Denying death in green burials?
December 10, 2009
I am unconvinced that green burial as currently conceived necessarily represents a healthier integration of death as a part of life - for some of its fans, it may be yet another subtle form of death denial. Moreover, although it claims to have an environmental motivation, it may also hide unresolved spiritual issues - that is, it as much a soul issue as a body one.
None of this means I don’t believe in green burials - on the contrary, some form of green burial is the way of the future - but at this point they need to be better understood in order to improve them.
Regarding the death denial possibility.
For many green burial may yet be another subconscious attempt to deny or exclude death by making it invisible, in this case by trying to hide death within nature, rather than visibly integrating it into nature’s cycles. Let me explain….
Yesterday I watched this Youtube video on green cemeteries. A man walking his dog through Forever Fernwood cemetery in California was interviewed (view from min 07:16).
He liked this green cemetery because it was a pleasant green space rather than a morbid traditional cemetery - a nice place for a stroll, to walk the dog in or relax on a bench in the sun. This is understandable - and I want the same …. Why not walk your dog in a green cemetery? But a green cemetery should aim to be something more than just a pretty place to walk your dog.
When the park has people buried in it, then it should manifest this function visibly and consciously. In this particular “cemetery”, at least in its green burial section, there are no visible signs of the dead who are buried there. This makes it feels like a park - but nothing more, only a park. It is no longer a cemetery but a park whose link with death is nothing more than its use as a space for environmentally-friendly body disposal. It has lost all connection with the personal and cultural memorial function of a cemetery.
All the above holds true for all forest, woodland, or conservation cemeteries where the visibility of the dead resting there is eliminated. As I have said elsewhere, this will result in beautiful but anonymous forests, not green cemeteries.
Green burial - also a soul issue, not just a body one
No - this reveals a soul issue. Death has been subconsciously denied in these cases, excluded, not integrated. That no visible signs are allowed is not accidental, however subconsciously motivated - this is a new disguise for the old “Let’s try to live as if there was no tomorrow and no death, no end to reckon with.” A literal attempt to push death “out of sight, and out of mind”.
On the contrary, a healthy and fearless psychological integration would consciously and deliberately include visible signs of the dead resting there. Death might be scary, but it is not a sickness; it is normal reality and handled properly, it can be enormously therapeutic for living.
Let me be clear. I fully empathize with the contemporary repulsion for traditional cemeteries, which for most contemporary people are gloomy, pessimistic places full of meaningless, pretentious and overpriced symbols. They speak neither to my sense of beauty, my private beliefs in life and after-life, or my connection with nature and natural cycles. I also want little to do with them.
But I do not want to deny death - on the contrary! Nothing is unhealthier for the soul, the psyche. Death must be, therefore we must integrate it into our life. But it does not have to have the negative association our traditional cemeteries arouse in us moderns. No - I want to find a way to deliberately and visibly integrate death with life in a positive relationship. Like many who embrace green burial, I love the idea of being buried in nature, be it a natural park or a forest. I love the idea that people will have picnics over my grave, play with their children, pick flowers or mushrooms, make secret love in the dark.
But in doing this, they should be given material to reflect that this is where I and many others lie, many others also who played and loved and picked flowers like them - but who have now moved on … as they will. This - and not denial - is healthy and brave. A cemetery should be a momenti mori, a reminder, not a denial of death.
Done with positive meaning and a timeless nature-oriented aesthetic, the bitter-sweet contrast between life and death could add greatly to our appreciation of life, to enjoying what we have while we have it.
Unfortunately what I describe here is NO LONGER in the spirit of traditional cemeteries. But it is also NOT in the subconscious spirit of denial apparent in much current green burial thought. This is why I am developing the Perpetua’s Garden concept: perpetual and green cemeteries, where time and human death are not denied but integrated with nature and life, symbolic and hopeful places where life and death meet and make friends.
