SOUNDLIVING

I am a pragmatist and thus cremation of the dead has seemed to me to be the sensible way to avoid the cost and sometimes macabre aspects of funerals. My mother, though well-schooled in the reality of decay and the theology of resurrection, said she wanted to be buried, not cremated, because she wanted Jesus to be able to find her body when he came again. Amateur theologian that I am, I laughed at such naivete. But the longer I live and the more memorial services I attend and/or conduct, the more I question my cavalier attitude toward cremation. Recently,…

“Compassion is not a snob gone slumming. Anybody can salve his conscience by (occasionally giving a dollar to a street beggar). Did you ever take a real trip down inside the broken heart of a friend? To feel the sob of the soul – the raw, red crucible of emotional agony? To have this become almost as much yours as that of your soul-crushed neighbor? Then, to sit down with him – and silently weep? This is the beginning of compassion.” (Jess Moody Quote-Unquote, p66)