The wheel of life doesn’t exclude death. Nonetheless, when a person very close to us passes away, we are still overcome with grief and sorrow. A closure ritual should be performed. Funeral services are rituals that help individuals to relinquish and achieve closure.
Funerals are state of family ceremonies conducted after the death of a person, in order to honour him. It involves a number of customs and rites that are unique to the religion of the dead person.
Most Christian funerals have rituals that can be divided into three kinds of events – visitation, funeral and burial. The visitation and funeral parts have greater importance from the point of view of rituals and have been discussed here.
The first ceremony is the visitation, when the body is placed in a coffin for public viewing by relatives and other people in the gathering. The body is often adorned with the best clothes and jewelery belonging to the deceased. Some cultures follow the rite of embalming the body, though not all communities are bound to do it.
Visitation often includes a display of photos of the dead person by the family or a display of articles that were valued by the deceased during his lifetime. Some relatives also like to do a slideshow or video from the deceased’s lifetime.
This service is succeeded by a memorial service, also known as a funeral, which is held usually at a church. The coffin with the dead body in it is brought to the church in a hearse, accompanied by a funeral cortege of mourners. The coffin is laid in the church with an elaborate floral decoration on it.
The service generally involves reading of parts from the Holy Scriptures or the Bible and offering prayers for the departed. The people assembled at the funeral also sing devotional songs. This is followed by a comforting speech delivered by the priest presiding over the funeral service and eulogies by the friends and relatives, who then share their personal thoughts about the deceased’s life. Sometimes, the people assembled are allowed to view the body for one last time before the burial. Church bells may be rung both before the service and after it.
Once these ceremonies are over, the body is taken in a funeral procession for burial, which marks the end of the funeral ceremony.
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