In my first year of priesthood, I received a call from my dean informing me of the unexpected death of one of our colleagues and giving me instructions to come to the funeral home to participate in preparing his body for burial. I was at that time a Byzantine rite priest of the Catholic Church, and this practice, though perhaps unfamiliar to Anglicans, is standard practice in that communion. We were taken to a part of the funeral home rarely seen by the public, and began vesting the body. I don’t know what I had expected, but it was a deeply moving experience.
Carefully, lovingly moving his limbs, we put on the vestments and recited—for him, for the last time—the vesting prayers. “Your priests, O Lord, will be clothed with righteousness, and your saints will sing with joy.” Then we liberally anointed his head with oil, and placed an aer—usually used for covering the eucharistic elements—over his face. Reflecting later on this rite, I realized we were handling something profoundly holy, and doing so in as intimate a way as one might when dressing one’s infant child or aging parent.
Most of us today have a strange relationship with our bodies. On the one hand, we have entire industries dedicated to telling us that our bodies are wrong, or at least in need of improvement. We need to lose weight, add muscle, cover, or uncover our bodies. Every decade or so the ideal body seems to change through the influence of fashion magazines, mass media, and social media. And we so easily retreat into a soft, uncritical gnosticism by which we understand our true self to be something immaterial or spiritual within, and that can indeed be at odds with this body created by God in his image.
On the other hand, there is an understandable response to this nonstop narrative of misalignment: “body positivity” movement. There’s nothing wrong with your body, they say. Be your glorious self. While this might be a helpful rejoinder, it also has some limitations. The body deserves intentional care, proper nutrition, rest, and exercise. The body positivity movement may also miss the biblical notion of life, including the body, as a gift from God.
And then there’s aging. Are those laugh lines signs of a joyful life, or merely reminders of impending doom? As we age, social media present us with advertisements and arguments for anti-aging creams, hair dyes, Botox, and cosmetic surgery. A friend of mine recently turned me on to a “hydrating eye stick” that really does seem to counteract the dark circles under my eyes.
But for all our society’s fascination—healthy or toxic—with bodies, our attitudes change as we approach death. As a culture, we have developed an aversion to the body as it meets death. And as a result, we count the body as null; we simply do not pay any attention—positive or negative—to the body. We simply say, “That is not the one I knew.” Unlike earlier eras, in which we would take some role in the preparation of our loved ones for burial, or hold the wake in our homes, we now are quick to hide death as soon as it rears its ugly head. Bodies are removed from the deathbed quickly and we don’t see them again (if at all) until after the funeral home has worked its cosmetic magic.
Our Anglican customs may be misinterpreted to reflect this approach. Our rubrics instruct that “the coffin is to be closed before the service, and it remains closed thereafter. It is appropriate that it be covered with a pall or other suitable covering.” Marion Hatchett explains that this is a restoration of an earlier Anglican custom that had been laid aside in the 19th century. But the pall is not to hide us from the reality of death. In the Middle Ages, the pall was primarily for the poor, who could not afford a coffin. Later, it began to be used by the wealthier to cover their coffins. In this way, the pall becomes a sort of equalizer, a reminder that in death all the things that separated us are no longer relevant. When we stand naked before God, we are equals.
When I was preparing for ordination in the Byzantine Rite, I was somewhat surprised to learn that the tradition is to have an open casket not only at the wake and panachida (a short memorial service in the home or funeral home), but also in the funeral liturgy. Toward the end of the service, worshipers are invited to come forward during the singing of the Hymns of Farewell, to pay their last respects to the deceased and—traditionally, anyway—to kiss the dearly departed. It is telling that, of the many funerals I conducted in that rite, only one family opted to keep this open-casket tradition; evidence, I think, of our modern aversion to dead bodies.
But it was not always so. For the early Christians, not only was death (possibly through martyrdom) an ever-present reality, but it was often right before their eyes as they came together to worship. Early Christian liturgies were held in the catacombs of cities like Rome and Paris. As Christianity came out of hiding, the bodies—at least parts of them—often came out, too, and the relics of the martyrs were placed under or in holy tables.
Though Cranmer, like the other Reformers, saw the use of such relics as “a fond thing, vainly invented,” it was not always so. John Chrysostom enjoined his parishioners: “Let’s constantly spend time visiting [the saints], and touch their coffin, and embrace their relics with faith, so that we might gain some blessing from them.”
In the early church, the Eucharist was celebrated on the tombs of the martyrs. Even in the reformation era, bodies were kept close, perhaps now in the church yard. It was in the era of the Enlightenment, especially in Protestant nations, that burial practices began to revert to pagan sensibilities—move those bodies away from us, even beyond town borders. The space of the living and the space of the dead became separated.
Lanta Davis, in a recent Christian Century article, reflects on the bones of the departed, especially as they are shown in various “bone chapels” like the deeply thought-provoking Capuchin Crypt in Rome, first constructed in the 17th century. Here the skeletons and bones of long-deceased Franciscan brothers are used as decoration in a series of chapels in what many might find macabre, but which is a profound affirmation of our belief in the Resurrection. One might ask if this use of bones as decoration is the best way of honoring the body that waits for resurrection, but there is little doubt that this practice evinces the Franciscans’ cherished hope for what is to come. Rather than death being something hidden, or spoken about in hushed tones, it is a reminder that, as the proper preface for burial masses says, “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended.”
Professor Davis explains that, while it’s perhaps soothing to a confused child, saying of a dead body, “That’s not really Grammy,” is theologically problematic, and may in fact implant in that child a long-term unhealthy approach to the body and death. She writes of her departed mother, “When I looked at my mother’s hands, saying this body wasn’t ‘really her’ just didn’t make sense to me. My mom was her body, and that body was good.” With all due respect to the many advances of modernity, we are not merely spirits driving around in a body. Thomas Aquinas said, “I am not my soul.” On Ash Wednesday, we are reminded, “You are dust,” not “you have dust.”
We lose something profound when we think of deceased bodies as mere shells from which the real part of a person has departed. That is perhaps why most graves today go unvisited. “The understanding of the body’s goodness—a goodness so powerful that God wants bodies to live eternally—is ultimately what I find so powerful, redemptive, and hopeful about the bone chapels,” writes Davis.
When God created humans, he created them not as bodies and souls separately, but as body and soul. Death, of course, is a great mystery. How is it that a person continues to exist—and in the presence of God, no less—while her body lies before us, or decays in the ground? But that body still is her, in some profound and meaningful way, just as much as her blessed soul is. This is why the body must be treated with deep respect, both before and after death. Maybe most of us are not ready to go back to wakes with the deceased lying on our living-room couch. And perhaps many of us are not ready to kiss the cheeks of our departed loved ones.
But in death, as in life, the body—regardless of size, shape, color, blemishes, or wrinkles—is worthy of our profound respect. After all, if we know and love someone—spouse, family member, or friend—we only know them in their body and by our bodies. Thanks be to God that, in our Christian life, we know that our “mystic sweet communion” continues “with those whose rest is won.” And yet, on the last day, we shall see them and be seen again, in our bodies, when we follow our Lord in his glorious Resurrection. Like the righteous Job, we too can proclaim, “After my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God.”
The Rev. Geoffrey Mackey is rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Parkersburg, West Virginia. He spent over 20 years in Christian college and seminary contexts in administration, teaching, and student pastoral care. He studied at evangelical, Catholic, and Anglican seminaries and previously served as a parish priest in the Catholic Church’s Byzantine Rite.
