I had a
congregant pull me aside at church a few weeks ago to ask me a very urgent question.
The senior pastor was out sick, the associate pastor was busy, and I had just
preached. This urgent question was about her concerns for those who are
cremated.
"In the bible," she said,
"it talks about Jesus coming back for us and raising us from the dead to
ascend with him to heaven."
"Okay," I replied, bemused
and nervous about where this was going.
"But what about those who are
cremated? How can Jesus raise them from their graves if they've been
cremated."
I wanted to
laugh so hard, but I guess I'm a minister...or something. I replied to this
concerned congregant with a carefully curated question.
"I don't believe that the author
meant for that to be literal. Jesus' return and the raising of the dead from
their graves is a metaphorical synopsis."
What I
wanted to say is, "We will all be ashes to ashes, dust to dust someday.
People who are cremated just get their quicker." But I left my comedy
aside. In Long and Lynch's The Good Funeral, he critiques
modern North America's discomfort with the body--this cultural
disconnect from the corpse of the deceased that has led to a rise in what Lynch
calls "the bodiless obsequy, which has become a staple of available option
for bereaved families" (Lynch, 59[kindle]).
We are so uncomfortable
with the body that we don't talk about it in many faith
communities. For a 70+ year old woman to ask me a question about the
metaphysics of "rising from the dead" conveys that even clergy have
shied away from such a topic. Lynch goes into brief detail about cremation in
chapter 3, vowing to dig further into the history and tradition later on the
book; but what he does give us is yet another example of how North Americans
distance themselves from death and the
body, performing cremation in an "off-site, out-of-site, industrial
venue where everything is handled privately and efficiently," and, might I
add, lacking in the spiritual ceremony that is to celebrate and commemorate
this final transition of the body.
My Leo used
to say, "I heard the body screams when it's being cremated," to scare
me. Leo was my best friend during my adolescent years, 33 years my senior. When
his mom died of a heart attack in 1999, he said he didn't call the undertaker
for 6 hours because he wanted to spend time with her before they took her away
for good. I wish I could have spent time with his body when he died in
2015.
I've
witnessed how uncomfortable we are with the body—how people have limited time
with the body during wakes and funerals. When I was growing up in the south,
everyone who died had a 2-4-hour wake service on Friday night where people
could view the body, and a 2-4-hour open-casket funeral on Saturday morning.
Now, wake services are disappearing and, often, the casket is closed during the
funeral as to not further disturb the grieving onlookers. "I could
have spent days with the body," O'Rouke writes, "getting used to it,
loving it, saying goodbye to it" (Lynch, 63). That's what wakes were
for. I really do miss that moment—moments like when I got to pass by my
grandmothers open casket during her funeral last November. They really do
matter. They are what Lynch suggests is a part of "a primal
obligation" we have to the dead. Long describes this “obligation”
well in the case of Atsushi Chiba, the retired undertaker who cared for bodies
of 1000+ tsunami victims, “gently [massaging] the bodies to relax them into a
posture of peacefulness” (89). The care for and lingering with the body really
offered the families peace.
I'm
somewhere between Jessica Mitford and Alan Ball feelings on "the body." Whereas Mitford hates the
corpse and all of the emotions it triggers, Ball wants the body back and
welcomes all of the emotions it triggers. I'm somewhere in between. I'd like to
think I'd want to spend time with the body of a loved one, but I'm selfish--I
don't necessarily want anybody spending time with my body...not if it means
dressing me up in something cheesy and putting a synthetic straight-haired wig
over my natural African hair. I suppose I'm distrustful of what people would do
to and with my body beyond just spending time with it. This issue with the
body is perplexing, to say the least. I wonder if funerals will even
exist 30 years from now.
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