The Good Christian Funeral

This essay first appeared in Issue 27 of The Mockingbird print magazine.

Left to their own devices, without custom or church to guide them, here’s how my family in Pittsburgh organized Aunt Tabitha’s “celebration of life”: They rented out the local Hibernians club on a Tuesday night, ordered a bunch of grocery store spaghetti and fried chicken, and told everyone the dress code was black and gold because Tabitha loved the Steelers. Walking through the nondescript front door, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the evening for a tailgate. Except for a few photos Scotch-taped to a posterboard, the urn placed on a table of flowers, and the strict “no booze” policy, there was little evidence of a memorial taking place. Family and friends, all decked out in jerseys, filled the social hall, ate spaghetti, watched the kids run around, and swapped condolences and memories. Verona, the surviving daughter, was there with her boyfriend. “She wouldn’t want us to be sad or cause a hubbub,” she declared, looking over the scene with satisfaction. “She would want us to celebrate her life.”

Monika Radžiunaite, fellows, welcome to the long-awaited burial of a person / Dilecta lumina, grata diu expectata hominum sepultura / Dear gleams, welcome to the long-awaited funeral of a person, 2023. Oil on canvas, 47 1/5 × 47 1/5 × 4/5 in.

There was no pastor to pray, no casket to view, no graveside or mausoleum to visit. There was no eulogy and no funeral home either. This Steelers-themed “celebration of life” sticks with me as a sociological curiosity. Only in Pittsburgh, it seems, would Sunday’s black and gold transcend its sporting signifier and become the appropriate attire for facing death. What might the reasons be for such an odd and unique gathering? Why this particular “celebration of life” as opposed to just about every other funeral in the history of Western civilization? And why was my gut reaction to the event an unusual mix of pity and objection?

Anyone, of course, can organize a bespoke funeral. “It’s still a service industry,” explained Oliver Peyton to the New York Times in 2024. Peyton, a well-regarded London restauranteur, is also the founder of the Exit Here funeral home. When his father died in 2010, Peyton thought that the traditional funeral home experience lacked options. The Exit Here storefront boasts the hip minimalism of a fashion boutique, with urns and coffins that wouldn’t look out of place in a Crate and Barrel or Anthropologie. At the opposite end of the cultural and socioeconomic spectrum is Albert Dancy Jr. of Sutton, West Virginia. When he passed in 2009, Dancy was buried in his beloved 1967 Chevy pickup, wearing his hunting camouflage, and holding his beloved pocketknife and Remington rifle. A Steelers-themed memorial service doesn’t seem so odd when the goalposts are bohemian chic and buck hunting season.

I imagine both Peyton’s funeral home and Dancy’s automotive coffin elicit strong responses from most people, the way Aunt Tab’s memorial did for me. The former is too “bougie,” too “Instagram,” too “whitewashed tomb,” while the latter is tacky, “extra,” or environmentally irresponsible. If we are honest, though, it’s probably because none of these ceremonies share our vision for what a “proper” funeral should look like or, perhaps, that these funerals were not the kind of funerals that we would want for ourselves.

That vision of a proper funeral has dramatically shifted in the last fifty years. In 1970 cremation only accounted for 5 percent of all U.S. funeral choices, but by 2030 that number is expected to rise to 71 percent. Orthodoxy is the only major Christian tradition that requires traditional funerals with a buried body in a box. A good friend of mine owns a small funeral home in a Pittsburgh suburb. He is Serbian Orthodox, and his business primarily serves Pittsburgh’s Orthodox Christian community. He’s always well dressed, mostly in a black suit and tie, and his business affords him and his wife and six kids a comfortable life. Sometimes, when the guys get together at the cigar bar, he’ll open up about the business, and how modern funeral trends have required consolidation or closure of his peers’ businesses. “I don’t know how anyone does funerals anymore when everyone wants to be cremated,” he confesses. “There’s no money in it.” Those who know him will recognize that his sentiment is not about taking advantage of the bereaved, but about making a living wage in a disrupted industry.

If funerals have become opportunities for authentic individual expression, they are often reflective of class too. Many of the Steeler jerseys worn to Aunt Tab’s event were faded and chipping, featuring the numbers and names of players who had retired decades prior. New fan gear was an investment many couldn’t afford: a new jersey costs as much, if not more, than a new suit. In lieu of flowers, the family asked attendees to consider chipping in to help defray the cost of the cremation and mortuary services. Throughout the night, friends and family quietly slipped envelopes of condolence into the hands of Aunt Tabitha’s widower, each an acknowledgement that his loss was financial as well as relational. The jerseys might have been black and gold, but the collars were as blue as the jeans everyone wore on their bottom half.

