Holy Week Reflections II

I have just returned from Good Friday evening service. Our pastor made the interesting point that in a way we are recalling the burial of Christ, but there was really no funeral. Easter morning the grave was empty. No funeral. I must admit that my mind wandered when he referenced “funerals”. As I have noted in a previous blog, funerals have always been a part of my life.

My father was a teaching minister in a rural Texas community. We lived on the extended church property, which included the church, the parochial school, the parsonage and the “teacherage” for the principal of the school. This extended property also had space to raise cows, chickens and vegetables. 100 yards from my house was the site of the cemetery with its many graves. Whenever there was a death in the church community I could accompany my father to the church where he tolled the bell to announce the death to the community. The next day I would watch the gravediggers work hard to get through the hard soil to prepare the grave. Of course, we went to the home of the deceased and viewed the body displayed there in the parlor. After the church service my father again tolled the bell as the hearse carried the coffin to its near-by final resting place. The ritual there always included the “ashes to ashes” and then I would watch as the gravediggers refilled the grave and the funeral director rolled up and carried away the artificial grass he had brought to surround the grave during the graveside rituals.  I must have observed this ritual well over a hundred times before I was a teen.

Later I served in Glendale CA near the massive Forest Lawn Cemetery. Everything there related to death has been sanitized. The grounds are meticulously manicured. The area around the graves is made to “look natural”: There are only discrete grave markers, not distinctive headstones. The organists and solo singers and even the presiding ministers are all professionals who preside at countless funerals. Any covering of the grave is done when the bereaved are nowhere around and they  “come back later” when all is neatly in place.

From there I went to Hong Kong. I learned to go to the street side shops and negotiate hard for the price of a made-to-order wooden casket. Then I negotiated with the coffin bearers to take the deceased to the gravesite. Once we stopped in the middle of the burial area when the bearers just set the coffin down in protest because the gravesite was farther up the hill than they had anticipated. They proceeded only after I had renegotiated the price and paid them their extra fee. I can assure you there was no artificial grass around.

And now I live in Southern California and among those with whom I interact there is almost never a funeral and certainly no open-casket viewing”. The accepted ritual is that there is a Memorial Service at which there is often present the urn containing the ashes of the deceased.  Or, as has been my recent experience, we board a boat and proceed to an appropriate site in the Pacific for an appropriate scattering of ashes into the sea.

 In due time during the service this evening my mind came back to the point, which the pastor made. We affirm that the death of Jesus was very real and the resurrection equally true, so that in the final reckoning it won’t really be that important what the details of our funerals looked like.