‘ve been thinking a lot about funerals lately, for one reason and another, and so earlier this week when I happened across my copy of Thomas G. Long’s superb article “Why Jessica Mitford Was Wrong,” I sat down to read it. Dr. Long’s piece, published ten years ago now in Theology Today, is a thoughtful and penetrating critique of the theology of Mitford’s books, The American Way of Death and The American Way of Death Revisited. He gives her the credit she deserves as a consumer advocate, but also the challenge she deserves as a cultural theologian. I especially appreciate this section of Dr. Long’s article:
What is often missing in the tug of war between the funeral-home-style service and the Mitford style is a thoughtful consideration of what a funeral—particularly a Christian funeral—could and should be. Obviously, a genuinely Christian funeral is not about the evils that Mitford found so easy to satirize—the vulgar, conspicuous consumption, the mawkish sentiment—but, strangely a Christian funeral is also not primarily about many of the good things that its friends claim for it: the facilitation of grief, helping people to hold on to memories of the deceased, or even to supply pastoral care and comfort to the bereaved. A Christian funeral often provides these things, of course, but none of these is its central purpose. A Christian funeral is nothing less than a bold and dramatic worship of the living God done attentive to and in the face of an apparent victory at the hands of the last enemy. Though the liturgy may be gently worded, there is no hiding the fact that, in a funeral, Christians raise a fist at death; recount the story of the Christ who suffered death, battled death, and triumphed over it; offer laments and thanksgivings to the God who raised Jesus from the grave; sing hymns of defiance; and honor the body and life of the saint who has died.
Dr. Long continues,
Thus, one measure of the veracity of a funeral is its capacity to face, without euphemistic smoke and mirrors, the reality of death. Death is, of course, the brute fact that occasions a funeral. Astonishingly, for all her talk about the funerals and the funeral industry, Mitford hardly mentions death at all, not real death. In Mitford’s world, people do not die painfully or peacefully, well or poorly, blessedly or tragically, in despair or in trust, nor do those left behind have seasons of grief, memories to be cherished or forgiven, or faithful meaning to be wrested from sorrow, just a series of consumer choices. The American Way of Death and The American Way of Death Revisited cover many topics, but, ironically, death as a human experience, death as a force that robs life, death as a knife that severs bonds of love is not one of them. Milford jibes and smirks and hurls sarcastic witticisms at the blowhards among the morticians, and some of them, like clowns at a carnival pie-throwing booth, make themselves into easy targets, but one cannot help but see, lurking over her shoulder, the immense and terrifying mortal reality she will not turn to confront. To produce two books about death that do not actually speak of death is so strange, so inexplicable, that the sheer fact of it seems clear confirmation of William May’s conviction that the unwillingness to name death betrays a repressed acknowledgment of its fearsome sacral potency. Contemporary people, he argues, “find it difficult to bring the word death to our lips in the presence of its power. This is so because we are at a loss as to how to proceed on the far side of this word. Our philosophies and our moralities desert us. They retreat and leave us wordless.”
By contrast, the Christian funeral, at its best, speaks plainly of death. It does not shy away from naming death’s power to pierce the human heart, to steal gifts of love, and to create empty places at the table of fellowship, and the Christian funeral bravely claims the victory over death won by Jesus Christ, and dares to trust the promise of the gospel’s great mystery, “We shall not all die, but we will all be changed.”
A second measure of the Christian funeral is the degree to which it treats the body of the deceased as the body of a saint. Mitford saved her strongest invective for the custom of embalming, restoring, and viewing the body, which she claimed is virtually unknown outside of North America and which she saw as utterly unnecessary, yet another sign of American bad taste, and an expensive trick pulled by funeral directors to con the gullible. She has a point, of course; the practice of paying someone a lot of money to put eyeliner and face power on an embalmed corpse so that it can be viewed under colored lights is difficult to defend. Nevertheless, two objections to Mitford’s attitude toward the treatment of the body need to be raised. First, it is not simply that Milford has no use for chemically-treated bodies gussied up and on view in slumber rooms; she has little use for the body at all. As for the three women whom the Gospel of Mark reports were on their way to the tomb of Jesus to anoint his body with spices, Jessica would undoubtedly have said, “Don’t bother.” Beneath her righteous consumerist rhetoric breathes the spirit of a gnostic who, like many educated people in our society, views the body as a shell, finally an embarrassment, part of what Geoffrey Gorer has called “the pornography of death.” What to do with the dead body? It can be burned or buried, donated or disposed, but, like all pornography, it should be done out of public view. The theological anthropology that defines human beings as embodied creatures, that calls for the honoring of the body in life and in death, is out of Mitford’s range.
In his fine book The Undertaking, poet and funeral director Thomas Lynch, comments on the “just a shell” theory of dead bodies. “You hear a lot of it,” he observes, “from young clergy, old family friends, well-intentioned in-laws—folks who are unsettled by the fresh grief of others.” He remembers a time when an Episcopal deacon said something of this sort to the mother of a teenager, dead of leukemia, and promptly received a swift slap. “I’ll tell you when it’s ‘just a shell,’ she retorted. “For now and until I tell you otherwise, she’s my daughter.” Lynch goes on to say,
So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is “just” anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize as if we were to say that it was “just” a bad hair day when the girl went bald from chemotherapy. Or that our hope for heaven on her behalf was based on the belief that Christ raised “just” a body from dead. What if, rather than crucifixion, he’d opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than “just a shell,” he’d raised his personality, say, or The Idea of Himself? Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that? . . . Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures.
This is spot-on, as is Dr. Long’s consequent point that
The most important measure of a Christian funeral is its capacity to place the event of a person’s death into the larger context of the Christian gospel. “Funerals,” says Thomas Lynch, “are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters. It is how we assign meaning to our little remarkable histories.” The Christian funeral is a liturgical drama, a piece of gospel theater, with roles to play and a time honored, if flexible and culturally varied, script. To understand Christian funerals as drama is not to say they are theater in the sense of Broadway entertainment, of course, but rather that they are community enactments of a formative narrative.
The unfortunate thing is that our culture has been so Mitfordized that even among Christians, there’s no longer the awareness and understanding of this truth. Instead,
The image of the deceased on a journey from this world to the next is now being replaced by the image of the mourner on a journey from grief to restoration. . . . Deprived of the ritual of a saint marching into glory, we replace it with the psychically useful notion of a good, or at least somewhat interesting, person we will remember from time to time as life returns to normal. The Christian kerygma tends to fade in favor of biographical comments about the deceased, often delivered by a number of people, such anecdotes seemingly far more useful to the stabilization of the ego in grief than are comments about discipleship, eschatology, and mission.
This is a real loss, and part of the ongoing flattening and loss of spiritual depth of our culture, which is being mirrored in much of the church. The challenge for the preacher who wishes to do a truly Christian funeral is to be concerned about more than just caring for the family, making the family happy, and doing the deceased honor—important as all three of these things are—but also about proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ and his victory over death. All the other purposes of a funeral must fall into line behind this one, or they too will ultimately fail and fall short, because those purposes do not create hope; they depend on the gospel hope to function, and so ultimately lack any real substance without the proclamation of the gospel.