Faith played a part in the gathering as well, or more specifically, lack of faith. Whenever a distant relative learned I’d become a minister, their initial response that night was to tell me about the local Catholic parish that had closed, or the beloved priest who had been transferred to serve elsewhere, or the nuns who beat them in school as kids. Which is to say, God had not been invited to the affair: not out of an intent to slight the divine, but because they didn’t know how or where to address the invite.

Illustrations by Aubrey Swanson Dockery.

Not only did class and faith play a role in the gathering, but rumor and judgment did as well. Most people in the room knew the quiet circumstances behind Aunt Tabitha’s death. She was the kind of person who, after her cancer diagnosis, took off her oxygen mask to smoke her cigarette so she wouldn’t blow up the tank. She drank heavily against the doctor’s orders, and the rashes and pockmarks on her skin hinted at serious drug use. She imposed herself on the rest of the family, especially as the cancer got worse, demanding they wait on her hand and foot. Many declined to attend her “celebration,” citing unaddressed grievances and bad blood. Even though the hall was packed out, those in the know recognized a few very important absences. The dark thought that many people were probably there for the free dinner began to worm its way into my mind.

***

A “proper” Christian funeral is basically a church service with a dead body in a box at the front of the room. There are tissues and tears, preaching and prayers, and traditional hymns like “It Is Well” and “Amazing Grace.” Churchy funerals acknowledge the loss while presenting resurrection hope. Altogether, grief and hope and sin and forgiveness are a powerful balm. For most clergy I know, one of the draws of the vocation is having something eternal to offer people as they encounter the inevitable. Fewer things are more Christian than a graveside declaration of “alleluia.”

The power behind a Christian funeral is one of the reasons I and other clergy I know resist and, frankly, resent many of these modern funeral shifts. These less churchy, bespoke arrangements use “celebration of life” as a euphemism for a funeral service devoid of negative elements. They are eulogy heavy; they feature slideshows with smiling photos of the deceased; and there usually isn’t any singing (outside of maybe a cousin who performs a sentimental ballad like “You Raise Me Up” over a karaoke track). They’re officiated with haste in an attempt to lower people’s discomfort in the presence of death, and they’re often run by a funeral home director instead of clergy. Most of these services aren’t defined by the high-end glamor of a boutique casket or the spectacle of a Chevy truck coffin. As I have experienced them, they are defined by their opposition to negative emotion and a curious absence of genuine positive emotion. Despite the name, there’s rarely, if ever, any celebrating taking place.

Clergy like me, having officiated and attended all sorts of funerals, can’t help but form our own opinions. I used to scoff at celebrations of life. It seemed to me that there was a better way, a “right” way, to mark the end of someone’s earthly pilgrimage. Life and time, and perhaps even God, have taught me to see them as something else entirely. As much as I love the “proper” Christian burial service, I’ve seen how a celebration of life offers something that my robes, liturgy, and alleluias lack. Societal changes happen because people are dissatisfied with the status quo, and when a complaint is raised, it’s worth our consideration.

My reconsiderations began when I officiated a service for a woman who had fought cancer for 16 years. She’d had a good long run, as they say, but when the choice needed to be made, she’d chosen a happy, cognizant, and informed goodbye with hospice care instead of continuing exhausting treatments with diminishing returns. She was wise to do so, I think. Over the course of a week, she was able to say goodbye to her kids and grandkids, firm up arrangements with the estate, and check off a handful of other important end-of-life items. She died with her husband and two sons by her side.

The family wanted a celebration of life as much as they wanted a churchy funeral. The truth is that they were glad their beloved was no longer suffering. She had been in constant and increasing pain. The issue was magnified when the cancer came for her stomach, which made the simple act of eating excruciating. For those 16 years, the family had been in a state of escalating grief, and it was a mercy to see her pass. They weren’t concerned with death, mortality, hope, and resurrection so much as marking together that her misery had ended. That was worth celebrating, or at least attempting to celebrate. It was a situation in which their grief did not follow the prescribed formula of sorrow, anger, or depression; or perhaps those stages of grief had already run their course in the long years prior.

Many who die have had chronic pain, bodily dysfunctions, and long-term disabilities, and in death, finally, the sufferings of this world no longer apply. The traditional Christian funeral — my churchy-style funeral — doesn’t always acknowledge that mildly shameful but universal exhalation at the end of a loved one’s prolonged suffering. Not everyone comes to a funeral in the same emotional state, and celebrations of life attempt to accommodate the range of emotional experience.

