The Good Funeral and the Empty Tomb 1

Introduction

A man that I work with named Wesley Rice once spent all of one day and all night carefully piecing together the parts of a girl’s cranium. She’d been murdered by a madman with a baseball bat after he’d abducted and raped her. The morning of the day it all happened she’d left for school dressed for picture day—a schoolgirl dressed to the nines, waving at her mother, ready for the photographer. The picture was never taken. She was abducted from the bus stop and found a day later in a stand of trees just off the road a township south of here. After he’d raped her and strangled her and stabbed her, he beat her head with a baseball bat, which was found beside the child’s body. The details were reported dispassionately in the local media along with the speculations as to which of the wounds was the fatal one—the choking, the knife or the baseball bat. No doubt these speculations were the focus of the double postmortem the medical examiner performed on her body before signing the death certificate “Multiple Injuries.” Most embalmers, faced with what Wesley Rice was faced with after he’d opened the pouch from the morgue, would have simply said “closed casket,” treated the remains enough to control the odor, zipped the pouch and gone home for cocktails. It would have been easier. The pay was the same. Instead, he started working. Eighteen hours later the girl’s mother, who had pleaded to see her, saw her. She was dead, to be sure, and damaged; but her face was hers again, not the madman’s version. The hair was hers, not his. The body was hers, not his. Wesley Rice had not raised her from the dead nor hidden the hard facts, but he had retrieved her death from the one who had killed her. He had closed her eyes, her mouth. He’d washed her wounds, sutured her lacerations, pieced her beaten skull together, stitched the incisions from the autopsy, cleaned the dirt from under her fingernails, scrubbed the fingerprint ink from her fingertips, washed her hair, dressed her in jeans and a blue turtleneck, and laid her in a casket beside which her mother stood for two days and sobbed as if something had been pulled from her by force. It was the same when her pastor stood with her and told her “God weeps with you.” And the same when they buried the body in the ground. It was then and always will be awful, horrible, unappeasably sad. But the outrage, the horror, the heartbreak belonged, not to the murderer or to the media or to the morgue, each of whom had staked their claims to it. It belonged to the girl and to her mother. Wesley had given them the body back. “Barbaric” is what Jessica Mitford called this “fussing over the dead body.” ² I say the monster with the baseball bat was barbaric. What Wesley Rice did was a kindness. And, to the extent that it is easier to grieve the loss that we see, than the one we imagine or read about in papers or hear of on the evening news, it was what we undertakers call a good funeral.

It served the living by caring for the dead. ³

A good funeral? I first heard that oddly oxymoronic trope from my father who would come home from the office, throw his black suit coat on the back of a kitchen chair, undo his tie and the top button of his starched white shirt, and sit down to dinner saying, “We had a couple good funerals today.” It made perfect sense when he said it, and in the saying was implied the sense that a funeral might just as easily go bad. But what exactly makes a funeral good?

To begin, these words about another funeral from the Gospel of John:

After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission; so he came and removed his body. Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds. They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews. Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there. (19:38–42)

I am not, I should say, entirely untutored in the scriptural, the canonical, and the pseudepigraphal; in fact, we have hosted a Bible study in my funeral home for the past several years. It came into being maybe 30 years ago when a Lutheran lawyer in our town called me at the office to tell me they were looking for a good Catholic to join their Bible study. Let me know if you find one, I told him. But he persisted. The group would meet every Tuesday morning at half past six in the local “Big Boy” restaurant. I figured what with the early hour and crummy food, we would all come to our senses before too long, but as I mentioned, it has been 30 years now and I am none the worse for wear and in most all ways improved by the fellowship and study.

The Big Boy restaurant went belly up as the Baby Boomers who formed its main clientele all aged beyond their appetites for cheeseburgers and onion rings and chocolate malts. They wanted grilled fish and skinless chicken and healthy options in tossed salads. That is when we moved to the funeral home, where the coffee was free and the chairs, like ourselves, were more well padded. The prayers we shared at the opening of our study began to mention more medical exams—stress tests and biopsies—and the marital strife of adult sons and daughters and the wellbeing of grandchildren. As we looked around the room, it was clear we were becoming elders, old farts, senior citizens. And studying the ancient Scriptures in a funeral home seemed to make a kind of sense as each of us has moved beyond the dutiful sons of aging parents to the status of aging parents ourselves. It is our own ends we contemplate and begin to plan for.

