For Whom the Bell Tolls
In the podcast, “A Proper Christian Burial,” Mark Bauerlein of First Things magazine interviews Tim Perry on what constitutes a proper Christian burial and why it matters that Christians recover this practice. Perry suggests that after the collapse of a common Christian culture, churches no longer play their significant role in marking transformative events in life’s passage. A couple of centuries ago, he says, churches would have been integral locations in marking these milestones: births and baptisms, confirmation to adult status in the religious community, marriage, death, and burial. Since most of these milestones have been displaced to other institutions or contexts, people frequently progress through these significant life events without assistance. Churches must catechize their own parishioners — to say nothing of the wider community — on how to traverse life, especially how to approach death well. Perry suggests that the Western church lost its eschatological vocabulary in the 20th century, but at the same time, culture is awash with apocalyptic imagery and vocabulary in our films, our literature, and our music. This radically shapes our imagination. Perry wants churches to create or recover decisively scripted liturgy for funerals that does not change relative to the faith or behavior of the deceased. He further argues Christian clergy must be unapologetically honest about what they can and cannot offer to families of the deceased in terms of funeral services. If our hopes of placing a cemetery on abbey property materialize, let us give equal attention to commenting on death well through our burial policies and liturgical scripting of the ceremonies.