Another funeral that changed my mind regarding the celebration of life was when I buried one of my congregation’s 90-year-olds. She had lived in a rural Pennsylvania retirement community, and her adult children all lived in big cities west of the Mississippi river. When she died, the family came together for the funeral, and insisted that they didn’t want a gloomy sad affair, but a celebration of her life.

As I got to know the adult children preparing for the service, I gathered that their relationship to their deceased mother was one of distance — they had all left the nest and never looked back. I began to wonder why. I didn’t get the sense, as pastors often do, that the mother had driven her children away because of an overbearing or critical nature. But they weren’t grieving their loss, because their relationship wasn’t close, and they didn’t need much comfort or hope for someone who was, at this point in life, a stranger to them. There was some guilt or regret at work too. These adult children didn’t play a part in caring for their mother into her late life. A celebration of life, one that skipped over negative emotions altogether, was more appropriate in their eyes. It would be disingenuous for them to feign a sadness or grief that they didn’t actually feel.

It might have pricked their consciences, too. Like it or not, clergy at the front of a church service radiate moral authority. As long as people carry guilt or inward resentments into their funeral planning, they’ll resist the churchy funeral. Ironically, when paired with confession and absolution, a churchy funeral can actually bring release to these negative emotions, but stereotypes exist for a reason — too few churches embody the grace that would be the focus of an ideal Christian funeral. Nobody wants to encounter death head-on and walk away feeling worse because of an unexpected (and probably undeserved) guilt trip.

The third funeral that changed my mind on the celebration of life service was Aunt Tab’s. The final observation — about her addictions and defects of character — made me appreciate celebrations of life the most. Coming together for a few beers to toast the deceased can seem more appropriate than a pious ceremony for a well-known sinner. A celebration of life is, from a somewhat distorted angle, a secular stab at grace. Sins that cannot be forgiven can at least be politely ignored or minimized.

To bury someone and ignore their faults feels respectful, in line with the old adage “don’t speak ill of the dead.” Put on the ritual clothing of the community’s binding worldview, highlight some noteworthy aspects of the character of the deceased, give thanks for happy times, ignore defects of character (or only briefly mention them to add some authenticity to the celebration), and then move on. For a blue-collar Pittsburgh family, a Steelers-themed social accomplishes all these goals. It’s the best departing ceremony many could hope for, if there’s no hope for the resurrection of the dead.

***

Celebrations of life make sense to our modern age in a way that they didn’t 50 and 60 years ago. Our medical technologies have extended life and helped us live longer and happier existences. Our positivity-obsessed society has declared negative emotions to be anathema to a good life. Communication technologies have given us the facsimile of close relationships over a distance, convincing us that they can replace face-to-face connection when they really can’t. Our (very good and important!) social safety nets make death less devastating, reducing the number of impoverished widows and orphaned children. Gratitude is an appropriate emotion, and it’s often the one emotion people can justify if there’s no expectation of relief, absolution, or hope. I no longer scoff at these ceremonies as I used to. They make total sense in the secular age as a search for good news beyond the judgments of this life.

However, just because I understand why people choose to go with a celebration of life doesn’t mean that I recommend them.

There is wisdom in the saying that “grief is the price we pay for love.” The forced positivity of a celebration of life, counterintuitively, puts a cap on the love that people naturally want to express through sadness. Without a place to go, that sadness will work itself out in other venues, of course. One can be just as sad alone in a house, in the office of a therapist, or behind a drink at a bar. A funeral should be the place most accepting of public sadness, but in our modern age that has changed. Ironically, despite the appeal of bespoke funerals and their break from rigid traditions, these rituals have their own unwritten rules about them. Honor the dead. Limit the discomfort of attendees. Keep it short and sweet. And chief among these rules for those throwing said funeral, don’t let there be any hint of sadness.

If only all funerals were unhappy and filled with tears, we might intuit that there was actually more love in the world than meets the eye. Jesus himself wept at a funeral wake, and the mixture of love and grief didn’t just make him sad, but angry. Angry enough, in fact, to raise the dead man that day, even though his entombed corpse had begun to reek with decay. Those who go to funerals as a blubbering mess, we discover from John’s gospel, are not far from the kingdom of God.

As I sat there in that social club, watching the black and gold with curiosity, I wished I could have given Aunt Tab a Christian funeral. I still wish that we could have had church with her urn at the front on the communion table. I wish people could have been publicly sad. I wish I could have told everyone that God forgives notorious sinners, and that his love is for everyone regardless of deserving. I wish people knew that the suffering of Jesus offers hope for those who suffer chronic pains. I wish people thought of church as the place they could go to work through their guilts and inner regrets instead of hiding them. I wish I could say alleluia over everyone’s graves.

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