Thus do the verses surrounding the burial of Christ, “according to the burial customs of the Jews,” take on a personal relevance, because they affirm that every tribe and sect, religious and ethnic community is obliged to figure out what to do with their dead. And so when Joseph the Arimathean, in league with Nicodemus, petitioned Pilate for the body of Christ, they were acting out a primal office of their species and the particular dictates of their tribe. Men and women of a certain age pay attention to such observances.

It was much the same that early April years ago at the Vatican, when long-suffering Pope John Paul II finally died.

That first week of April 2005 was dominated by images of the dead man’s body vested in red, mitered, and laid out among the faithful with bells and books and candles, blessed with water and incense, borne from one station to the next in what began to take shape as a final journey. The front pages above the fold of the world’s daily papers were uniform in their iconography: a corpse clothed in sumptuous vestments from head to toe, still as stone and horizontal. Such images, flickering across their ubiquitous screens no doubt gave pause to many Americans for whom the presence of the dead at their own funerals had gone, strangely out of style.

For many bereaved Americans, the “celebration of life” involves a guest list open to everyone except the actual corpse, which is often dismissed, disappeared without rubric or witness, buried or burned, out of sight, out of mind, by paid functionaries such as me. So the visible presence of the pope’s body at the pope’s funeral struck many as an oddity, a quaint relic of old customs. How “Catholic,” some predictably said, or how “Italian,” or “Polish” or “traditional”; how “lavish,” “expensive,” or “barbaric.” Such things were also said after the deaths of Princess Diana and Ronald Reagan. “When in Rome,” the perpetually beleaguered cable television commentators would say, “et cetera, et cetera.”

In point of fact, what happened in Rome that week eight years ago now, followed a pattern as old as the species—it was “human,” this immediate focus on the dead and this sense that the living must go the distance with them. Most of nature does not stop for death. But we do. Wherever our spirits go, or do not, ours is a species that has learned to process grief by processing the objects of our grief, the bodies of the dead, from one place to the next. We bear mortality by bearing mortals—the living and the dead—to the brink of a uniquely changed reality: Heaven or Valhalla or Whatever Is Next. We commit and commend them into the nothingness or somethingness, into the presence of God or God’s absence. Whatever afterlife there is or is not, human beings have marked their ceasing to be by going the distance with their dead, getting them to the brink of a new reality—to the tomb or the fire or the grave, the holy tree or deep sea, whatever sacred space of oblivion to which we consign them. And we have been doing this since the beginning.

Our theology is shaped by our eschatology. Our living faith is informed by our best hopes for the dead. Our ideas of God are informed by our contemplation of Last Things—dying, death, heaven and hell, the judgment with its punishments and rewards.

Thus, the defining truth of our Christianity, the empty tomb, proceeds from the defining truth of our humanity: we fill them. Our mortality is certain although our faith lays claim to more. The mystery of the resurrection to eternal life is bound inextricably to the certainty of the cross of suffering and death. Indeed, the effort to make sense of it all—the religious impulse—owes to our primeval questions about the nature of death. Save for these uniquely human curiosities about last things and eschatologies and the liturgies we construct to answer them, we would be so much road-kill and windfall, litter and landfill, our names and dates, our lives and deaths unmarked and unremarkable. Like baptisms and nuptials, we do funerals to address the uniquely human questions: what is permanent, what is passing, what is the meaning of life and love, suffering and death. Gladioli and gold fish are not much troubled by these things. Only humans are.

You can try this at home. If you have a pair of parakeets or Pomeranians, geraniums or cacti—just about any animate being will do—put one to death or simply let it die in its own good time, and watch what the other of its own kind does. There may be some sniffing or circling in momentary scrutiny, but little else will happen. The surviving half of the former duo will simply swim or slink or saunter away, keeping whatever thoughts they have to themselves.

We humans are different and it was ever thus.

Ours is the species bound to the dirt, fashioned from it, according to the Book of Genesis (2:7). Thus, human and humus occupy the same page of our dictionaries because we are beings “of the soil,” of the earth. The lexicon and language are full of such wisdoms. Thus, our “humic density,” as the scholar Robert Pogue Harrison ⁴ calls it, the notion that everything human—our architecture and history, our monuments and cities—all rooted in and rising from the humus, the earth, the ground in which our dead are buried, is what eventually defines us.

