I am aware of this criticism. I have made it heard several times since the early 1980s of the protestant tradition and especially of the more evangelical wings. Along with this, almost side by side has been a lot of critism of the drop in physical mourning ceremony in society. The suggestion that death is the last taboo.

Now I have just re-read for an exam an article by Ian Craib pointing out that far from death and mourning being a taboo subjects they have become one of deep discussion amongst professionals who deal with people in distress. That if you look a Foucault and his analysis of what has happened to sex in the late nineteenth century, you will see a very similar pattern happen around Death and mourning today. That is mourning for someone who has died, is becoming to be seen as requiring the intervention of the professionals, in the same way that certain sexual practises did. That is the very natural symptoms with respect to mourning of a person are interpreted more as illness that needs treatment rather than as a healing process a person goes through.

Death has always been an area where the Church has been the ‘professional’, the one who dealt with it, and the movement of other professions into this area is also a present trend. Then again death of someone close to us is less often experienced today so congregations and communities have in many ways lost the old support mechanisms.

Now mourning is not always something people do in public, it has an intensley private side to it and I am one of those who needs almost to be totally alone at times during the process. However the trend today in many ways is apart from for big dignatries (e.g.Princess Dianne), it is unacknowledged that the community will need to mourne.

I think given the above we need to think very carefully about what the situation is actually telling us. The lack of mourning on Good Friday is not an isolated incident, it is one that is taking place against a change in mourning practises in the whole of society. Mourning has moved in the Church (and I think this is all branches to some extent) from the very public setting of worship to the private one of pastoral care. This is reflecting the way society is changing. However I think that the subject of privatisation in this sense needs to be tackled and thought about.

Jengie