Father Ed: there is room for every hope
October 20, 2009
BBC World Radio surprised me with a call today, inviting me to take part in a broadcast debate on the “Tina Turner -esque funeral” trend in Britain. I learned from the journalist that an uproar had been stimulated by an Anglican vicar (Revd. Fr. Edward Tomlinson SSC of Saint Barnabas Church) speaking frankly about the - in his view - spiritual emptiness and superficiality of secular funerals.
Given that Perpetua’s Garden is clearly not yet a mainstream initiative (may it one day become the new mainstream!), the journalist presumed I might like to argue the alternative view - he still needed to suss out someone for the “traditionalist” side. Flattered though I am, I will decline - if he even calls back after I told him that Perpetua’s Garden was more about the place (a new kind of cemetery) than what happens there (the funeral rituals).
In fact, I categorically take no sides when it comes to how each person deals with death or wants to celebrate it. Father Ed has his beliefs, as those commenting on his blog have theirs. Fair is fair - as beliefs each is valid. But I am not a vicar, or an atheist, or a humanist - I am simply someone trying to provide a better alternative for EVERYONE, regardless of belief.
Yes, Perpetua’s Garden is hoping to develop a better alternative than the funeral industry (which is every bit as superficial and spiritually empty as Father Ed presents secular funerals to be.) But it has no intention of substituting the spiritual function of the church - rather it will have room to integrate the church’s practises and beliefs, along with those of all other beliefs or non-beliefs. That is, there will be room for every hope, room for every denomination or individual to celebrate their beliefs about life and death - the traditionally religious, the “free-thinkers”, new-agers, environmentalists, atheists, whoever, however.
Whatever my own personal beliefs may be, ABSOLUTE freedom must be allowed to every other person’s faith. Freedom to believe in this, or that, or even specifically in Nothing. If the state of Death has any reality, then it is by default a spiritual one - beyond a decaying body or some cremated remains, it certainly has no material reality. And as as a spiritual matter, let no-one dictate to anyone else what is right and wrong here. We can express and live our beliefs with regard to death, but we must not dictate or impose them on others - people understandably object violently to such efforts. (And anyway, imposed spirituality is quite meaningless - belief is there or it isn’t, full stop.)
In conclusion, it seems fair that Father Ed is reluctant or sees no meaning to secular motifs being aired in his specifically religious place. Perpetua’s Garden on the other hand allows absolute freedom of belief - it does not presume to judge who is closer to the truth and who is therefore allowed entry or not. It will provide space for each to practise in their way.
In Death we are all equal - “ROOM FOR EVERY HOPE” is thus the first and most fundamental premise of Perpetua’s Garden.
Michael Jackson’s Funeral
July 9, 2009
That motorcade, that gold casket, all that incredible media and popular interest in this prominent funerals. Where was the environment in all of this? And why was everyone so fascinated by it all, especially Americans who are so afraid of anything to do with death?
In the microcosm of burial and cemeteries, more immediate and personally relevant considerations than environmental effects are present. In the last moments of Michael Jackson’s world, as well as that of his millions of mourners, the environment was non-existent. This is understandable for mourners, or for someone considering their own final arrangements: the end of a life is no light matter, and for the majority, the environment will always be secondary, maybe the last thing they care about at that point. In ultimate situations, people follow what they believe in, they don’t give a damn about what they are told or forced to do. Hence the only real solution for green burials would be to gradually change the predominating beliefs so that people do the “right thing” willingly, almost instinctively at the moment of crisis.
Such a change will not come about by simplistic “holier-than-thou” green dogma, public indoctrination with the 3-R’s, renewable energy, green-industry, etc - or, in the case of green burial, citing fearful statistics about how much formaldehyde and concrete goes into the earth etc. Instead of fear-based negative preaching, green burial should be presented in positive terms of higher human integration into natural cycles, including the non-material spiritual aspects, indeed based on them. Almost all traditional religions (even nature-hostile Christianity in its original form) integrated man far more effectively into the environment than we will ever do with our technical “environmentalism” - so too, our world will only reintegrate itself properly into the earth’s processes if it finds a “higher” reason to do so and then works downwards from the spiritual belief to the material action. The environmental benefits will then be positive side-effects of a different worldview, and not the primary goal.