Years ago, I took to trying to imagine the first human widow awakening to the dead lump of a fellow next to her, stone still under the hides that covered and warmed them against the elements. This might have been forty or fifty thousand years ago, somewhere in the Urals or Mesopotamia or the Dordogne, or maybe Lebanon or Uganda or the Congo and seventy or eighty thousand years ago. The species’ history is a work in progress. Anyway, this is long before we have alphabets or agriculture, or any of the later-day civilizers. The species evolves from upright foragers and carnivores to upright foragers and carnivores who begin to think in symbolic terms. They begin to wonder. Symbol and image and icon and metaphor become part of their reality. What was it, I ask myself, that first vexed them into contemplations?

I always imagine a cave and primitive tools and art and artifacts. They have fire and some form of language and social orders. This first human widow wakes up to find the man she has been sleeping with and cooking for and breeding with gone cold and quiet in a way she had not formerly considered. Depending on the weather, sooner or later she begins to sense that something about him has changed quite utterly and irreversibly. Probably she smells the truth of this within a matter of a day or two. And what makes her human is that she figures she had better do something about it.

Let us, for a moment, consider her options.

Perhaps she gathers her things together and follows the nomadic herd of her group elsewhere, leaving the cave to him, in which case we could call it his tomb. Or maybe she likes the decor of the place and has put some of herself into the improvements, and so decides that she should stay and that the now unresponsive and decomposing lump of matter next to her should be removed. She drags him out by the ankles and begins her search for a cliff to push him over or a ditch to push him into, or maybe she digs a pit in the earth to bury him because she does not want wild animals attracted to his odor. Or maybe she builds a fire, a large fire, around and atop his rotting body and feeds it with fuel until the body is all but consumed. Maybe she keeps one of the bones for a totem or remembrance. Or let us say she lives near a body of water and counts on the fish to cleanse his remains, or maybe she hoists him into a tree and figures the birds will pick him clean. Maybe she enlists the assistance of others of her kind in the performance of these duties who do their part sensing that they may need exactly this kind of help in the future.

And here is where, in my imagination of this, Humanity 101 becomes the course of our history. It has to do with that momentary pause before she turns and leaves the cave or the ditch or the pit or the fire or the pond or the tree or whatever oblivion she has chosen for him. In that pause, she stares into the oblivion she has consigned him to and frames what are the signature questions of our species: Is that all there is? Why is he cold? Can this happen to me? What comes next? Of course, there are other questions, many more, but all of them are uniquely human, because no other species ponders such things. And they align with questions that might have formed the first time she had sex or the first time she gave birth or the first time she was frightened by something in the sky or the dark. This is when the first glimpse of a life before or beyond this one begins to flicker into the species’ consciousness, and questions about where we come from and where we go take up more and more of the moments not spent on rudimentary survival. Maybe the way the sun rises and sets or the seasons change or the tide ebbs and flows begins to replicate her own existence. And maybe whatever made the larger and the smaller lights in the night sky and the great yellow disk that moves across the sky had something to do with her and the man whose body she is disposing of.

And this is the point that I am trying to make: the contemplation of the existential mysteries, those around being and ceasing to be, is what separates humans from the rest of creation; our humanity is, therefore, directly tied to how we respond to mortality. In short, how we deal with our dead in their physical reality and how we deal with death as an existential reality define and describe us in primary ways. Furthermore, the physical reality of death and the existential contemplation of the concept of death are inextricably linked so that it can be said, in trying to define what might be among the first principles of humanity, that ours is the species that deals with death (the idea of the thing) by dealing with our dead (the physical fact of the thing itself).

Insofar as our homo sapiens neanderthalis—our first human widow all those millennia ago—is concerned, it was by dealing with the corpse of her dead man that she began to deal with the concept of death. This intimate connection between the mortal corpse and the concept of mortality, it goes without saying, is at the core of our religious, artistic, scientific, and social impulses.

“No form of human life,” writes the sociologist Zymunt Bauman in Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies,

… has been found that failed to pattern the treatment of deceased bodies and their posthumous presence in the memory of the descendants. Indeed, the patterning has been found so universal that discovery of graves and cemeteries is generally accepted by the explorers of prehistory as proof that a humanoid strain whose life was never observed directly had passed the threshold of humanhood. ⁵

I want to emphasize that Bauman finds two elements to this “threshold of humanhood”: first, “to pattern the treatment of deceased bodies,” and secondly, “their (the dead’s) presence in the memory of descendants.” And when we find evidence of ancient graves and cemeteries, crematories or other sites of final disposition, we can assume that they are venues where humans sought to deal with death by dealing with their dead—by treating their deceased bodies in ways that said they intended to keep “their posthumous presence in (their) memory.”

