The Life After Death

Traditional Christian practices relate with death and dying originally arose out of Judaic practices, and they in turn out of Near Eastern burial usage that can be traced back for tens of millennia (on these customs see, e.g., Kenyon, 1960, pp. 41-43, 47, 51-53, 84-86, 137ff). Burial of family members at a lower place the floor of the living argona in the caves of Mt. Carmel and in the homes of Jericho, devotion of skulls in those same homes, apparent veneration of skulls and bones in the shaft monstrouss of Jericho (they being precisely the type of grave that Jesus was buried in according to the accounts in the Gospels), Jewish "funeral feasts" on the anniversary of a loved one's death--all these factors seem to suck up weighed heavily toward the decided Christian preference for interment of the body.

The Greeks alike had a tradition of "heroic feasts" at the tomb of a famous ancestor or founding father, but the Romans did not, and so were scandalized by the Christian practice, which seemed "gross" to them, of actually eating on the graves of the dead. This joyless custom has in fact been combine into the structure of every Roman Catholic church: the altar, the set back on which the symbolic feast of bread and wine is served, moldiness contain a bodily relic of a done for(p) saint--often an actual bone. (The Code of Canon Law, #1237, ?2

, p. 216, states that "The ancient tradition of placing relics of Martyrs or other Saints within a fixed altar is to be retained"; Canon #1239 provides that a corpse may not be buried d admit the stairs an altar, but Canon #1242 allows bishops to be buried in their own churches, and the burial vault in many ancient churches is in fact below the main altar.) To some extent Jewish and early Christian belief in physical resurrection no doubt also created a preference for interment.

However, to think that resurrection was not possible unless the body were interred would have been to doubt God's superpower to re-assemble each body from its constituent parts, no matter how widely dispersed they may have become; and consequently such(prenominal) an attitude was never given theological respectability.

Ware, Timothy (1972). The Orthodox church. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin.

In these three faith communities, one can thus see how beliefs about the afterlife are reflected in funereal practices. Christians retain a belief in physical resurrection, as well as in the rulership of the one God o'er the physical world; and so the physical body is honored even in death. Hindus consider the human condition to be what Plato said the "Orphics" also considered it to be: soma sema, "the body is a tomb"; and so the body is to be destroyed as the major impediment against moksha. The Lakota consider the body to be a part of nature, neither more nor less holy than anything else; allowing it to change integrity as pictorially as possible avoids interference with the natural course of events.

Contemporary "catholic" Christians are not in practice focused on a future physical resurrection. Rather, they perceive a continuity between life and death, in that both the faithful departed and the living faithful are living right now in the presence of God, lodge to make up a single community as the Family of God, and t
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