors know it all. Every single person matters separately and absolutely. To lose one soul is to lose the whole world.
I had hoped to ring the church bell today in honour of the man whom we are burying. This idea was prompted by one of the commentator's on this blog who quoted Dunn, 'don't ask for whom the bells tolls'. I'd have quite like you to ask 'for whom is the bell ringing?'. Sadly though church bells are used to call people to prayer, to gather in the church building, and so we cannot ring them during this crisis.
However, at noon today, please stop. If you have a local church clock that rings the hour, use it to honour all those who have lost their lives and whom we cannot properly mourn. Not just those who have died as a result of the virus, but all the others whose families are denied the ability to say goodbye as they would wish. Honour each one. Let the noontide bell be their moment.

An unknown cousin, discovered near the grave of my great great grandmother, Eliza Moody