And this formula—dealing with death by dealing with the dead—defined and described and, by the way, worked for humans for forty or fifty thousand years all over the planet, across every culture, until we come to the most recent generations of North Americans, who for the past 40 or 50 years have begun to avoid and outsource and ignore their obligations to deal with the dead. They are willing enough to keep “their presence in the memory of descendants” (the idea of the thing), as long as they do not have to deal with “the treatment of deceased bodies” (the thing itself). A picture on the piano is fine, but public wakes, bearing the dead to open graves or retorts, is strictly out of fashion.

The bodiless obsequy, which has become a staple of available options for bereaved families in the past half century, has created an estrangement between the living and the dead that is unique in human history. Furthermore, this estrangement, this disconnect, this refusal to deal with our dead (their corpses), could be reasonably expected to handicap our ability to deal with death (the concept, the idea of it). And a failure to deal authentically with death may have something to do with an inability to deal authentically with life.

It bears mentioning that while this estrangement is coincident with the increased use of cremation as a method of disposing of the dead over the same half century, and may be correlated to it, cremation is not the cause of this estrangement. Indeed, cremation is an ancient and honorable and effective method of body disposition, but in most cultures where it is practiced, it is done publicly in ceremonial and commemorative venues, whereas in North America, very often it is consigned to an off-site, out-of-sight, industrial venue where everything is handled privately and efficiently. Only in North America has cremation lost its ancient connection to fire, because it is so rarely actually witnessed. In North America, in the past 50 years, cremation has become synonymous with disappearance, not so much an alternative to burial or entombment, rather an alternative to having to bother with the dead body.

Ours is a species that deals with death (the idea, the concept, the human condition) by dealing with the dead (the thing itself, in the flesh, the corpse). Whatever our responses to death might be—intellectual, philosophical, religious, ritual, social, emotional, cultural, artistic, etc.—they are firstly and undeniably connected to the embodied remnant of the person who was. And while the dead can be pictured and imagined and conjured by symbol and metaphor, photo and recording, our allegiance and our primary obligations ought to be to the real rather than the virtual dead. In as much as a death in the family is primarily occasioned by the presence of a corpse, the emergent, immediate, collective, and purposeful response to that emergency is what a funeral is. In short, a funeral responds to the signature human concern, to wit, what to do about a dead human?

Thus, the presence of the dead is an essential, definitive element of a funeral. Funerals differ from all other commemorative events in that the presence of the dead and their subsequent disposition are primary concerns. Memorial services, celebrations of life, or variations on these commemorative events, whether held sooner or later or at intervals or anniversaries, in a variety of locales, while useful socially for commemorating the dead and paying tribute to their memories, lack an essential manifest and function, namely, the disposition of the dead. In this sense, the option to dispose of the dead privately, through the agency of hirelings, however professional they might be, and however moving the memorial that follows may be, is an abdication of an essential undertaking and fundamental humanity.

A second essential, definitive element of a funeral is that there must be those to whom the death matters. A death happens both to the one who dies and to those who survive the death and are affected by it. If no one cares, if there is no one to mark the change that has happened, if there is no one to name and claim the loss and the memory of the dead, then the dead assume the status of Bishop Berkeley’s tree falling noiselessly in the forest: if no one hears it, it did not fall, it never was. It is the same with humans. And like Bishop Berkeley, it may become for us the case for a god who sees and hears and claims everything in creation.

A third essential, definitive element of a funeral is that there must be some narrative, some effort towards an answer, however provisional, of those signature human questions about what death means for both the one who has died and those to whom it matters. Thus, an effort to broker some peace between the corpse and the mourners by describing the changed reality death occasions is part of the essential response to mortality. Very often this is a religious narrative. Often it is written in a book, the text of which is widely read. Or it might be philosophical, artistic, intellectual—a poem in place of a psalm, a song in place of prayer—either way, some case must be made for what has happened to the dead and what the living might expect because of it. “Behold, I show you a mystery” or words to that effect are often heard.

A fourth and final essential, definitive element of a funeral is that it must accomplish the disposition of the dead. They are not welcome, we know intuitively, to remain among us in the way they were while living. Furthermore, it is by getting the dead where they need to go that the living get where they need to be. And while this disposition often involves the larger muscles and real work, it also enacts our essential narratives, assists in the process of our essential emotions, images, and intellection about the dead, and fixes their changed status in the landscape of our future and daily lives. Whether the dead are buried, burned, entombed, enshrined, or scattered, hoisted into the air, cast into the sea, or left out for the scavenging birds, our choice of their oblivion makes their disposition palatable, acceptable, maybe even holy, and our participation in it remedial, honorable, maybe even holy.

