Even if we're headed for an afterlife, what about the body we leave behind?

Cremation has become a favorite disposal means, but is it the right one

My current plan for when I shuffle off the mortal coil, as a teacher of mine used to say, is to be cremated, with my ashes buried in the yard of my church.

Not today, I hope, but I am daily more aware of the 100 percent possibility of my demise, so I think about these things (between innings).

As this article by a law professor at Wake Forest University, notes in The Conversation, “Nearly two-thirds of Americans now opt for cremation — a figure that has been steadily increasing over five decades.

“On the surface, that proportion tells a simple story: The nation has embraced cremation, while its preference for casket burials has fallen off.”

(This photo shows the gravestone of my parents in Oakland Cemetery in Woodstock, Ill. They each had a traditional casket burial. I’m thinking I won’t.)

Tanya D. Marsh, who wrote the piece to which I just linked you, says that in 2024 she “launched the first academic survey on consumer preferences in death care.”

It listed six methods: Cremation, casket burial, green burial, donation to science, water cremation and human composting. Then it asked respondents “whether they had ‘heard’ of that method and whether they would “consider” that method.

She found that “while 72.6% of respondents said they would consider cremation, only 33.4% ranked it as their actual first choice. Casket burial edged it out at 35.9% as the top-ranked preference. Yet the real-world cremation rate — 62% — is nearly double the stated first-choice rate.”

Well, you can read more about what she found at the site to which I linked you above. For my purposes today, I want to focus more on whether your faith tradition, if any, leads you toward one or another “death care” options of what to do with your body after you die.

(This recent photo in the sanctuary of my church shows where my funeral will take place — maybe in 2095 or so [ha]. Whether the wonderful, recently installed but temporary paper chain chalice will still be hanging there then remains to be seen.)

In my Protestant Christian tradition, I find — without specific figures to prove I’m right — that more and more people are choosing cremation. And they have no theological problem making that choice because our faith promises some kind of eternal life even if we don’t agree on exactly what that means despite pledging belief to the concept of the “resurrection of the body.”

The more important choice, it seems to me, is not about which body-disposal method we choose but, rather, whether we arrange to pass on to our surviving family and friends not our valuables but, rather, our values.

How, in other words, do we teach our children, grandchildren and so on what we have thought is vital in life, what moral and ethical principles are at our core and what theology, if any, underpins all of that. Such matters are way, way more important than where are our dead bodies will be as they decay back into the ancient atoms that made them up.

(I took this photo at Forest Hill Cemetery in Kansas City.)

So spend a lot of time and effort on your body-disposal choice if you want to. Just know that if you do, you are majoring in the minors.

---

What’s this? Worship attendance is rising?

A story more than half a century old — the decline of participation in institutional religion, particularly among Protestant branches of Christianity in the U.S. — recently has gotten more complicated and maybe even more hopeful.

Which is to say that there now appears to be some evidence of a general increase in the number of people who attend Christian worship services, as this report notes.

The story says that “a new report from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research shows signs of a shift — for the first time in two decades, attendance is up. More people are volunteering, and there also seems to be a renewed sense of optimism among pastors and other clergy.

“‘The headline finding is cautious optimism,’ Alison Norton, co-director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, told reporters at the annual conference of the Religion News Association, meeting in Atlanta. She added that the data showed a story of resilience and recalibration.”

Although many people try to measure participation in religion in the U.S., such figures almost never describe what difference such participation is making in anyone’s life. Is it making people more generous, more loving, more charitable, more caring? Such statistics won’t tell us much about that.

To learn about those effects, you simply have to be part of a congregation. Which is almost always a good idea, no matter what faith tradition you choose. The roots of the word religion, after all, suggest a tying together, a uniting. And it’s in that adhesion that generative change is found. So go join a congregation (mine, even) if you’re not already part of one. Tell ’em I sent you.

---