Against Cremation
Grove City, PA. It is the ultimate decision we all will make concerning place. Where will our bones to be laid to rest? In our age of hypermobility the answer is complicated. Many of us, as Peters lamented so well recently, are orphaning our children for our success; moreover, some of us in doing so are only carrying on an old family tradition. Multi-generational orphans of success, we are orphans and we are orphaning. We probably live and move and have our being a couple of states away from where we were born and raised and were made a man. So where will this mobility put us down?
I asked one colleague— a Texan who grew up summering with grandma in Ohio, educated in Virginia and North Carolina, and now living and working in Pennsylvania—and he instantly responded, “Oh, my spouse and I are going to be cremated.” (Nota bene, he thought this was an adequate answer to my question.)
“Cremation?” replied I, just short of exclamation. “But cremation is not Christian.” It should be stated that this conversation had as its prevailing tone casual disinterest—about an eventuality in the distant future. But the bravura, the cocksure assertion in such black and white terms that something not even mentioned in the New Testament could be dismissed outright as not Christian stunned our would-be cremationist.
A back-and-forth ensued about dust versus ashes, God’s omnipotence, the nature of the resurrection and of the incarnation, scripture v. tradition, soul and body, secularization, materialism, sacramentalism. Christians cremating themselves is only a recent post-Protestant phenomenon! What follows is a hack job, er, careful revision, of what took too long to prove in print, so I’ve reduced my argument against cremation to mere assertion for your convenience.
Naturally, as is our wont here on the Front Porch, I applied the tried and true formula suitable for any ethical dilemma: WWWD or What Would Wendell Do? Berry, however, does not mention cremation anywhere that I recall. Burial on the other hand figures prominently in some of his fiction. In his greatest novel Jayber Crow the eponymous narrator, as many of you remember, becomes Port William’s gravedigger as well as its barber, and it is a job and a duty of increasing significance to him. The long short story or novella, Fidelity, has as its climax the death and burial of Burley Coulter. Perhaps it is enough to say that since burial is conventional, traditional, the-way-its-always-been-done then the burden of proof is on the proposed innovation, in this case cremation. Certainly a proper accounting of cremation’s pros and cons is in order. But the way Berry dramatizes the significance of burial reveals a greater network of virtues than a mere reflexive balk against a new trend.
This new trend of modern cremation requires a bit more introduction. Most of you consider cremation a legitimate option of disposing with the dead. This according to experts in the industry. And half of you, they predict, will choose to be cremated (unless Porchers for some reason buck the current trend). The current trend is even more interesting.
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