Ain’t no grave can hold my body down

Here’s another song. Johnny Cash used to sing it. This is the Tom Jones version.

I seem to be on a bit of a roll at the moment. It won’t last. There’ll be time to catch up, I’m afraid.

There ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
When I hear that trumpet sound I’m gonna get up out of the ground
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
Go down yonder Gabriel, put your feet on the land and see
Oh, Gabriel don’t you blow your trumpet ’til you hear it from me
I looked way over yonder and what do you think I see?
I see a band of angels and they’re coming after me
Then I looked way down the river saw the people dressed in white
I knew it was God’s people ’cause I saw them doing right
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
When I hear that trumpet sound I’m gonna get up out of the ground
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
I’m going down to the river Jordan and I’m gonna bury my knees in the sand
Holler “Ah, Hosanna” ’til I reach the promised land
Then I looked way over yonder and what do you think I see?
I see a band of angels and they’re coming after me
So meet me King Jesus, meet me, wont’ you meet me in the middle of the air
If these wings should carry me, I won’t need another pair
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
When I hear that trumpet sound I’m gonna get up out of the ground
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down

Well, meet me mother and father, meet me down the river road
And momma you know that I’ll be there when I check in my load
Ain’t no grave can hold my body down
There ain’t no grave can hold my body down
There ain’t no grave can hold my body down

Absolute rotter

Here is the best post this blog will ever publish, so don’t glance at its length and give up. Read on!

Today is all about Bill Jordan. I first heard from Bill back in December 2010. This is what he said:

I am an aging reformed biologist, now more or less a writer, but more accurately a philosopher-poet-canary-priest, and I have come upon some uncommon conclusions on the proper relationship between man and nature in the course of my time on this remarkable planet. These will be set forth in more detail in a book I am writing, presuming I have the time to complete it. But considering my age (66) and heart condition, I must be realistic and plan for my return to the liberated molecules.

I have found my own spirituality in biology and this now sustains me with remarkable equanimity. It is based on how the natural world functions–how it lives–and I wish my remains to return to the living molecular plasma that the surface of the earth nurtures and maintains. Consequently, I am almost obsessed with having my corpse laid out upon the surface, to fulfill the needs of the natural world. I am attaching a short musing on the subject.

Anyhow, such a disposition is simply blasphemous to normal, traditional societies, and I will have to work hard to fulfill my wishes. My question to you is simply to ask your initial reaction to such an odd request. Of course if you have any notions of how my wishes could be carried out, I would be most grateful to hear them. I live in California, USA.

I suspect my body would be willing to travel.

I directed Bill’s attention to the example of Bernd Heinrich and William Hamilton here, and I touched on the difficulty of finding unpeopled wilderness on our crowded planet. I suggested the body farm in Tennessee. All the while, I chuckled at Bill’s developed rationale, which he attached as a Word document. I asked him if I might post it. He told me he wanted to redraft it first. He’s just sent it back to me. He also sent me photos of his cat, Brutus, his duck, Jacqi, his neighbour, Polistes exclamans (a paper wasp) and his back yard (garden, we’d say in Britain) unmown for four years because “I was interested see what the poor, craven, downtrodden grasses of a typical yard would become, if liberated from the obsessive-compulsive human urge to manipulate and control all that which surround them.”  These photos illustrate his text.

Green Departures — Das Lied zu der Erde

William Jordan

Having come to a point much closer to the end of life than the beginning, having survived a close call with my mortality, age having its inevitable way, it seems time to get my affairs in order….. Or more specifically, to make my bed. If you know your bed is waiting, the sheets turned down, climbing in is a formality, maybe even a pleasant one.

When I go, I want my body laid out on the ground, so the insects and other small scavengers can participate in their rightful and overdue feast. Human civilization is based on the deepest, most cardinal of ecological sins–burial–because for the vast majority of terrestrial life you lie where you die, and the entire ecology depends on the unfettered redistribution of nutrients. This means there can be no such thing as “green” burial, because in nature there is no burial at all. The corpse is the groceries of a living system; a corpse represents a health-food supermarket stocking the nutrients, minerals, etc., that we have gathered and assembled in our bodies during the course of living. When we die, nature wants the ingredients back, because they are only on loan, and all living things excepting the human being, are happy to oblige. The custom of burial, however, seals the nutrients off, slowing the redistribution, if not outright arresting it. But, because of the incalculable stench of a decomposing human corpse, particularly that of a right-wing conservative, we simply cannot obey the normal, physiological ways of nature. Civilization –which requires existence in one place–also requires us to stuff our cadavers under its synthetic rug, starving the world that nurtures us through life. The same principles hold true for the turd. A turd is a vital repository of essential vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, oils that represent the expenditure of much time and energy to concentrate–but civilization cannot long endure without the nihilistic practice of burial and sewage disposal–or at least that’s the way its values are currently structured.

I would offer myself back. My god is in nature, although I don’t think of it as a god, just a vast, all-pervasive, incomprehensibly nuanced reality from which I have bubbled up like hot-springs mud and will subside back, only to bubble up again in some other molecular form. So for me, to know I’ll be going back into the air, the soil, the rain, the mist, the snow–back to the ecstasy I feel while walking–these experiences are so comforting that I almost look forward to being laid out on the festive table of a Sierra Nevada meadow, or the large rocks in the Australian Alice, or the sagebrush scrub of the Great Basin. I would like to delay my departure, of course, because the essence of life is procrastination. Those live longest, who procrastinate best. But, like everyone else, I suppose I’ll just have to wait and see how much I can delay things.

