We say the funeral is about the mourners, not the dead. But that's not the whole story: consider what the words of the traditional rites say. Part of it is about us "Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitterness of eternal death." But part is very explictly for the dead person: "O God, who by the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ destroyed death, and brought life and immortality to light: Grant that your servant N., being raised with him, may know the strength of his presence, and rejoice in his eternal glory; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."
We're not praying to make ourselves feel good. We're asking God to take care of our dead loved one. Granted, some people don't think prayer is effectual, but they can arrange their own rites.
And what we do with the dead matters. You can holler yourself hoarse that it shouldn't matter; that the body is just the temporary housing of the soul; that the dead don't feel anything anymore. We still feel that it makes a difference.
The traditional Christian understanding of the human person is that we are body and soul--when the body dies the human person is broken, not Platonically "released." Jesus wept about this, so we needn't feel ashamed to do the same, even if we know the loved one is "absent from the body and present with the Lord." What we see before us isn't good, though good can come.
We cling to the particular. This field is where we played pirates, that ring is merely a substitute for the lost wedding ring, that person, and not a generic person is our spouse. The particular is connected to us somehow. Part of us is there--not incarnate, exactly, but really there, really connected. These things can fade, but they feel very real. A two-year-old wants his ball, not a substitute. You feel a loss when someone builds a garage over the ditch where the "pirate cave" used to be.
The particular gets meaning from those connections. Another Althouse post quotes LLosa: "At the same time, love is a private experience. If it's made public, it becomes cheap, shoddy, full of commonplaces. This is why it’s so hard to write about love in literature." In its place sex can seem holy and funny at the same time; displayed to the world is seems merely animal or even obscene. The family jokes and traditions seem empty and banal when broadcast to strangers, but the family's loves make them live. Something intangible makes a vast difference. Strict materialists have to work hard to explain it away.
We sense that the dead body is still connected to the person. The past isn't entirely past. We can't keep the body and the link is too deeply broken for us to restore the person, so we use the prayers and the burial to respectfully recognize the breakage.
A "celebration of life" ignores that breakage. It's probably harmless, but we need more.
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