For millenia, it was a given that Christian families buried those who had fallen asleep in the Lord while pagans burned their dead through cremation. In modernity as neoplatonism and gnosticism have in turn crept back in to Christian circles, both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism have accepted cremation as an acceptable practice for Christians.
Here is why it isn't.
""The Body is Not the Soul's Garbage" ~ Cremation: the last, final illusion of modern pseudo-civilization
By Fr. Charalambos Livios Papadopoulos
If the body has no worth, then neither does the soul. The body is not the soul's garbage, to be burned in the landfills of our "pseudo-civilization." You see, we have this "modern," "rational" idea that cremation is simply a technical solution: cleaner, more efficient, more ecological, less space, less "trouble." But this is precisely where the problem lies. Because the real question is not, "What is more practical?" The real question is: what kind of civilization are we, when we consider it normal to burn a human being?
If someone were burned alive, we would call it horror, a crime, unthinkable violence. And now, suddenly, because he is dead, the very same act is presented as a "choice." A nice word: choice. This is the idolization of life. Ideology is not that we tell lies. It is that we make the lie appear natural: to appear "neutral," to appear "civilized." But the burning of human beings is precisely the opposite: it is the point at which civilization reveals its hidden barbarity.
For what does cremation say? It says: "the human being is finished." And when we say "finished," we do not simply mean that he has died. No. We mean something deeper: that now you can do whatever you want with the body, because it is nothing. It is residue. It is garbage with no value anymore. Get rid of it. And this is the modern thinking: the body as garbage.
And yet, the cremation of the dead often reveals a deep perception that the body no longer has value, that we can do whatever we want with it: make it disappear, throw it away, burn it. But the body is not garbage. The body is a temple, it is history, it is a person. It is the human being whom I loved, whom I kissed, whom I baptized, whom I communed, for whom I wept.
The body is the earth, the place and the space of my soul. Every one of its cells is my history, what I was and what I became in this life.
You know, the body was and always is a "problem." The body smells, the body decays, the body reminds us that we are mortal. And our culture hates this reminder. It cannot endure our corruptibility. It wants to make the body disappear, not simply to bury it. For nothing to remain. To become dust.
As if to say: I do not want even the memory of materiality.
And here something appears that the Orthodox and Christianity in its most radical form in general proclaim: matter is not a mistake. The body is not inferior to the soul.
We do not have here a "spirituality" of the neo-Platonic type, where the body is the prison of the soul. No. Exactly the opposite: matter is glorified. Matter is sanctified. Matter becomes the place of God. The place and space of love.
The scandal is the Incarnation. God enters into matter. Therefore, matter is not "abandonment"; it is encounter.
And here is the real scandal of Orthodox thought and experience: Christianity is not a disembodied religion, nor a philosophy that despises matter. Orthodox theology is not Neoplatonism.
It does not say that matter is evil and must be eliminated. On the contrary, Orthodoxy is the glory of Matter, the deification of Matter. For God Himself became man: He took a body, He took blood, He took flesh. Matter in the Church is sacred: water, oil, bread, wine all are sanctified, by Christ, all become bearers of Grace. And perhaps here lies the most violent aspect of cremation: it is not simply the management of a dead body. It is an act of denial, a symbolic declaration: I do not want anything material to exist that reminds me that the human being has eternal value.
That is why the relics of the Saints are so disturbing to the modern consciousness. A relic, a bone, matter that exudes fragrance this is the most irrational thing for "rational" modernity. And precisely for that reason it is so powerful: the relic is the point where matter refuses to become garbage. And here perhaps we must say the simplest thing: the human being is not a soul that merely "wears" a body. He is a body with a soul, in absolute equality and value.
A human being without a body is a ghost; a human being without a soul is a corpse.
So, yes: cremation is the last, final illusion of our pseudo-civilization that it can discard matter and keep only the "meaning." But when you discard matter, in the end you discard meaning as well."
So do not buy into the lies of modernity. As you age, make proper preparations for the day your body will fall asleep in the Lord as your soul goes to be with Him. A proper Christian funeral, not just a celebration of life, that will allow those who are left behind to reflect on their own mortality and come to follow Christ if they have not done so yet. And yes, a grave in which your body will rest until on that final day, at the sound of the last trumpet, it will rise incorruptible and restored.
