Why Jessica Mitford was wrong

Theology Today, Jan 1999 by Long, Thomas G

The point here is not to argue that a Christian funeral should include, somewhere in the process, a viewing of the body. That is not the case. The claim rather is that Christians, through a variety of customs, honor the body. Honor can still be paid to the body of the deceased whether or not the body is viewed or even if the body is cremated or not physically present at the service. But many Christian groups do include the custom of viewing the body as a matter of tradition, and this practice must be understood in its larger ritual and theological contexts. It is quite common, for example, among blacks generally and among whites in rural areas like Appalachia, and the custom connects firmly, as we have seen, to the religious imagery of the journey of the deceased from this world to the next. Mitford wrinkles her nose at all viewing of the dead, not only because she incorrectly identifies the practice as unquestionably vulgar and pagan but also because she has a poor feel for ritual action and she misunderstands the meaning of customs outside the narrow range of her ethnicity and class.

But Mitford's view has begun to gain traction. There is mounting evidence that the metaphor of the journey of the deceased no longer grips the imagination of many American Christians, especially suburban, white Protestants. 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. The view currently gaining ground is that it no longer the dead person who is traveling-the dead person is, after all, dead; all dressed up and nowhere to go-it is the mourners who are traveling, and the journey is an intrapsychic one. "The once publicly supported process of mourning," observes David Wendell Moller, "has now become defined as the private trouble of the individuals involved, in the resolution of which lies their personal coping and adaptive skills." 12 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. In a genuinely Christian service, stories and memories of the deceased are told as well, but such stories are not ends in themselves; they are stories of the grace of God refracted through a human life. In today's funerals and memorial services, less attention is paid to the body, since the body is going nowhere and the presence of a tangible dead body, or a box of ashes, tends to be something of a "downer" if psychological adjustment to grief is the only issue at hand.

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." 13 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. It is to claim that they have more in common with Greek drama than with individualistic psychotherapy. A Christian funeral is, to the church, what Martha Nussbaum states Greek tragedy was to ancient Athens: