Decent Burial

John Doe drove a Cadillac, worked in an air-conditioned office and smoked 75-c- cigars. When John died, the undertaker (whose card described him as a "mortician") came to talk over the arrangements with his widow.

A man of Mr. Doe's position, the undertaker quietly suggested, should certainly lie in a sheet-bronze casket with a quilted satin lining. Of course the widow would want the body to be on view in the "reposing room" before the ceremony. The service could be held either in the "chapel" or in a regular church, whichever she preferred, but it would be a great comfort to know that her late husband would be laid away in a vault of waterproof cement, guaranteed to give protection "not for years, not for life, but forever." The whole thing would come to about $2,500.

The well-organized trend toward such sumptuous burial rites has increased ever since the development of modern embalming.* The trend has increasingly set ministers' teeth on edge. To many, such a long-faced travesty on Christian burial seems just as offensive as the frank vulgarity of the District of Columbia's "merry mortician," whose new calendar (see cut) proclaims "Beautiful Bodies by Chambers." In this week's Christian Century, Methodist Minister Edwin T. Randall tells of a community in which the ministers have organized to do something about it.

Two "Fine Professions." When the Rev. Jesse Pindell Peirce came to the First Congregational Church of Elgin, Ill., writes Randall, he gave each member of his congregation a "get-acquainted statement" which included a request that for funerals "the casket be not opened in the church if the service is held there, and that the casket be closed in every case before the service begins if the service is held elsewhere. Christians do not glorify the body, which does not inherit eternal life, but the spirit, which does." Peirce further suggested "that the family not allow itself to be coerced into spending lavishly on casket or otherwise."

Other Elgin ministers were so impressed by Peirce's statement that they decided to adapt it for general distribution in pamphlet form. Promptly Elgin's undertakers proposed a meeting to talk it over. Such a meeting, explained a representative of the undertakers, "was in the interest of two 'fine professions,' both seeking to give the public what it wanted."

Pagan Survival. "The undertakers," writes Randall, "offered some complaint about cutting into their incomes. 'We still list $100 funerals, but we can't make any money on that kind of business,' one explained. ... A florist . . . voiced the most pointed complaint. 'You [ministers],' he said, 'want to take this sum that is to be saved and use it for your own purposes. You ought to consider if there aren't other ways in which you can derive income from funerals without interfering with our business.'"

Elgin's ministers decided to go ahead with their pamphlet, called it "When Death Comes." Its main points:

"Making the body the center of a funeral service interferes with the Christian emphasis upon the eternal value of the soul. Parading past the corpse is a survival of paganism. Many Christians prefer to remember their loved ones' faces as they were when radiant from the spirit within."

Writes Randall in summing up: "It is the hope of the Elgin ministers that groups elsewhere, even if small ones, will take advantage of this bit of pioneering, and perhaps also of the statement they have prepared, in order that funerals elsewhere may become more truly expressions of Christian faith and victory."

* Introduced to U.S. undertakers after the Civil War.

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