Reflections on a Funeral

To bury a man is truly something.  This is one of a handful of most important times in someone's life.  Everything becomes very real and clear.  The vanities of this life are truly nothing--whether we had pleasures or pains, they're all over.  This is the moment of truth, what our lives have been moving toward, what we've been preparing for--the moment when the old order passes away, we are shown laid bare our hearts, and we begin to partake in what will be made full for us at His Second Coming, as our heart has inclined and decided.  All this life is vain, yet amid the sadness of seeing one leave there is the hope and promise of resurrection.  Read Ecclesiastes and you will understand how I felt there--he writes in hatred and sadness over the vanity of this life, but not despairingly, but with hope in the life to come and the true mercy of God.


His name was Zviadi.  I didn't really know him--I had met him once, but didn't really remember it.  He died the day before yesterday, and I didn't know the funeral was today until I arrived at Church for Saturday Vigil.  There were more people in the Church grounds than I had ever seen there before (perhaps excluding Nativity), and that certain peaceful stillness that comes with the most important of matters was in the air.  The service in Church was just finishing, and soon they brought him out to be buried.  We Orthodox believe in the Resurrection of this body at the Second Coming (though it will be changed, and become as Christ's Resurrected Body), and thus do not cremate our dead.  But we also know the way of things in fallen creation, and neither do we try to cling to the dead nor deny His power to change our bodies in the Resurrection, as the Egyptians did by sending off the body embalmed and preserved (and even with "gifts" that they would then have in their supposed afterlife).  Rather we try to keep away from embalming and, as the Church always has, bury the body quickly, accepting the reality of its repose.  I have never seen a dead man before my own eyes before, and it was not as I expected.  I expected to be shocked, perhaps disgusted even--and I was rather struck by how natural it was--for unfortunately, it is natural to fallen creation.  We live, but then, inevitably, we die, and all is made suddenly real and, for them, revealed.  To see the reposed's body is an affirmation impossible to ignore, that this is not all there is, and this vain life will not continue in its repetitions forever.  He didn't look at all "like he was sleeping," as I've heard that some people say at funerals--he looked dead (I'm sure he wasn't embalmed, and he had stitches on his head, having died in a car crash); but not at all like a mere shell for the soul, but rather like a person, awaiting a final awakening and healing of all corruption.  He was in a white burial shroud with the proper cross and writings; prayers for his soul, and a respectful sendoff for him.  His family was given a chance to give the final kisses, cries, and shouts out for and to him before they covered his head with the shroud as well, put on the lid, with St. Nino's cross carved out on the top, and then lowered him.  We threw our handfuls of earth on the grave and thus said goodbye for the remainder of our lives here on earth before shoveling the rest on top--and there is something to be said for naturally shoveling out the grave and filling it by the hands and sweat of real people, who are thus respecting and praying for him, giving a little small labor forth in the hope of his salvation.  The cross went into the ground, and that was it--the end of a life on this earth; the beginning of that life where all is revealed before its Creator.


In Christ,
Teopile/Theophilos Porter