I went to a service yesterday in a City church which, I understood, had been expensively and extensively restored. It looked exactly the same as when I was last in there - damp, dirty and decaying. The occasion of my visit was the funeral of a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a distinguished authority on arms and armour. It was an odd sort of service, in the modern style, combining elements of funeral and memorial services - entry and exit music by Wagner, three hymns, Vaughan Williams' anthem "Let us now praise famous men", three lessons, a long address solely concerned with the achievements of the deceased, and a delightful sonata for flute and bassoon. Of the address, a colleague observed at the post-funeral reception that it said nothing about the character of man, and especially nothing of his famed irascibility, concerning which stories abounded.
Funerals in the City cannot be followed immediately by interment or cremation. There is a long journey to the nearest crematorium or cemetery. It has become usual to say a form of the committal before the hearse takes the coffin away. At Saint Bartholomew's we do that, with all the congregation gathered on the pavement, as the coffin is loaded into the hearse, and then we wait for it to be driven away, passing out of sight as it goes towards the Central Markets.
At yesterday's funeral the committal was said while the coffin was still standing of the trestles in the midst of the church with the solemn words "we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust". The Prayer Book rubrics are quite explicit:
Then, while the earth shall be cast upon the body by some standing by, the priest shall say". It makes no sense at all to use the words of committal in the precise Prayer Book form in a completely different and unanticipated context. But then some very odd things happen in the City of London and the Archdeacon seemed to think it was all quite normal!
