Monsignor Pope Ping!
When I die, I want to be cremated as soon as possible before autopsy and dissection, embalming, if possible.
I want my ashes interred in a sealed metal canister that replicates a large caliber cartridge. 45 ACP appropriately dimensioned and sized would be my choice.
I am not Catholic but my wife is. I’ve told her that I want to be cremated once all my organs are donated. Then her and our children are to take my ashes to the Virgin Islands and throw me in.
Instead of a “funeral” I’ve asked that they have a gathering to celebrate my life and tell stories about me and how I affected and influenced their lives.
Hey, when I'm gone, compress my cremains into a diamond.
That way I may actually be worth something.
Cremation is little more than desecration and a defilement of the human body.
Not a Christian practice.
I never understood the logic of this. Did somebody (unclear on the definition of "omnipotent") believe that it was possible for God to resurrect a dead body, but restoring ashes was just too much to expect?
Interesting analogy about not scattering limbs & pieces in the woods.
However, it did bring up a question in my mind about Saints bones being kept in different churches.
Like my late wife I am an anatomical donor. When I die my body will go to the University of Virginia, it will be used to help teach new doctors. I feel that is a lot better than sending it to a cemetery. When they are done the body is cremated.
How is that any different than when a person dies in an intense fire, lost at sea or any other way that the body is destroyed? The Bible says that the sea will give up the dead, nothing is said that the body must be intact.
Well if the bishops took a stand in regards to the high costs of funerals years ago, you would not have new problems when it comes to cremation.
Actually, in the case of the glass jewelry/suncatchers the ashes or hair clippings burn up and become bubbles at those temperatures. It’s really not creepy at all.
Resin would be another matter.
In early America people would make bracelets of braided hair.
I never thought about it much until I heard my favorite Baptist, Al Mohler, say the burial of an actual body is the last witness to others of the departed Christian’s hope of a bodily resurrection. Granted God will give me a new body and it doesn’t really matter where my body is, a six foot hole or the bottom of the deep blue sea.
Kind of resonated with me though.
Not only on this matter.
bfl
I always wanted to be stuffed. Then I could be wheeled out for family gatherings.
Or, if I had enough money for a mausoleum, I could be propped into a frightening pose to scare people when they looked in.
When my Mother died, she had asked to be cremated, because she wanted to be buried next to my stepfather, and the small cemetery only had room for cremated remains. In fact they had closed it to any new burials, and she was only buried there because she had signed up years before. I had no problems with the cremation, since the Catholic Church now allows it. We had a funeral Mass said for her, with the urn before the altar, and another priest said prayers at the burial of her urn.
God wants us to bury our dead with respect. But if someone has lost an arm or a leg, or has been burned in a fire, God will have no trouble putting them back together at the Resurrection. The same with cremated remains. But they should properly be buried, not scattered.
The prohibition is partially due to the expectation of the resurrection, but as others on the thread pointed out, God is certainly capable of resurrecting ashes or decomposed bodies into our new, heavenly bodies. For good descriptions of what resurrection will be like, see The Valley of Dry Bones section of Ezekiel. St. Paul also discussed the resurrection.
Primary reason for forbidding cremation has to do with the nature of man. We are made in the image and likeness of God. Some saints clearly manifest that image and likeness in the current life and their bodies can also manifest that after their death. This is the foundation of the veneration of relics.
There are also biblical foundations for the power of relics. I don't have the citation handy, but the body of Elijah brought a man back to life (2 Kings?).
The willful destruction of a human body, like through cremation, can be viewed as also destroying God's handwork and the image and likeness of God.
Traditional Orthodox practices do not allow embalming either. Open caskets are the norm at funerals.
My screen name is where my wife’s ashes are spread. She asked me to have her body cremated because she wanted to have the last laugh at the cancer that killed her. She loved the majestic redwoods at the Muir National Monument forest so there she is.
Why do they believe that God would not be able to gather , reassemble, rehydrate and reanimate even the scattered ashes of the cremated?
If that doesn't work, I hope to live to be 100 and get shot by a jealous husband.