장례예식을 넘어 죽음의례로

Abstract

Presently, the studies of the Protestant death ritual focus on the formal funeral service of the church. Their scholarly arguments are mainly about the way to change the traditional funeral service. Recent studies seek to modify the rigidity of the formal, traditional funeral service, and the tendency to be out-of-context due to its emphasis on the universality of liturgy. These studies also work to clarify the importance of grieving, highlight the liturgical appropriateness to occasion, and to expand the function of funeral service in strengthening communal solidarity. These studies construe funeral service as the most important death ritual, and are predicated on the assumption that ritual is regular, repetitive human practice characterized by formality and communality. The problem here is more informal, personal death rituals are not attended to. The simpler and more informal death rituals occur in our daily lives in various ways, affecting individual people more deeply than formal funeral services at church do, sometimes. The Protestant death rituals should attend to - beyond the formal funeral service at church - the death rituals that carry the stories of people’s lives connected with their deaths. We can find living ritual and experience living faith there. The funeral service of the church, which shows no sign of change despite the critical insights and suggestions by the researchers, can be motivated indirectly to transform itself. Given the fact that the death ritual is the way the grievers deal with the passing of their beloved, the studies of the personally practiced rituals enable to shed a light on the whole death ritual overlooked by the funeral service. The result is to diversify the larger repertoire of death rituals which allow the survivers to bear the death in their hearts. These studies can practically contribute to expand the discourse of death, such as thanatology and education of preparation for death, to the world of daily living, beyond the funeral service of processing death.