If you are in the throes of church-shopping for your dream wedding, take a moment to consider whether that same sanctuary would work for your funeral.
We reported a few days ago on the Revd Laurie Brock’s blog post offering advice to non-church members seeking a venue for their wedding.
Now, a new post on The Federalist offers pointers for choosing a church for your funeral. Hans Fiene, Lutheran pastor in Illinois and the creator of Lutheran Satire, advises,
If you are a typical five-year-old girl and are currently planning your dream wedding, please stop for a moment and plan your funeral first….
I know it sounds a bit morbid to encourage kindergarteners to contemplate their postmortem course of action, but, statistically speaking, it’s a better use of their time than wedding planning. If Time Magazine is right, only 75 percent of those five-year-old girls will turn into blushing brides one day. But 100 percent of them will eventually turn into dead people.
Fiene relates the unfortunate story of Vanessa Collier, whose funeral was turned away from the church where it was scheduled to take place “minutes” before the service was due to start.
If you don’t decide which venue you’d like to host your funeral before you die, that responsibility will fall to your loved ones with the additional challenge of having to see through the muck of their sorrow and figure out if that venue is comfortable celebrating your life the way you would have desired. Since your family would only have about seventy-two hours to answer that question, it’s quite possible for a lapse in communication to bring about an ugly situation like the recent one in Lakewood, Colorado, where Vanessa Collier’s funeral was cancelled just minutes before it was scheduled to start after the congregation hosting the funeral learned that she was a lesbian.
Fiene’s solution is to “Avoid A Funeral Standoff With Three Easy Questions,” those being,
1) Do you want a religious funeral service or a secular one?
2) Do you believe the stuff that’s taught by the church you have selected?
3) Do you belong to a church?
If so, Fiene’s advises, that might be a fine place to start (or stop) looking for your funereal destination.
Posted by Rosalind Hughes