Death, burials and funeral rituals may present a place for such a worldview to grow. There is no more personal form of recycling than “dust to dust”. To a limited degree, the green burial movement speaks of this. But it should go further and emphasize that our recycled “dust” goes to create new life, and that, in cycles of birth, death and rebirth for as long as the earth exists. All this only on a material level - more importantly, the infinite natural cycles of death and resurrection could lead us to new prospects regarding our own souls, that old forgotten concept in our mundane and nihilistic world.
But for this to happen, we have to integrate the human aspect better than the green burial movement currently does, make it the primary consideration again, and not merely a means to realize an environmental goal.
I thus find the image of a garden more appropriate for green cemeteries than a forest. A forest exists independently of humans, a garden on the other hand exists for and requires humans. Nevertheless it exhibits all the birth, death and resurrection of nature. The only question is of the degree of human involvement in the garden’s formation and maintenance. This is a matter of taste. In our world, where Man’s interference with nature has been radically overdone, a lesser degree of artificiality would be attractive. A Japanese garden for example, where nature’s owns forms are used to go even beyond naturally manifesting beauty.
Michael Jackson’s funeral (and his life for that matter) exhibited all the worst nature- and death-denying aspects of our artificial world. However, the incredible level of interest in his funeral - as in those of in other prominents like Lady Diana, Ronald Reagan, etc - shows that the problem of our mortality is as acute as ever it was in history. We are too afraid to face the fact of our own mortality directly, hence these celebrity deaths become mirrors in which we can work through the problem indirectly, without fear. Far from being disinterested in death and funerals, we are fascinated.
Beautiful garden cemeteries that had NOTHING of the hopeless and morbid atmosphere of traditional western centuries might be another place where we could come to terms with our mortality. Their “greenness” would be a positive side-effect, or a concession to the real needs of an overpopulated and overstressed environment, but not the main thing.
Thomas Friese
Cemeteries and funerals: body or soul?
February 5, 2009
The first and most obvious point in discussing the question above it that it always includes at least the materialistic matter of dealing with the dead body. But how this is done, with what accompanying beliefs, with what ulterior purposes, in short, everything beyond the actual body disposal is where the question of spiritual or materialistic becomes relevant.
If the material body disposal issue is always present, what of the spiritual elements which are also presumably present, even if only to a minor degree? Can we say which practices and aims are material and which spiritual, and to whom are they seen like that? These distinctions are very personal in nature, since the very same act or object can have spiritual or material significance or both, depending exclusively on the person or culture making the judgment. Moreover, we should look carefully, below the surface - for each individual or culture, what looks like a materialistic goal or value at first glance might reveal itself as spiritual, and vice versa.
Let us take embalming. In North America, this seems at first glance to concern only the body, whose appearance it aims to preserve until the family has made its farewells, and whose dangerous potential to decay and spread sickness it purports to forestall. But at a deeper level, this is a non-material need: for the individual family, to create an attractive last impression; and for the society, to maintain the possibility of a collective denial of death through the preservation of the body as if it were living. (This modern western schizophrenia reflects on our materialistic culture and its fear of admitting to having spiritual needs which cannot be satisfied materially - that is, we pretend that we embalm for hygienic and aesthetic reasons, whereas in reality we do it to keep an awareness of our mortality at bay, to keep from looking for a spiritual solution to the problem of death.)
