The title of a recent New York Times op-ed (“The Trouble with My Father’s Resting Place,” Jan. 2) caught my eye because it seemed, for once, that maybe somebody else had recognized the point I’ve long made: cremation deprives people of a final resting place. (Ultimately, that recognition didn’t happen.) The author is an Episcopalian priestess, who admitted in her opening sentence: “For the past three years, my dad’s ashes have lived in a FedEx box on the top shelf of my closet, in the very cheapest of graves. One Halloween, I nearly knocked it over reaching for a wig.” (A link to the op-ed is here.)

I’d dispute that her dad has any “grave” at all. The pronoun she uses to describe overturning dad’s ashes is telling: “it.”

Let’s think about what the term “resting place” or even “grave” entails. It suggests at least a quasi-permanent place where the remains of a faithful departed one are. Places occupy space. They place a claim on a part of this world. They can be visited. In practice, none of that is true of ashes.

Yes, the Catholic funeral industry has gotten its piece of the pie in building columbaria as “resting places” for urns, and the Church does say a Catholic’s remains should be put there rather than scattered. In practice, that’s not how things often happen. It’s certainly not the Hollywood image of ashes flying over beaches, oceans, forests, farms, and highways. And our modern ecclesial mania of “accompanying” the Zeitgeist isn’t offering what many people, including Catholics, take as compelling counternarratives to it.

French philosopher Damien Le Guay, in his book La mort en cendres (Death in Ashes), raises the theologico-anthropological question cremation poses: What does cremation say about our understanding of the human body and person? He argues that there is a deep reason why Catholics long eschewed cremation, why it was a funerary practice among pagans rather than Christians. He also maintains that, rather than address it, we just avoid that question.

The question is not purely Catholic. Although the authors in Interpreting Death: Christian Theology and Pastoral Practice are mostly Protestants with openness towards cremation, one admits “[t]he issue of destroying a body is largely ignored in discussions of cremation” (p. 80) and asks whether “cremation involve[s] a kind of symbolic vacuum” (p. 81)? In short, when we consider what cremation is and does, can we square it with Catholic understandings of embodiment, sacramentality, anthropology, redemption, and eschatology?

I think not. I do not believe we have done the hard thinking even to attempt that. So, how have we arrived at this situation? Two ways:

First, too much discussion of cremation, even in Catholic circles, has reinforced what I deem a spreading cancer in Catholic thought: the tendency to treat whatever canon law allows as “good Catholic practice.” Because the Holy Office in 1963 rescinded more severe penalties against Catholics resorting to cremation, let’s admit it: the average Catholic today sees nothing inherently bad about incinerating the body of a loved one.

Sure, the official Church will proclaim that earth burial is “preferred,” just like it will declare that all Fridays are penitential and, that, absent other penitential practices, one should engage in Friday abstinence from meat. Likewise, the official Church will say ashes should be kept intact and not scattered, but then… if you want to keep a pinch of papa, well, that’s okay, too… it’s just “pastoral” permission. Pardon me if I don’t join in the wink, wink, nod, nod approval that a canonist’s dispensation signed off by a bishop makes things right. I’ll continue insisting that canon law exists to serve good theology. It does not make it.

Second, too little discussion of cremation, including from the Church’s side, fails to talk about money. The Times’ writer admits her father wanted to be scattered over Hawaii. But pop remains on the bedroom closet shelf because he died in the middle of COVID, when flying a family to Hawaii was impossible. And she admits, “Years passed. I kept saying I would figure out a meaningful, reasonably priced alternative to my dad’s Grand Hawaiian plan. But everything I came up with seemed dull and everything I imagined he would want was … expensive …”

Every time I’ve written against cremation from a theological perspective, the criticisms I get back ignore it, focusing instead on the economic: “Do you know what a funeral costs?” I’ve argued that the size of the Church in the United States is such that we ought to be able to affect the funeral industry, but the Church instead seems more attentive to capturing a cut of the market it’s losing from the disappearance of earth burial by building Catholic columbaria.

Most people don’t want to admit they have burned their relative or have him reposing in their closets or on their dining room tables because burying him costs something. Instead, they offer all sorts of rationalizations to justify (mask?) their real motives.

Which brings us back to the question of a “final resting place.” Human beings, taking up space and time, should take up some space at least for a time after death. Scattered ashes are no place. There is nowhere to visit. There is no grave. Dad is just so much dust.

Yes, over time and by the dispensation of God we all will be, but I maintain there is a qualitative difference between that natural occurrence and our acceleration of the process in a furnace. I also reject the desire to turn the body that was a sacramental temple of the Holy Spirit into a pantheistic, utilitarian good, where mom becomes mulch for her favorite maple tree in the name of a misguided “environmentalism.”

Wrapping up, I recall Leo Tolstoy’s short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” (See here.) The protagonist is a Russian peasant named Pahom with an insatiable hunger for expanding his land holdings. He learns that the Bashkirs of central Asia were willing to give away huge tracts of land. Their condition was this: one had to demarcate the holding by digging a contiguous trench around it, concluding by sunset at whatever point one began at sunrise. Failure to do so was a forfeit. With visions of land wealth dancing in his head, Pahom starts out, tracing so large a stretch that he grows forgetful of the sun setting. He races over hill and dale to complete his claim. Just as he reaches his starting point, he suffers a stroke from his day’s exertions, dying on the spot. Tolstoy laconically concludes: “[Pahom’s] servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahom to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.”

In Tolstoy’s day, the fact that six feet of earth sufficed for avaricious Pahom was a paradox. How much more impoverished are we when we begrudge even that much earth for our loved ones? And because it costs money? One of the most eloquent passages of the Old Testament describes how Abraham in his old age buried his beloved Sarah, who predeceased him. He asks the locals to sell him space for the grave. They offer it gratis but Abraham declines.

Abraham agreed to Ephron’s terms and weighed out for him the price he had named in the hearing of the Hittites: four hundred shekels of silver…. So Ephron’s field in Machpelah near Mamre — both the field and the cave in it, and all the trees within the borders of the field — was deeded to Abraham as his property in the presence of all the Hittites who had come to the gate of the city. Afterward Abraham buried his wife Sarah in the cave in the field of Machpelah near Mamre (which is at Hebron) in the land of Canaan. So the field and the cave in it were deeded to Abraham by the Hittites as a burial site. (Gen 23:16-20)

Again, have we regressed from what our “father in faith” knew was the human thing to do nearly forty centuries ago?

Cemeteries, like universities and hospitals, were in many ways a Catholic invention. It’s not because others don’t die but because Catholicism infused the cemetery with a particular identity: the term etymologically means “a place of sleep” (see here) pointing towards the Resurrection. We recognize that a body sleeps and have analogically applied the concept of “sleep” to death (as the Church does every day in Night Prayer). Sorry, but dust doesn’t rest or sleep. It just blows in the wind.