Green Funerals
By Dixon Kinser, so indie it’s embarrassing
Last Spring I took our Youth Ministry community away on a death retreat.
Over the course of the weekend we practiced prayer mediations in hospitals, visited funeral homes and had four different conversations; 1.) Why We Are Afraid to Die in America? 2.) Living With Death: Why Almost every Christian Symbol connected to Death and Dying. 3.) The Afterlife Part 1: What’s the Deal with Hell? (Hint - It’s not what you think.) 4.) The Afterlife Part 2: Nobody Goes to Heaven After They Die.
The weekend was really profound (I have been meaning to blog a full report for 6 months now) and if you ever want to host one of your own I’m happy to share what I learned. However, none of these are the point of this post. What is, is a phenomenon I discovered while researching the conversations for the death retreat and while watching the finale of Six Feet Under; Green Funerals.
Green Funerals are earth friendly, natural alternative burial practices that not decrease the amount of carbon and chemicals that are released into the atmosphere and the soil, but keep very much in line with the Christian discipline of dying well. While I am energized by both these wonderful outcomes, it is the latter that continues to spark my imagination.
Green Funerals eschew embalming (the corpse can be kept cool and doesn’t need to be embalmed by law) and favor biodegradable pine boxes (see picture) or burial shrouds to the industry standard steel casket and concrete vault. Likewise, a green burial doesn’t take place in a cemetery, but instead scatters burial plots in random places along a secluded woodland or nature preserve marking them with natural shrubs and trees (as well as a GPS tracker) instead of a tombstone to ensure future generations can find the site. Furthermore, the fact that human remains have been interred on the land virtually guarantees it will not be developed into suburban track homes or a shopping mall. (And if you’ve seen Poltergeist you know what a bad idea that is;)
The most attractive thing the practice is how it maintains a close connection between the living and the dead. There is a subversive bent to choosing green funerals in our world of sanitized death. Death is scary. We don’t want to think about, touch it or smell it. Indeed part of the pain of death in our culture involves the very awareness that were dying. (Which is why so many people want to “go in their sleep”) Green Funerals invite both the dying and their family to walk through this death well, awake and in the presence of each other and the Creator. I see that as a profoundly Christian practice.
There is some great literature on the topic too. This article was the first I found and it is a great primer on the practice and if you want to go deeper I recommend Caring For the Dead by Lisa Carlson.
I am planning my own Green Funeral and see this being part of our families heritage for years to come. If you are interested in it check out Green Endings, Natural Death for services that do these funerals as well as this page for lots of links on the topic (if this link is still broken google Green Funerals and it will be your first hit).
Peace in the Resurrected One,