Christian reflections on (Christian) burial

Excerpts from a symposium in Touchstone...

Burial Plots & Parking Lots by Russell D. Moore
Our Buried Sentiments by Wilfred M. McClay
Landscapes of the Dead by Anthony Esolen
The Grave Not Taken by David Mills
Stone Sobriety by S. M. Hutchens
In Grave Country by Darryl Hart


Powerful thoughts from Russell Moore...

Drive by your local booming suburban church, or the up-and-coming congregation everyone’s talking about in your community. You might find a state-of-the-art children’s complex, complete with antibiotic soap dispensers in every corner. You might find a Family Life Center—previously known as a gym—with a basketball court, foosball tables, maybe even an Olympic-size pool. You’ll almost certainly find a feeding hall, perhaps with a franchised gourmet coffee kiosk nearby.

What you will not find is a graveyard.

Not many churches have graveyards anymore. In some ways, that’s understandable. Churches that are growing and evangelistic rightly conclude that sharing the gospel with the living is more important than remembering the dead.

We all know churches that carefully manicure their graveyards and remember who is buried where. They also remember who paid for what pillar—so don’t you try to remove it to create additional space for your children’s Bible fellowship area. For them the graveyard is a symbol of a concern more for maintaining their family genealogies and the memories of the past than forging forward for the Kingdom.

But, still. I wonder if we are losing something by outsourcing the care of our dead to the funeral industry. Did we lose something important, maybe even something biblical, when we paved over our graveyards?

The church graveyard might serve to remind us of something that we as contemporary Christians, with all our flash and verve, seem to forget too often these days. We are going to die....

Maybe a cemetery would serve as an icon that all our Babels will collapse, all our wood, hay, and stubble will be incinerated before the Judgment Seat....

The antidote for such pride is to consider one’s end....not just a check on the pride of individuals, but of churches as well....

We’re a Kingdom, a Kingdom that spans the ages and includes the dead and the unborn...

I’m realistic enough to know that the church graveyard is a thing of the past....But maybe we would see something of what we’re missing if we took the time to walk among the tombstones once in a while....Maybe if we spent more time in graveyards, we might reconsider the need for them....the graveyard is not just a sign that we haven’t forgotten our dead. It’s a sign that we’re just waiting for them—and for ourselves—to hear one last invitation hymn....

Wilfred McClay opens with the story of a woman walking her dog and stumbling upon the remains of a human corpse. This negligence-- and hundreds of cases like it-- was the work of "Tri-State Crematory, a family-owned business hired to deal with bodies from funeral homes in three states. Some of the bodies were “stacked like cordwood”; and bones "were scattered through the woods like leaves, skulls mixed with leg bones in a ghoulish jumble”.

McClay then asks why there was so much "outrage" and "vehemence".

Why, when so many Americans see nothing exceptional in the taking of a pre-born life, when they are becoming inured to the warehousing of the elderly and infirm, when they regard the protection of embryonic life as itself a laughable proposition, when they routinely accept cremation, and the dismemberment of corpses for science, did this bizarre episode strike horror in so many?...

It goes to the fact that there is something of primal importance about the way we treat the dead...

One might even say that burial has a certain civilizational priority, that what we make of the dead creates the foundation for what we make of ourselves....Prehistoric nomads established permanent habitations of the dead...Only later did such men exchange their mobility for settled habitations...

A typically poetic effort from Anthony Esolen, poignant words from S.M. Hutchens, and something of history from Darryl Hart-- but I don't see anything to excerpt...

Finally, this from David Mills-- on the unfortunate symbolism inherent in cremation (aside from whether it is biblical, unbiblical, or abiblical)...

She could not explain her objection, but I understand it, and share it. I know, and explained to her, the arguments allowing cremation. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church tersely puts it, “The Church permits cremation, provided that it does not demonstrate a denial of belief in the resurrection of the body.”

But still, it feels wrong to burn a body that could be laid to rest. It may be “licit,” in the technical language of canon law, but it does not seem to me proper. It may be permitted, but that does not mean it is good when you can accomplish the ideal....

You burn something to destroy it...Ashes are in every other case something you throw away....We bury things we want to preserve, like time capsules, or to transform, like seeds and bulbs. Planting is the main symbol we think of when we think of burying something. It is an act of hope, of trust....