Obviously Margaret Holloway, one of the DH leads on social care whose framework document has just been published – see the previous two posts – has had a busy month. She has also finished her research on spirituality in contermporary funerals. I’ve just had a copy and it will shortly be on the University website at Hull. They visited loads of funerals and then interviewed the professionals involved and the families about their views of what happened. There’s a lot of fascinating detail in the report; even though the theoretical material will probably pass a lot of readers by. It’s one of those sociological studies that really tells you about people’s lives, but also tells you that sociologists think very complicatedly about said lives.

What it shows is that funerals are still very important to families and there are spiritual and religious ideas within them what enable people to ‘make meaning’ of their lives and the life of the person who has died. There is still a lot of ritaul, but some of it is newish and perhaps a bit secular. It was often about celebrating and remembering a life, and while people could be sombre traditional religious music and hymn-singing was by no means universal.

I know this from singing in the choir at weddings: not a lot of the congregations can cope with hymns other than those they’ve encountered at school assmblies or the last night of the proms (not a lot). Recently, as a rather distant relative, I was invited to a funeral solely because it was known that I would know the hymns and sing loudly, to overcome the family embarassment at the fact tha nobody knew the hymns or could sing.

Any way, loads of fascinating detail here: the research website:

http://www2.hull.ac.uk/fass/socsci/research/research-projects/spirituality.aspx