WE HIRE PROFESSIONALS to handle our dead. They embalm the body. They put the body in an expensive sealed coffin and place that sealed coffin in a sealed cement vault. But why?
Almost 30 years ago, I found my mother’s traditional Catholic funeral to be jarring and deeply unsettling. But why?
Becoming a funeral shroud-maker was a response. It was a response to the modern American funeral industry and its exceptionally consumptive, earth- and human-unfriendly practices.
My mother’s death and her traditional funeral unsettled me and made me consider all my “whys.” Too late for her, but hopefully not for others I love, including myself. The symbology was off, the weird ultra-calm professionalism of the undertakers (no keening here, please), the massive, expensive coffin, the generic service from the priest, the sanitation of the gravesite—none of it matched my simple, earthy mother.
She venerated the Virgin Mary, not Christ. She considered herself “shanty Irish,” meaning poor. She was a farm wife and a gardener. She made do and pinched pennies all her life. A lavish funeral seemed anomalous. She had her doubts about Catholicism late in life, and none of us knew this priest. He obviously didn’t know my mother. It all felt cattywampus. So, the research began.
WHY COFFINS AND VAULTS?
The European Catholic Church decreed that Catholics must not be buried in such a way that their bodies touched the earth. Coffins, and later vaults, were required. Those with wealth could afford caskets, funerary indulgences, and to be buried, first under church floors (most expensive), and later in approved and specially blessed graveyards.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July/August 2021 من Spirituality & Health.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July/August 2021 من Spirituality & Health.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
ONE WORD TO BEAT WINTER BLUES: BIOMIMICRY
CREATURELY REFLECTIONS
THINKING ABOUT RESTITUTION
THE HEART OF HAPPINESS
WAITING IN LINE
OUR WALK IN THE WORLD
ENTER THE SAUNA
Journalist Emily O’Kelly shares some uplifting research on the benefits of sweat bathing, a global healing practice not just limited to Northern climes.
the trail of ATONEMENT
One Ashkenazi Jewish family escaped pogroms in Russia and then flourished in South Dakota, but the “free land” of their new homestead had been unfairly taken from the Lakota by the United States. Generations later, a celebrated investigative journalist set out to tell the truth of the Lakota and her family, calculate The Cost of Free Land—and pay it back.
STALKING YOUR Mind
Stalking the Mind is part of an ancient Indigenous American Medicine Way to tame your guilt, fears, and shame. What we’re “stalking” are our thought patterns and beliefs that seem to create the opposite of happiness and wellbeing. It’s a powerful psychotherapeutic journey of healing without the diagnosis or labels.
LEAVING MESA VERDE
After 21 years of service at Mesa Verde National Park, RANGER DAVID FRANKS recently guided his last tour of the pueblos and cliff dwellings. He says he was fortunate to assist the archeologists with a variety of work and never lost his amazement with their ability to figure out how and when things happened. The question he still wrestles with is much deeper: Why they left?
BECOMING YOUR OWN LEAD RESEARCHER IN HEALTHCARE
PEGGY LA CERRA, PHD, downloaded a health app to aggregate her medical records and was stunned to see the phrase \"aortic atherosclerosis.\" What she did next is a helpful model for all of us.
ARCHETYPAL ASTROLOGY
\"Is astrology true?\" is the wrong question, writes RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO. He suggests that the truth is out there, but out there is really in here.
WELLNESS IN THE WILD
Spa aficionado MARY BEMIS takes the [cold] plunge at Mohonk Mountain House.