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The dance of death moves to the music of the holy.
We will need to be more than liturgical interior decorators, trying to figure out how to create tasteful funerals. We will need to step behind the curtain of our current customs to examine what lies hidden in the shadows and to explore the history of how we came to this place in our funeral practices. We will need to rethink basic assumptions about what makes for a “good funeral.”
am persuaded that in this, our moment in history, we are going through one of those periodic upheavals in the ways we care (or don’t) for the dead that are inevitable signs of an upheaval in the ways we care (or don’t) for the living.
To put it bluntly, a society that has forgotten how to honor the bodies of those who have departed is more inclined to neglect, even torture, the bodies of those still living.
The fabric of the Christian funeral is not woven entirely from threads of pure spiritual silk. The finger of God did not inscribe a divinely mandated funeral service on Moses’ tablets, Jesus gave no teaching about funerals in the Sermon on the Mount, and Paul did not bother the Corinthians with burial instructions.
When someone dies, Christians, like all other humans, look around at the immediate environment and ask: What do we have to do? What seems fitting to do? What do we believe we are summoned to do? In other words, Christian funeral practices emerge at the intersection of necessity, custom, and conviction.
Thus the church quietly avoided the “unworthy” practice of animal sacrifice in mystery religions, thundered against the “dangerous” and pompous initiation ceremonies of the Roman elite, and altered its baptismal rite to include a “reinterpreted” Gentile custom of drinking of a cup of milk mixed with honey (the Romans gave milk and honey to newborns to ward off sickness and evil spirits). The reason the church welcomed the milk-and-honey custom into worship was, says Chupungco, because it could and did reimagine it as the “fulfillment of God’s promise to our ancestors that he would lead them to
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As H. Richard Niebuhr reminded us, for a Christian the ethical question, What should I do? is always preceded by another question: What is going on?
The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf. As I have remarked elsewhere, it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.
All Christian funerals—formal or informal, high church or low, small or large, urban or rural—say, in essence, “Look! Can you perceive this? The life and death of this one who has died can be seen, if you know how to look, as shaped after the pattern of the life and death of Jesus.”
In other words, the way we get to know a person is through a lifetime of small embodiments. We are, in essence, what we choose to do with our bodies.
When we say we know our friend’s “soul,” we do not mean something apart from his body; we are describing the character and personality we have seen through his cumulative embodied actions.
“Dignity” is rooted, etymologically and philosophically, in the concept of merit.7 Dignity is an achievement, a rank, and therefore it can be lost. Sacredness is a divine gift, and it can never be taken away, even when the old thieves, disease and death, pillage us of our dignity.8
The earliest Christians could never have anticipated how thoroughly we contemporary Christians would be willing to trade our incarnational birthright for a bowl of warmed-over Neoplatonic porridge.
But do we really want to leave the dead behind at Golgotha and not welcome them to Easter? Is Easter about only a resurrection of our memory, or is it about the resurrection of the body?
After all, we say, the person is there “in spirit,” and the presence of a casket can be more of a clumsy distraction to worship than an asset. We are not amused, though, when a church member heads off to the golf course on Sunday morning, reassuring us that they will be present at worship “in spirit.” The body does not lie.
Ethically and theologically, we are not where we put our good intentions; we are where we put our bodies.
As Oscar Cullmann has said, “Death in itself is not beautiful, not even the death of Jesus…. “Whoever paints a pretty death can paint no resurrection. Whoever has not grasped the horror of death cannot join Paul in the hymn of victory: Death is swallowed up—in victory!”
If we thunder out only denunciations of Death, the final enemy, we may obscure the fact that death, biological death, can sometimes come as a friend, ending pain and halting the merciless fall of sufferers into despair. On the other hand, if we forget about Death’s bloody saber and focus only on death as a part of the natural flow of life, we can be seduced into bland and finally unchristian bromides about death.
The bodily resurrection of Jesus—so troubling to philosophers, so perplexing to scientists, so repulsive to gnostics—is a crucial claim, but not a crudely literalistic one. It is not as if God gathered together all of the cells and molecules of Jesus’ body, including the DNA he left on the chalice at the Last Supper and on the cross beam, reassembled them, and set Jesus back walking the streets of Jerusalem.
The claim is that God raised the fullness of Jesus, the person of Jesus, from the dead. God raised Jesus, the Jesus who was known and experienced in the things he said and did with his body—not the idea of Jesus, not the spirit of Jesus, but Jesus; and that is an embodied reality.
In the words of Jürgen Moltmann, “Death will die, not-being will be no longer, hell will go to hell.”15
But eternity speaks not of “the last day” but of Today.
The notion that the eternal fate of people swings on whether they decide to allow Jesus Christ into their hearts is ruthlessly individualistic and runs counter to the biblical hope of a new creation. Putting the weight of God’s intent to redeem creation on a series of personal choices is something like a man in a cottage on the coast of Normandy in June of 1944, as the Allied forces swept across the beaches, thinking that he had to choose whether to be liberated or not. Moreover, such a view of salvation puts God’s will at the mercy of human decision making. As Moltmann observes: Can some
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Despite popular misconceptions, a funeral is not primarily a quiet time when people gather to reflect on the legacy of the deceased, a devotional service dealing with grief, a show of community support for the mourning family, or even a “celebration of life.” Good funerals, in fact, do all of these things—console the grief-stricken, remember and honor the deceased, display community care, and give thanks for all the joys and graces experienced in the life of the one who has died. But these are some of the consequences of a good funeral, not its central meaning or purpose.
Though probably no one present would have thought of it this way, this little bit of drama was actually something of a secularized séance. The actual dead man was nowhere around; in fact, not having his body around was part of the theatrical point. What was desired was his spirit, and the four “priests” were there to invoke it in the form of positive memory.
Like the memorial service described by Mitford, this ritual had no place to go, not because the participants lacked conviction or cleverness, but because the underlying narratives on which these rituals were based were stories of the dead with no destination.