 

Such a disposition would require preparation–some kind of cage or enclosure to keep bears and other large omnivores from scattering bones about. That wouldn’t bother me. My tolerance would be infinite–besides, there’s nothing wrong with a little flinging of the feast. But law enforcement would pitch a fit, and Forensic Files would produce a 2-hour special. It’s a bizarre sign of the times that when a human body is found in some natural place like a field or a forest, people treat it with horror, because most never have, and never will encounter one. If a world of 6.9 billion people were self-sustaining (impossible given the current nature of nature), bones would lie scattered everywhere, like styrofoam; you could not find an uncluttered landscape. But society stuffs its cadavers under the ecological rug, so the land shows no evidence of the human hordes that dominate it. Nevertheless, in my ideal world, all I’d need would be enough time for the soft parts to be carried off in the bodies of the flies and ants, which are the first-line distributors of the invertebrate world. The bones, cartilage, mummified skin, hair–I’m fine with burying those, but directly in the soil, not sealed in some sort of unholy canister.

The challenge becomes finding some remote land, protected, if necessary, by remote people for several summer months while the feast proceeded. At this point I am open to any and all suggestions.

Perhaps the best way to sum up my thesis is to consider the diametrical opposite of a green disposition: The ex coronation of Pope John Paul, preceded by an undertaking to make the Pharaohs weep.

First, they embalmed the Pope’s corpse, rendering him inedible. Then they placed his body inside a hand-crafted black-walnut coffin. Then, they placed that coffin inside a larger coffin made of lead and soldered it shut. Then, they placed the body-inside-the-coffin-inside-the-leaden-box inside a huge stone sarcophagus, and finally, maybe to make sure the Pope didn’t rise up like his Boss, they placed the body-inside-the-coffin-inside-the-leaden-box-inside-the-sarcophagus into a crypt, and there the pope’s remains remain, sealed off from the living earth like an old reactor with a half-life of eternity. I cannot imagine a more horrifying, claustrophobic limbo-hell. Like that of all other creatures, my distribution would cost nothing and give back to nature the nutrients essential to a living world.

Aside from all that, well, I figured it was about time for something to show up. It’s been a wonderful existence; the molecules have treated me well; there is nothing to regret….well…. maybe a little to envy in those dealt an even better hand….

 

Funerals are for…

Four comments here from this article in yesterday’s Guardian.

Organising the funeral for my 17 year old son, who died in an accident overseas in Sept 2008, was made vastly easier by the wonderfully kind funeral director and an equally wonderful C of E Canon – a Canon whose first words on meeting us were to offer us the keys to his Church so we could go in, lock the door behind us, and curse God.

Yes, funerals are for the living but there is virtue and comfort across generations in familiar rituals. We sang no hymns apart from the Lord is My Shepherd. But we said prayers and despite my rage and despair I said them with heartfelt sincerity. My daughter and I spoke about the boy we loved so much. The Canon gave a fiery and angry sermon of amazing power on about the cruelty of loss and the pain of grief. The rest of the music consisted of Max’s favourite songs. We had 500 people at the crem, standing room only, many of them stunned and tearful teenagers who couldn’t believe what they were a part of. The funeral service was just right because it was mostly about him but also about those of us left behind to cope with his loss.
My real point is that it’s all very well to intellectualise and pontificate about these things but when it comes to deciding on a funeral service we must go with what our heart tells us, not our head, and we must remember that like the other great set-pieces of our lives the rituals exist because they express a deeper meaning than we sometimes realise.

 

Over the years, I’ve been asked to recite eulogies at Atheist, Jewish and Salvationist funerals.

The approach I used on all these occasions was more or less the same; fully acknowledging the grief of the bereaved, offering the solace of friendship and respect and duly celebrating the lives of the departed. In all cases, there was a lot worth celebrating.

Following the very dignified, secular funeral service of a dear and respected friend and mentor, a formerly Catholic Atheist, I felt there was something missing, if not for him then for me.

So, being Jewish, I went home and recited Kaddish for him and continued to do so for a year. Given his tolerant indulgence of religiosity , I can’t imagine that my old pal would have objected.

It was my way of thanking whatever forces may or may not shape our destinies for the apparent serendipity of friendship.

 

I think the divine spirit can be just as much in so called ‘secular’ words and music as in so called ‘religious’ words and music.
to say something is ‘god free’ doesn’t mean that god is not present. I think we try to separate the ‘spiritual things’ from the ‘non-spiritua’l things creating a dualism that isn’t really present in our world

 

Quoting: ‘At my age, I go to more funerals than weddings nowadays. What dismays me about them (except in the case of humanist occasions, which have proved excellent celebrations of life, not death) is the way the person officiating is always a priest, and the true object of the funeral is a recruiting pitch for the church. The person concerned is forgotten as promises of eternal life for those present are made – providing, of course…’

I understand where you are coming from, really I do but I wonder why – if the deceased or their family, have chosen to have their funeral service taken in a church, anyone would be surprised that a priest is taking the service – in the CofE, a licenced Reader may also take the service. My husband is a Vicar in the CofE and as such, has a responsibility to ensure that certain protocols are adhered to within that church – the church belonging not to him, but to the Parish. The other point that I can speak of from personal experience is that when my husband is arranging the funeral with relatives of the deceased, he asks if they would like the service to have a evangelistic aspect or not; many times people say yes. If people say no, my husband obviously respects their wishes and at all times, at least in our church, the service is about celebrtating the life of the deceased and what that person meant to their family and friends. Christians believe in an afterlife; why would this belief not be a part of a Christian funeral – indeed it is part of the liturgy. Nobody is forced to have a funeral service in a church.

By contrast, my daughter – not a church-goer and a Guardian reader to boot, went to a humanist service and was appalled at the ‘advertising’ for atheism. It can cut both ways.

The Good Funeral Guide
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