The holy fire

Thomas Lynch has a fascinating article on cremation in a recent Christian Century. He’s a funeral director who has written eloquently on death, burial, and his occupation. He begins this article with observations about changing American attitudes toward cremation, and the impact of those attitudes on our funerary rituals. He uses Thomas G. Long’s Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral. Both lament the relative absence of concrete experiences of the mourners with cremation. We have all attended burial services, but few of us have witnessed a cremation. He writes about contemporary “memorial services:”

If not made to disappear entirely, the presence of the dead at such services is minimized, inurned, denatured, virtualized, made manageable and unrecognizable by cremation.

He continues:

The issue is not cremation or burial but rather the gospel, the sacred text of death and resurrection, suffering and salvation, redemption and grace–the mystery that a Chrisitan funeral ought to call us to behold, the mystery of life’s difficult journey and the faithful pilgrim’s triumphant homegoing. The memorial service, by avoiding the embodied dead, the shovel and shoulder work, the divisions of labor and difficult journey to the grave or pyre, too often replaces theology with therapy, conviction with convenience, the full-throated assurances of faith with a sort of memorial karaoke where ‘everyone gets to share a memory.’

Now, I’ve never witnessed a cremation, but then what Lynch says about burials is not quite accurate, either. In my experience, burials are hardly visible to the mourners. In fact, it seems that most cemeteries are reluctant to let us see the open grace, instead covering it with astroturf.

The liturgy instructs priests to cast dirt on the coffin. In the antiseptic funeral, an experienced funeral director will supply me with a tiny vial of what looks to be mason’s sand. There is no connection with the body, or with what Lynch calls “the spade and shoulder work.”

Contrast that with the cremations in which I’ve participated. At St. James, we dug a hole, we carried the ashes and poured them; often they sifted through our fingers. I’ve found those ashes much more real, more embodied, than the artificially made-up faces of loved ones in open caskets.

I will agree with Lynch that more work needs to be done. There are problems with the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer as it moves from the burial service to the graveside, and especially in dealing with the reality that a burial may take place at a very different time and in a very different place than the memorial service. Families struggle mightily to make those services meaningful and to find meaningful ways to say goodbye to the mortal remains of their loved ones.

Lynch seems to think that we ought to develop some rituals related to cremation and fire. Perhaps. He doesn’t realize the ritual power and sacred meaning in the ashes themselves. He seems to assume the memorial service takes place without either body or ashes present and that the norm is for it to occur before cremation. In my experience, the ashes are almost always present. And I’ve been struck repeatedly by the ways in which loved ones deal with the presence of those ashes, the care and awe that they show.

The full text of Lynch’s article is here.