To be “human” means to come from the ground (from the Latin noun humus “earth”, and the Latin verb humare “to burry”) . It was from the earth that the Lord formed Adam (Gen 2.7). And in the Fall we are told that it is to the earth that we shall return (Gen 3.19).
And while this is biblically true, it is also culturally true. Since as long as we have been “human” (setting aside the debate about how long that length has been) we have been compelled to burry the dead and —barring any community transgression— to burry them with ceremony.
Giorgio Agamben has written some illuminating reflections (here and here) on the ways in which Roman rites, handed down from Romulus, made explicit the political dimension of burying the dead: Three times a year a mighty stone was rolled away from a central Pit, purportedly dug by Romulus in honor of all the City’s glorious dead, at the heart of the city. Into this pit the living would cast fistfuls of dirt —symbolizing themselves— into the sepulcher forming a living tether between the past and the present.
The idea is this: there is no human life without the human past. And there is no human future without maintaining the inheritance laid up by the human past. Contrary to the current intellectual fashion in the west, the ancients understood the tomb as the places where human life happens: where humus-past and humus-future share a tether in the witness of humus-present.
As He always does Christ simultaneously frustrates and satisfies the old paganisms: Christ is was made man, which means earth, and was born of the humus of the virgin Mary, suffered under the dirt-king Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried.
Buried. Laid in the heart of the earth. The place where the dead go. And a stone, like the manalis lapis that closed Romulus’ trench, was rolled over the space. The new and greater Adam, a new and greater Humus-man, laid in the earth from which all his bodily lineage came. Perhaps, like the pagan cults of antiquity, his followers might come and visit the grave tri-annually, to commune with the dead.
But… lo, The Dead became The Living. Christ rose from the grave. And so, in him —and not in the tomb in and of itself— the past breaks-in upon the present. In him, and not in memorial offerings to the dead, do we have surety of the future. He is the link, the eternal tether between past-present-and-future.
And yet, at the same time, we don’t dispense with the grave. Now more than ever, for Christians, the tomb is where life happens. And this for two profoundly christo-centric reasons:
Now, in Christ, we share a far more profound connection with the glorious and saintly dead, for we are yoked with them in the eschatological promises of our Savior. I share more with my deceased great-grandmother than Romulus ever shared with Rhemus, for I share with her the unfading crown of life, and I shall see her, in the body again.
Now, because of Christ, the grave is not the end. One day all the tombs shall give back the bodies they currently tend.
But now, let us consider, what strangeness has come upon us in these days that we now witness in which not even a pagan generosity is afforded to the dead. With gestures far more austere than Creon, the dead are afforded less than mourning: they are named among the “unclean” (with all of its medical, social, and religious connotations) whose death is resultant from their contamination with the plague. The tomb is not, in modernity, where life happens. The tomb is a thing we try to eschew.
In a few weeks we will celebrate the triduum of the Hallows —a full 180 degrees across the cycle of the year from Easter. To celebrate it right, we must maintain its connection with the Resurrection. For in Hallowtide what we celebrate is the fact that the Resurrection applies to us and to all those who have died in Christ. If Adam was told “you are earth, and to earth you shall return” Christ satisfies and reverses the magic: “You are dead, but from the dead you shall return!”
After two years in which eulogies were not said, funerary eucharist services not celebrated, and where the sight of the grave and the terror of death loomed large, people begin to feel a kind of loss —the loss of their connection to the dead, which is to the past. We can offer to that world more than a fistful offering of sprinkled earth (a la Romulus). We offer them the Feast of All Saints, and the Day of All Souls, in which we give thanks for, remember, and count as blessed those who have died. We can say the eulogies we did not get to say last year. We can lift the names of the dead up in our community before God, giving thanks, as Malcolm Guite describes, for the “Unnumbered multitudes, he lifts above / The shadow of the gibbet and the grave, / To triumph where all saints are known and named; / The gathered glories of His wounded love.”
Perhaps, after long internment under an unjust sentence of being labelled a “papal-pagan-invention”, it is time for the church in the west to resurrect on a widescale, the public celebrations of Hallowtide, esp. with its historic processions, graveyard charivari, and with all of the particular ways in which these days are uniquely situated to bring tears to the eyes, and then wipe them away with the message of the Gospel (cf. Rev. 21.4). For God is not a God of the dead but of the Living (Lk. 20.38).