”Gå vi till paradis med sång” : psalmers funktion i begravningsgudstjänster

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to shed light upon the function of hymns in Church of Sweden funeral services in the 1990s. The funeral service is one of the strongest links between the Swedish people and the Church of Sweden. Since this service can be seen as an essential meeting-place between people and their needs in a mourning process and the Church and its message of faith in this situation, the primary focus in this thesis is the study of the conditions necessary for meeting these needs and conveying this message in the funeral context. To achieve this purpose empirical data is used. 2,222 questionnaires from the research project <i>Begravningsseder – studier av sociala skillnader efter döden</i> have been analysed. The completed questionnaires cover 2,222 funeral services in the Church of Sweden during 1997. They show that some 220 hymns from <i>Den svenska psalmboken 1986</i> were used for congregational singing. The most frequent hymns are traditional, well known and genuinely cherished hymns. However, in 10 % of the funerals one of the hymns of <i>Den svenska psalmboken 1986</i> was replaced by another hymn or song, or by instrumental music. In order to analyse the function of hymns in funeral services, ten funerals were chosen for qualitative analyses. As a first stage in conducting a functional analysis of the funeral services, the theological and existential content of 14 hymns was analysed. The in-depth analysis of the funeral services focuses on the relation and interaction between the hymns and the other parts of the service. The analysis indicates that the hymns were often, but in diverse ways, related to other parts of the service. In addition, most of the ten funerals appear to have been well-composed services which included the opportunity for meeting people’s existential needs in a mourning process, which also provided a Christian message of faith in the funeral context. Most of these funerals met the necessary conditions for an encounter between the aspect of society and the aspect of the Church, and were able to help people in a mourning process to turn from death to life.