Finished this week's funerals - all very different services. One all CD and young people, another organ music, robed choir and people at the other end of life and yet another full of love, expression, feeling .
Thing is that despite the fact that I have managed to fill a few rows of the church register with funerals this week, I really do enjoy them. Yesterday's was an opportunity to say goodbye to a dear, and dearly loved, Christian man. It was probably the first open-casket funeral the Parish church had ever seen and the interment was the first time any of the locals had seen the family fill the grave in after the service.
It's odd how, despite the period or poverty in which they were born, people make real successes of their lives. Look at the generation that's leaving us now (in my book they're about eighty-seven) for instance. They knew how to party, managing to make a couple of bottles of beer and a piano last all weekend, and could have nothing in their pockets and still find ways of having fun! This is the generation who sent people to war and did what had to be done and yet never (generally) suffered PTSD or any of the other problems that beset the 'modern' generations. They knew their mind, suffered fools badly and (generally) kept to strictly held beliefs and standards. Two of the most telling traits of this generation was that they'd generally do anything for anyone (the cliché is that 'if they couldn't do you a good turn they wouldn't do you a bad one') and that they 'paid their way'. They knew when to stop buying Christmas presents - the money ran out.
In comparison the newer generations are nowhere near as resilient. They struggle to own possessions that possess them and they fare really badly should things not go their way. We are beset by a people who know their rights and yet are fairly unclear when it comes to responsibilities. The saddest thing is that they just give up where other generations would have stuck out their chins and tenaciously gone for it.
Now I know that the pressures facing us today are 'different' from say, the fifties, but life is richer, education is more readily available and generally things are better now than then. So what's the main difference between then and now?
You know I've been racking my brains and looking at the differences and what I find is:
i. Women were the homemakers - they taught the kids, cared for the husbands (who were pretty lazy wotsits when it came to home) and generally kept the family living and loving, fed and clothed.
ii. There was a faith life that generally underpinned society, set and maintained standards, and provided answers to some of the major questions and an opportunity to have some expression of faith.
iii. Possessions were things you had. There was the 'front room', that amazing place reserved for special occasions and filled with special things (treasures often), but outside that you tended to have what you needed (one of them) rather than now where you have many of the same thing to the point of absurdity.
iv. People gathered around pianos, talked, listened to the radio and read. Television provided the means whereby we could live in a magical world of having been everywhere without leaving our self-imposed dungeon. Computers have assisted in this insularity and now, thanks to MP3 players we don't ever have to leave our private world to engage with others.
Seems like we've perhaps been born into a tougher world after all and (generally) without God and faith there's no answers (outside of sex, alcohol, drugs, possession and mental illness).
Life, it seems, was great then and could be now (and perhaps I've given us all some pointers here)!
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