Cremation Liturgy

This is my first try at this. I drafted this as a liturgy for a crematorium, with the idea that it is for the family and friends who might gather there for a cremation before or after a full funeral or memorial service.

Obviously it emerges from Christian faith, but it could easily be modified. (OK, maybe not all that easily. But somewhat. ) Also, names and pronouns could easily be inserted where I've used the phrase "our beloved."

What I am trying to do is express some of the realities of cremation, and I have taken much from the wisdom in the comments to the previous post.

All comments welcome. I am going to go ahead and hit "Publish," because I have already done so accidentally several times today as I've worked on this.

May God be with us all.
With us all, both here and there.
May God be with us all.
With us all, those we can see and hear and touch, and those we cannot.
May God be with us all.
With us all, those who live and those who have died

A reading from Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.

A Prayer:

We are not where we want to be.
We are in a strange land.
We are in a foreign land, far from comfort and familiarity.
We are in a land of fire.

A Reading from Psalm 139:

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.
Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.
For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

A Prayer:

Our hearts are broken.
Our bodies are bent.
We are doing one of the hardest things.
We are giving up the body of our beloved one.
A body formed most wonderfully and intricately.
A body woven in secret.
A body that walked and ran and spoke and cried.
A body that loved and is loved.
A body that will be transformed by fire.
A body whose ashes we will carry to other places.

A Prayer (Based on Exodus 3):

We stand on holy ground.
We know that fire consumes and we know that it does not.
It consumes the precious body of our beloved.
It destroys the harm, the damage, the pain our beloved suffered.
But it does not consume the love we share.
It does not destroy the bonds that link us together.

A Prayer

Holy and Gracious God,
Creator of All,
You created the body for which we care today.
We confess that we do not know what to do,
That we are limited in knowledge and understanding,
And that we can only commit this body to your care and love,
Knowing that our beloved whose absence tears at our hearts
Lives with you forever,
And that the love we share
Cannot be consumed by fire, cannot be buried in the ground,
Cannot float away in the water, cannot vanish into the air,
But can only live into eternity
Because love is stronger than death.

Benediction (Contextualized from The Book of Common Prayer):

In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our beloved, and we commit this body to the fire. May God bless and keep our beloved and may the face of God shine upon our beloved. May God be gracious unto us all and give us peace. Amen.

Ashes to Ashes

Over at my new place, I described a bit of my experience a couple of weeks ago in scattering some of my son's ashes in places meaningful to us in North Carolina. I left out most of what I was thinking and some of where we went ~ private property where we received permission along with the words, "We are honored" ~ but private property, nevertheless. So you can get a glimmer, but not much beyond that, from those posts.

Meanwhile, this week one of my blogging friends is attending a workshop in Living with Loss/Grieving and I raised the question, as I guess I have before, of cremation liturgies. I am thinking specifically of situations like ours, common in the United States, where there is a funeral or memorial service in a house of worship with the cremation happening at a separate facility before or after. In most cases in this country, family and friends do not go to the crematorium. I did, with a friend, but in the trauma of that week, it did not occur to me that perhaps a short but intentional service there would have been a good thing.

Diana asked me about my thoughts on cremation liturgies. Perhaps I will write one over the next few days. My very beginning thoughts(which I left in comments to one of her posts) go something like this:

"I think that cremation forces us to confront the end of an embodied existence in a way that burial may not. I think that fire is a very different element than earth and its connotations are quite different. And when all is done, you have not a mound of earth but a container of ash -- no place to visit, but material to deal with, and that's something that people handle in a variety of ways."

I would very much appreciate hearing from others about their thoughts, experiences, and ideas.

Ashes to Ocean (Again)

I waded up to my waist into the warm waters surrounding the Florida Keys last week and scattered some of my son's ashes into the path cast by the sunlight across the Atlantic. An osprey soared overhead and the gentle swells of water carried some of him into the ocean he loved all his life.

After our son's death and the cremation of his body, we had to learn about the disposition of ashes. I discovered that some people, from a variety of faith traditions, are opposed to cremation for religious reasons, and some have no problem with cremation but insist that the ashes should remain together in one container and location. We were in neither of those camps, and knew that we wanted to leave our son's remains in a place or places meaningful to him. In that regard, the most helpful stories came from a woman whose friends had scattered some of her husband's ashes along the his favorite marathon route, and another who has found comfort in taking small amounts of her son's ashes with her to leave in various spots to which she has travelled around the globe. She was also the source of sound advice about how to manage the task discretely when travel is involved. Such were among the conversations in which we were engaged last September, in the funeral home, in meetings with my spiritual director, and around our kitchen table, and they helped us learn how to connect past and present into an unexpected and unwanted future.

We had first taken our boys to Florida when they were three months old. My grandparents had rented a house for the winter in Vero Beach, but my grandfather had become extremely ill. He was alert during the days and was able to spend that one of the last few weeks of his life enjoying his new great-grandsons. At night, however, he would succumb to the predations of dementia, and I would lie awake on the king-sized bed in the guest room next to his, where I was often alert at odd hours, as I was nursing two babies, and listen sadly to his confused ramblings. During the daytime he knew that it was 1984 and that Christmas was coming; late at night he was usually under the impression that it was the 1930s and thought he needed to get up and go to work.

That week was a chilly and windy one, so the photographs of the boys' first outings to the beach show a family of four bundled up in sweaters and hats. The next year we instituted our two decades of annual sojourns to St. Augustine, where we generally had better luck with the weather. A long sequence of photos shows my sons' growth from year to year, in and out of the Atlantic Ocean every spring. Lively toddlers, ecstatic first-graders, serious fifth-graders, long-haired middle schoolers, soccer-playing high schoolers, languid college students. When Chicago Son was a senior in high school, his first serious girlfriend joined us there for an unexpected trip at New Year's, and we took fireworks out to the beach for a midnight celebration. We were last there all together the next summer; after that college and summer job schedules took their inevitable toll on extended family vacations. I had hoped that he and Beautiful Ballet Dancer would meet us there last winter, but that was not to be.

The beaches of Florida are the locus of some of my best memories ~ times with my mother, long gone; times with the grandparents who cared for me so attentively after her death, times with my own children. And so I took my son's ashes there, to the ocean into which he had dashed so fearlessly as a child and to the waves into which he had dived over and over and over again as a young man, and I watched part of him merge with the salt and the water and the sunlight.