THE
P RTAL
December 2016
Page 24
Death: Burial
or Cremation?
What is the official view of the Church?
Geoffrey Kirk looks to the Apostles’ Creed
for an answer
Cryogenics was,
I suspect, a subject which never crossed the minds of most people – even of
those who could spell it. But the heartfelt plea of a teenage girl, and the decision of a judge, have brought
the subject to the forefront of our minds.
Christian hope is to awaken to eternity
and to the beatific vision of the glory of
God, whom we will see as clearly as he
sees us; to ultimate reality rather than to
an deracinated existence in a world of
change.
Who would exchange Gray’s Elegy
where ‘Beneath those rugged elms, that
yew-tree’s shade, The rude forefathers of
the hamlet sleep’, for a facility in California
where a team of budding Frankensteins
await their moment of glory?
What do Christians believe about death, resurrection
and the body? The Apostles’ Creed – the baptismal
affirmation of the Western Church - is quite explicit
on the matter.
We believe in the resurrection of the body: that is
to say that because Jesus in his death and resurrection
has overcome it, death cannot hold any of those for
whom he died. The baptised have already entered
upon everlasting life and their whole being and bodily
identi ty is part of that.
This is why Christians have traditionally fought shy
of cremation: the imagery of Christian death is not of
sanitation but of gardening. We treat the human body
with respect, we plant it as a seed in the confidence
that it will grow to new life.
For the Christian, death is a stage in an inevitable
process, not an unfortunate failure of the medical
profession. It is to be embraced and not shunned. An
earlier age of Christian piety had the courage to see all
life as a school of the ars moriendi – the art of a good
death.
There is, after all, something both tragic and comic
in living in the hope of being Rip van Winkle. The