How long are we supposed to respect the dead? In our secular culture, which has abandoned belief in the afterlife, there doesn’t seem to be much need to do so unless we need inspiration. You still see Steve Jobs quotes floating around facebook walls. If the deceased was a celebrity, our reaction vacillates between weeks-long canonization by acclamation (e.g. Michael Jackson or Whitney Houston) and a few jokes on late-night talk shows.
If the deceased was a politician or world leader with whom we disagreed (Robert Bork, Arlen Specter, or Saddam Hussein), then we sometimes can barely contain our glee at their passing. So our culture seem to be inconsistent at best in giving due respect to the dead.
All this is prompted by our family’s visit to the Titanic artifact exhibit this weekend. It was interesting if a little brief (the highlight was our 3.5 year old seeing a woman dressed in period clothes and remarking “Ooh, she’s a witch!”). To set the tone, though, the staff gave all the visitors a “boarding pass” which included the name and some background on one of the actual Titanic passengers. As they handed the passes out, the staff said “Keep these until the end and you can see if you survived or not.” I can appreciate the effort to make history seem more relevant and interesting for folks (in order to sell tickets), but it seemed a little too casual to kid about being the Rev. John Harper, age 28, and to wonder whether I died of hypothermia or not.
Titanic.jpg at wikimedia commons
This wasn’t the first time that we saw the memory of the Titanic used in a less-than-respectful way. At one of our local town festivals, kids got to play around in an inflatable jump house bearing a Titanic theme. It was strange to juxtapose the image of a tragedy that cost the lives of 1,500 people with that of boiled crawfish and fried Twinkies. How many years will elapse before the memory of those who died in 9/11 is similarly marred?
- Virtually every day of the year is dedicated to remembering the life of a saint, and not just in the sense of “Wasn’t St. Ignatius of Antioch a great guy?” Our remembrance is to unite our prayers with one who is still praying for us; we don’t ask the “dead” to pray for us, as if we’re asking for prayers from a statue. We ask the living to pray for us. St. Ignatius is more alive than I am now.
- We have a feast day of the universal Church to pray for all those who have died, either known (All Saints) or unknown (All Souls).
- We are encouraged to pray for those in purgatory. Actually, we are encouraged to pray for the speedy release into heaven of everyone who has died, even if our prayers have no real effect on the person for whom we’re praying (if they’re in heaven, they no longer need our prayers. If they’re in hell, our prayers cannot save them).
- We bless graves and require that the faithful be given proper burials that respect the integrity of the body (e.g., no scattering of ashes).
These practices serve to remind us that this earthly life is not the end game. We know something exists just around death’s corner. Even Socrates knew that.