The Presidential Funeral and the Sacred Dignity of the Body

Although I have not watched President George H.W. Bush’s funeral in full, the parts that I saw had a profound impact on me and are burned into my memory (in a good way). If you have not seen any of it yet, I highly recommend that you do, since laying to rest a national leader with all of the pomp and circumstance provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the dying process and death itself. Yes, I am sure that most of us have attended at least one funeral during our lives, but to see one “unabridged with all the fixings,” so to speak, helps us ponder the nature of the human person and his or her final destination.

There were many different parts of the funeral that struck me, such as the sheer exalted beauty of the National Cathedral, the gorgeous singing of the military choir, the humorous and touching remarks of President George W. Bush about his father and the number and diversity of people in attendance. Yet there was one detail that stood out in particular throughout the whole funeral liturgy, namely the deep reverence displayed toward the body of President George H.W. Bush in the casket. Seeing thousands of people from all walks of life paying their respects for Bush in the Capitol Rotunda all day and all night, saluting the casket, praying and standing in silence, prompted this question for me: “When someone dies, why do we feel the need to say our goodbyes (and hopefully our prayers for them) in the presence of his or her remains?” From a Christian perspective, we know that the soul has been separated from the body and that the person, as we knew him or her, is no longer there in that dead body. Nevertheless, at a Catholic funeral Mass, the Church envisions the body to be present, or at least the cremains, so honoring the body is clearly a good thing to do.

Why is the body, even after death, something worthy of reverence? I think we can go about answering this by looking at what happens when disrespect is shown toward the body. Since I am no longer in seminary formation and have not yet started a job, I have had a little extra time on my hands, part of which has been spent watching Criminal Minds. If you have never seen the show before, the premise is that an FBI team from the Behavioral Analysis Unit is brought in on special cases that often involve serial murder. By reviewing the particular way that the killer murders his victims, the team creates a profile for the murderer that helps them narrow down their search. Now, obviously there is a huge disrespect shown toward the person and the body whenever someone is murdered, but the way the body is treated after the murder actually adds to the gravity and perversity of the crime. Although these postmortem atrocities (e.g. dismemberment, cannibalism, necrophilia) often assist the FBI team greatly in creating an accurate profile for the killer, it’s clear that for the BAU and the viewer, these additions add a whole new level of darkness to the crime and make one’s stomach queasy. The main point seems to be that it is particularly egregious to treat the body in such a way after death. To desecrate the dead body is to desecrate the person whose body that is.

 Unlike the Platonizing aspect of Greek philosophy or the religious systems of Buddhism or Hinduism, Christianity has stubbornly maintained that the human body is not a shell or nuisance but rather an integral part of what it means to be a human person! To be human means to be a union of body and soul, and that temporary separation that occurs at death will be remedied with the resurrection of the body, which Jesus shows us in His own Resurrection. The resurrected Christ reveals the exalted, eternal destiny of the human person and the human body! Pope St. John Paul II beautifully expresses that “the body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God [God’s love for man], and thus to be a sign of it” (Theology of the Body, February 20, 1980).

Even though the body is an essential part of what it means to be a human person, I think it is sometimes subjectively difficult to identify ourselves with our bodies. Perhaps, on the superficial level, we can look at ourselves in the mirror and, seeing our physical defects, say: “This isn’t me.” On a deeper level, I think one of the major obstacles to accepting our bodies as us is the fact that our personal histories, for better or for worse, are written into our bodies. This is very obvious in the case of physical scars, but it goes for the whole body, especially as we consider our own wounds. For example, we can say that with these ears, we have heard personal insults and degrading comments, and now those are stored in this memory, enabled by this brain. At the same time, with this body we have wounded others, physically, emotionally, psychologically, sexually or spiritually, and the body contains those memories too, which rise to the surface from time to time. If I’m honest, I would have to confess that I’m sometimes attracted to the idea that I could run away from my body, with all of its history of being wounded and wounding others!

At the same time, while the body does have a real capacity to wound, it has an even greater capacity to love. It is through our bodies that we first learn how to receive love by resting in our parents’ arms and crying out and being attended to. As we grow, we learn how to say, “Please,” “Thank you,” and even “I love you.” Even though our bodies carry our wounds, they more importantly carry the history of our redemption. From the sacramental perspective, our bodies are bathed in the regenerating waters of Baptism; our heads are anointed with Chrism oil at Confirmation; our voices confess our sins and with our ears we hear Christ’s forgiving words. In a redeemed life, we also learn to speak words of comfort, to hold another’s hand during grief, to embrace a friend in greeting or departing, and, for married people, to make a mutual gift of ourselves in sexual intimacy.

It is ultimately Jesus Christ who shows us why we should accept our bodies as ourselves. In His Resurrection, He still bears the marks of the nails from His suffering, but He does not look upon them simply as memories of His Passion. Rather, I believe that He keeps those scars to show us how His greatest act of love for us, given through His Body, is always present to Him and to us.