These four essential, definitive elements, then—the corpse, the caring survivors, some brokered change of status between them, and the disposition of the dead—make a human funeral what it is.

Finally, once we can separate the essential elements from the accessories, the fundamental obligations from fashionable options, the substance from the stuff, the necessary from the knick-knacks, the core from the pulp, we might be able to assign relative measures of worth to what we do when one of our own kind dies. We might be able to figure not only the costs but also the values. Thus, coffin and casket, mum plants and carnations, candles and pall, vaults and monuments, limousines and video tributes—all of them are accessories, non-essentials. They may be a comfort but they are non-essential. Same for funeral directors and rabbis, sextons and pastors, priests and clerks, florists and lawyers and hearse drivers—all of them are accessories who may, nonetheless, assist the essential purpose of a funeral. And when we do; when we endeavor to serve the living by caring for the dead, we are assisting in the essential, definitive work of the funeral and the species that devised this deeply and uniquely human response to death.

So much of what I know of final things I have learned from the reverend clergy: these men and women of God who drop what they are doing and come on the run when there is trouble. These are the local heroes who show up, armed only with faith, who respond to calls in the middle of the night, the middle of dinner, the middle of already busy days to bedsides and roadsides, intensive care and emergency rooms, nursing homes and hospice wards and family homes, to try and make some sense of senseless things. They are on the front lines, holy corpsmen in the flesh-and-blood combat between hope and fear. Their faith is contagious and emboldening. Their presence is balm and anointing. The Lutheran pastor who always sang the common doxology at graveside, “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,” his hymn sung into the open maw of unspeakable sadness, startling in its comfort and assurance. The priest who would intone the Gregorian chant and tribal Latin of the In Paradisum while leading the pallbearers to the grave, counting on the raised voice and ancient language to invoke the heavenly and earthly hosts. The young Baptist preacher who, at a loss for words, pulled out his harmonica and played the mournful and familiar notes of ”Just as I Am” over the coffin of one of our town’s most famous sinners. “Between the stirrup and the ground,” he quietly promised the heart-sore family and upbraided the too-eagerly righteous, “mercy sought and mercy found.”

My friend Jake Andrews, an Episcopal priest, now dead for years but still remembered, apart from serving his little local parish, was chaplain to the fire and police departments and became the default minister, the go-to guy for the churchless and lapsed among our local citizenry. Father Andrews always rode in the hearse with me, whether the graveyard was minutes or hours away, in clement and inclement weather, and whether there were hundreds or dozens or only the two of us to hear, he would stand and read the holy script such as it had been given him to do. When cremation became, as it did, the norm among his townspeople and congregants, he would leave the living to the tea and cakes and ices in the parish hall and ride with me and the dead to the crematory. There he would perform his priestly offices with the sure faith and deep humanity that seems to me an imitation of Christ.

It was Jake Andrews’ belief that pastoral care included care of the saints he was called on to bury and cremate. Baptisms and weddings were, he said, “easy duties,” whereas funerals were “the deep end of the pool.” I think he had, as we all do, his dark nights of the soul, his wrestling with angels, his reasonable doubts. His favorite studies were on the Book of Job. But still, he believed the dead to be alive in Christ. He met the mourners at the door and pressed the heavens with their lamentations. It was Jake who taught me the power of presence, the work of mercy in the showing up, pitching in, bearing our share of whatever burden, and going the distance with the living and the dead. He taught me that a living faith ought not to be estranged from death’s rudiments and duties. Faith claims based upon redemptive suffering and meaningful death, a risen corpse and an empty tomb lose something of their power when the living become so distant and estranged from the shoulder work and shovel work the dead require.

On March 1, 2013, the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney returned to Emory to read his poems to a standing room only assembly of over a thousand in Lee Memorial Chapel. There was about it an evocative and valedictory quality, as if he were saying his goodbyes to a community he had visited many times in the past and to which he had entrusted a great cache of his letters and papers for students to study into the future. ⁶ On the day he read one of my favorites of his poems. It is called “Miracle,” and draws for its opening image a reference to that story in Mark 2:1–12 when Jesus is preaching in Capernaum and the crowd is so great that men bring the paralytic to be healed and have to take him up to the roof, remove the roof tiles, and lower him down by ropes, whereupon Jesus, impressed by their faith, tells him his sins are forgiven. Of course, the naysayers among them begin to mumble about blasphemy until Jesus questions them, asking which is the greater miracle—to say, “your sins are forgiven” or “take up your bed and walk.” It is, of course, a trick question.

