“In the days of Shalmaneser I performed many acts of charity to my brethren. I gave my bread to the hungry and my clothing to the naked; and if I saw any one of my people dead and thrown out behind the wall of Nineveh, I would bury him.” Tobit, 1:16-17

Natural law is the source from which Roman Catholic morality derives all its positions – on sex and the family, Church and state, civil and human rights, positive law, and so on. The list is quite long and extensive.

What many do not know is that perhaps the most celebrated site for defending the significance of natural law has nothing to do with any of the areas traditionally associated with it. It has to do with our subject today, the last of the corporal works, namely, burying the dead; and the context is the ancient Greek play, Antigone.

Antigone was the daughter of King Oedipus. After the latter, blind and in disgrace, abandons his kingdom in Thebes, his two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, fight for the throne, and ultimately die in battle at each other’s hand.

Their uncle, Creon, assumes authority, and pronounces that since Polynices was the one attacking his motherland (with Eteocles defending it), he must remain unburied outside the city, without proper rites, fit only as food for birds and dogs.

This is the point of Antigone’s intervention. In perhaps the play’s most famous lines, she defends her decision to defy Creon and give her brother a proper burial. “Did you dare to disobey me and keep these laws”, Creon demands? “Yes”, she replies…

“For it was not Zeus who gave them forth/nor Justice, dwelling with the gods below/who traced these laws for the sons of men/ Nor did I deem your edicts strong enough/coming from mortal man, to set at naught/the unwritten laws of God that know no change/They are not of today nor yesterday/but live for ever/Nor can man assign/ when first they sprang into being.”

One cannot read these lines without realising not only that we live in quite another time, but also in quite another cultural environment, where giving the dead proper burial hardly bears significance of any depth.

If anything, our rituals surrounding burial are becoming more and more attenuated, more and more dominated by efficiency, one of today’s big cultural values.
Traditionally, in Trinidad, though perhaps always more the case in the country than in the city, the ritual surrounding death involved three stages, apart from the funeral itself, namely, the wake, the nine nights, and the forty days. The West African origin of the process is beyond dispute.

The wake here (as in the Caribbean generally) is not the same formal pre-burial affair that one finds, for instance, in North America. It is a time when the community comes together in support of and solidarity with the family in their time of grief.

It is a form of vigil lasting the entire night. Prayer is central to the occasion, though games such as card-playing and dominoes, and story-telling are also part of the ritual.

The nine nights following the funeral are a form of continued wake, where prayer and consolation of the family remain central. The dead are not simply disposed of through burial.

Their memory is retained, and they themselves finally let go only after forty days. The forty days constitute one long goodbye. It means the end of an adequate period of mourning.

The attenuation of burial customs today is a fact of our present life.  Death has become a matter requiring efficient treatment.  It’s one reason why for many people cremation is preferable to traditional burial. Death can quickly be over with, and people can get on with their lives.

The reason that the Church was previously reluctant to sanction cremation is that burial is not the disposal of a thing. In burial, we’re reminded that the body is not a shell, a husk tossed aside by the “real” person, the soul within. The body is the reminder that the person who died was an embodied self, and that embodiment will be the form of our resurrection.

It’s also the reason that the women in the gospels went early on Easter morning to anoint the body of Jesus. They were on their way to pay honour to the person of Jesus, not simply to anoint his corpse.

There are today, of course, valid reasons for cremation, not least of which is burial space, but people often talk as if there were no differences between the two burial forms, as if earlier distinctions were simply archaic, meaningless prejudices.

One recent development in funeral services that requires attention, it seems to me, is that of the eulogy. It is a feature of the service that has got completely out of hand.

The word eulogy means high praise – and one hears hardly anything else at funerals today. But what if there’s some lack of concordance between what is said and what participants at the service remember?

 I have officiated at funeral services where the eulogy was practically equivalent to canonisation. I have officiated at others where it was as long as the service itself. I have been present at others where several people felt they had something to say, even if they repeated what several others had already said.

As presently constituted, the eulogy has no settled form, no accepted time-frame, and no restrictions whatever regarding content. It’s simply up to everyone to do whatever they think fit.

The liturgy of the funeral service, like all liturgy, is an act of the Church. Eulogies can be quirky and idiosyncratic. Again, I’ve been at services where relatives made a request of the choir to sing “a favourite” of the deceased, which turned out to be something that would have been more appropriate in a bar or on J’Ouvert morning.

 A service to bury the dead deserves to be differently conducted. There should be due respect for those present. The tenor of the contributions should also be in line with the Church’s understanding of death and the afterlife.

Not least of all, there should be a staple acknowledgment that we have all fallen short of God’s glory, and we all stand in need, from first to last, of his mercy.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Fr Henry Charles has left the country on sabbatical. We wish him God’s blessings on his future endeavours and thank him for his generous contribution to this newspaper. He hopes to be able to continue his column in the near future.