The ancient Egyptians were far more self-aware and coherent on their reasons for embalming. Their embalming was done explicitly for spiritual reasons of the soul, in this case for one (of the many) souls of the departed, that it have a permanent physical home to return to from its flights away from the tomb. The purely spiritual importance of embalming for the Egyptians is underlined by the fact that they also put symbolic facsimiles of the dead into the tomb, usually little statues, so that if the body did not not survive, the soul would still have a place to dwell. They evidently also understood the embalmed body as a symbolic home, and not purely literally.
We see from this example that what seems like a common practice has little in common when its aims and the world view of the practitioners is examined more closely. We would 0nly have something in common with ancient Egyptians if we admitted that fundamentally our embalming was also an attempt to deny death, albeit a rather pathetic one.
Let us further examine body preservation along spiritual/materialistic lines. Like the ancient Egyptians, fundamentalist and orthodox Christians and Muslims also apparently believe in preservation of the body for spiritual reasons of the individual soul: the body must rest undisturbed and intact in the earth until the Second Coming and the body’s resurrection. But even within these groups we cannot generalize based on external similarities: for the most fundamentalist, the resurrection is understand literally, as some sort of miraculous rising of the flesh-and-blood body from its grave. More mystically minded Christians and Muslims understand this rather as a resurrection in a higher body, an astral body, a gloried body, the names vary, in any case not the old flesh-and-blood body. Again, the difference is essentially whether the matter is seen materially or spiritually. Fundamentalists reveal themselves to be surprisingly materialistic in this sense.
Analysis along these lines is also interesting regarding cremation. For the most materialistic of Christian and Muslim “body-preservationists”, cremation can only be seen as evil, since it utterly destroys the flesh-and-blood body that is to be resurrected. (Among the ancient Egyptians, for whom a symbolic body-double could serve as a substitute home for the wandering soul, an accidental cremation or other destruction of the body would not have been so tragic.) For a mystically-minded Christian or Muslim, cremation should in theory be acceptable, since the body that will be resurrected is not the one destroyed in the flames.
For Indians, cremation is viewed from an altogether different perspective. Here it is a matter of the soul, but paradoxically one that actually requires the material destruction of the body: the soul of the deceased sees the utter destruction of the body by fire and understands, without leaving any room for hope, that its old life and body are gone, that it must make a clean start into a new incarnation.
Secular cremation in the New World appears on the contrary to be purely materialistic, a simple utilitarian matter of body disposal: it is a cheaper, less complicated and supposedly more environmentally-friendly method of disposal. Yet spiritual elements are also present, even in the most secular or atheist proponents of cremation. For example, the commonly heard aversion to the idea of being eaten by worms or “going into the cold damp earth”, reveals a spiritual belief which subconsciously must be similar to the beliefs of materialistic fundamentalists. If our bodies are merely matter, then what difference does it make what happens to that dead matter that our body becomes after death? Or do these people subtly believe in some kind of continuing life or significance of the body after death? Moreover, would not the “burning heat” of the cremation oven not be at least as uncomfortable as the cold damp ground? If the whole matter was purely material, none of these confused but genuine feelings would even be felt. Here too a subtle belief in a spiritual element reveals itself.
Some proponents of cremation may disagree here, claiming that that cremation is for them a spiritual return to the natural cycles of the earth, and thus a “spiritual” affair, a reincarnation of our matter, if you will. Of course, the cycles of nature in their complexity and beauty are wondrous things, and to see one’s place in them is a spiritual matter. But it is a nihilistic spirituality which cannot deal with the possibility of survival of the individual soul. Since it is not able to believe this, it opts for the only survival it can imagine, an anonymous survival of its physical matter.
Hence, it would be invalid to compare or justify cremation in the west by using the ancient Indian tradition as proof. There may be other good reasons for cremation in the West, but not the Indian one, unless we also accept reincarnation of souls.
This line of analysis could be extended to all aspects of funerals and cemeteries, but we leave it to readers to do that for themselves. Or post their ideas in comments below.
We will extend the analysis to green burial and cemeteries in a future posting.