Some days forgiveness seems impossible, to give or to receive. And in ways I need not number, we have all been paralyzed by the press of sin, the failure of vision, by fear, by worry, by anxieties about the end. We are frozen, motionless in our vexations. This is where Heaney’s poem directs us to consider the quieter, mundane, familiar and utterly miraculous kindness of “the ones who have known us all along.”

This particular miracle has meaning for Heaney, who in 2006 in Donegal suffered a stroke. He had read at a poetry festival and was spending the night with friends and other poets in the local Bed & Breakfast. So it was fellow poets—ones who had known him all along—who helped strap him on to the gurney and get him down the stairs out the house and into the waiting ambulance to ride with his wife to Letterkenny Hospital. In his poem, the miracle is the one of friends, “the ones who have known him all along,” who do the heavy lifting of his care and transport. Their hefting and lifting and large muscle work is part of his salvation. Here is the short poem:

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks

But the ones who have known him all along

And carry him in —

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked

In their backs, the stretcher handles

Slippery with sweat. And no let up

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable

and raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.

Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid out ropes to cool,

Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity

To pass, those who had known him all along. ⁷

This language of “numb shoulders, aching backs and waiting for the burn of paid out ropes to cool” put me immediately in mind of my last encounter with Seamus Heaney at the funeral of our friend, Dennis O’Driscoll, who died on Christmas Eve last year and was buried near his home in county Kildare. I walked with Heaney and his wife, Marie, from the church to the cemetery, half a mile or so, following the coffin and the other mourners, and chatted about our friend and the sadness we all shared. In Ireland, the dead are shouldered to the grave and lowered into the ground by ropes by those who have known the dead all along. The miracle of life and the mystery of death are unambiguously connected, religiously bound by the exercise of large muscle duties—shoulder and shovel work and the heart’s indentures. And the strain of pallbearers at O’Driscoll’s open grave, as they lowered his coffined body into the ground with ropes slowly being paid out, seemed like the existential labor of the paralytic’s friends lowering his bed through the opened roof to the foot of the Healer for a cure. Thus do mortuary duties replicate the miraculous claims of an incarnate faith.

The question presents itself: what harm if we simply forget how to do a good funeral? What harm if we grow more distant from our dead?

Or ought we ask, as more and more of our fellow Americans are joining the church of “none of the above” when it comes to religious identity, is there any connection between the slow but steady decline in church attendance, community and identity, and the pop culture’s seemingly insatiable interest in “True Blood,” and “Twilight” and “The Walking Dead” and the kindred popularity of Zombie Apocalypse? Are the erotically charged vamps and vampires served up by Hollywood somehow connected to the failure of our “eschatological nerve,” as Thomas Long elegantly calls the slow but steady erosion of relevance of the Christian message in its current telling? ⁸

These are queries beyond my scope or scholarship; still, it seems to me a simple thing that we should restore to the funeral some aspect of goodness, some gravity and tasking, some actual purpose, some shoulder and shovel work, some witness at the very least.

It has taken all of 50 years, from the year that Jessica Mitford published her lampoon of funeral practices, The American Way of Death, the same year we buried President John F. Kennedy, to downsize and devolve the funeral from an exercise in eschatology to a celebration of biography. No longer do we process mortality by processing mortals from the spaces they inhabited in life to the stations they inhabit after death. No longer do we accompany them with singing. We hardly accompany them at all. No longer the lapsed Catholic or backslidden Baptist, devout Calvinist, “holy roller,” or “born again”; now, we are bowlers and bikers and golfers and gardeners. We are known less for what we believed and more for how we passed our time. Rather than affirm a salvation of faith and baptism and religious practice, we “celebrate” the life of barbeques and hobbies in a kind of funereal karaoke in which the good laugh is approved and the good cry is discouraged.

As Baby Boomers age and watch the sacred faith-claims of the church replaced by funerals-lite, the happy-chat silliness of “open-mic” eulogies typical of bodiless obsequies and memorial services, it is little wonder that we see more and more formerly observant Christians join the ranks of the “spiritual but not religious.” As the dead are disappeared from their funerals, and heaven and hell have become virtual and vaporous, the faith claims we remember from our youth become more and more vacuous. We neither see the dead nor believe anymore in the sacred mysteries of their redemption.

Perhaps if the dead are more welcomed in church, the full heft and flesh of their corpses afforded their sacred space at the foot of the altar and in holy ground, their burden carried from station to station by the large muscles of real grief and faith, maybe then the living will find more reasons to return.