Station 11

Questions:

What was the last funeral you went to?

How do you remember the Ones you have lost?

What do you think is the purpose of a funeral?

Meditation:

Burying a loved one is awful.

This station is a cross section of two elements typically involved in our burial ritual - a flower and a shovel.

You may have experienced the ritual of throwing flowers onto a grave at a funeral ceremony. No one actually knows when this tradition started, and various explanations have been given for why it’s practiced. One opinion is that flowers help say what we find difficult to say. They are a symbol of our gratitude, honor, grief, and well wishes to one who had such an effect on our lives. Throwing a flower into a grave is our final tribute to the gift to us that was their incarnation. Another explanation is that flowers signify the beginning of life. Placing flowers in a grave expresses a hope that the deceased will start a new life after death.

The shovel is a representation of how we excavate a hole in the earth to place our deceased loved ones in it. It reminds us of the prayer we say when we receive ash on our foreheads at the beginning of Lent… “From dust you came, and to dust you shall return.” The poem at the beginning of Genesis speaks to a Creator making a human form out of dirt - which is just the elements of the universe - and animating that form with Its own breath. So it makes sense that when we witness the spirit of that form depart, we would naturally return the dirt portion of the form back to the Earth.

The flower and the shovel remind us that we are an amalgamation of soul and dirt, spirit and material, something tangible and intangible. We remember that there is a part of us that returns to the dirt, and there is another part of us we have no idea where it goes.

Jesus partook in being remembered.

Which is beautiful and sad at the same time. Remembrance is beautiful because we can revisit our favorite moments in the presence of that loved one. It’s sad because we know we’ll never get any more moments in their presence.

We remember that they used to be around.

We remember where we buried them.

We remember the loss of love found in death.