From the Archives: "Committed to the Earth: Ecotheological Dimensions of Christian Burial Practices"

Each month, our blog features articles from the archives of Liturgy. Our goal is to share the wisdom from decades past so that we might celebrate the work and insights of these excellent ministers and scholars.

More and more attention these days is being given to reducing pollution of our precious Earth, and one of the arenas undergoing change is how we choose to care for human bodies after death. Today we have more environmentally healthy options that avoid using toxic embalming fluids to preserve the body accompanied by burial in a metal casket inside a concrete vault. Ben Stewart is one of several people who have written about natural burial as a sensible alternative. This article explains the rationale for making choices about care of the dead in order to care for Earth. He outlines not only the environmental costs of the alternatives but also the theological perspectives behind turning to a way of burial that more clearly connects us with the dust of Ash Wednesday.

Selected Quotes from

“Committed to the Earth: Ecotheological Dimensions of Christian Burial Practices”

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“Over the past fifty years in the United States, the liturgical renewal movement has achieved remarkable ecumenical consensus and actual reform around some central embodied elements of Christian worship: abundant water in baptism, real bread at communion, and increased attention to the physical and artistic dimensions of liturgical space. But even as robust physicality and embodiment were being recovered in some liturgical settings, in another important Christian rite the human body and even the earth itself were quietly but rapidly disappearing, at least in the United States: the physical bodies of the deceased have increasingly been absent from their own funerals, and the committal of the body to the earth at the grave has come to be treated as an optional, private ceremony—one that is increasingly not observed at all.”

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“The natural burial movement takes pains to clarify that they are not proposing an alternative to traditional burial practices. Rather, they are advocating mostly traditional practices over and against what they see as recent harmful distortions of burial practices.”

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 “Beneath the surface of the green, park-like grass of a typical American cemetery is something more like a landfill rather than what one might expect of a cemetery. The average American ten-acre cemetery holds 900 tons of casket steel, enough coffin wood to construct more than forty houses, and 20,000 tons of vault concrete.”

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“In sum, the natural burial movement seeks (1) to care for bodies after death without toxic embalming, (2) to carry the remains of the deceased in burial vessels that are constructed with ecological considerations and that themselves biodegrade naturally, and (3) to commit bodies to the earth in ways that do no ecological harm, and perhaps, even in death, contribute to an ecological good.”

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Benjamin M. Stewart is pastor of Emmanuel Lutheran Church, Two Harbors, MN, and an affiliate professor of liturgy at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

Stewart, B. (2012). Committed to the Earth: Ecotheological Dimensions of Christian Burial Practices. Liturgy, 27(2), 62–72.

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