The Orthodox Funeral

The funeral is usually served in the church, the body present in an open casket facing the altar, a small icon or hand-cross resting in the departed's hands. Its texts are woven from the Psalter — Psalm 90 ("He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High"), Psalm 118 sung with the refrain "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, teach me Thy statutes" — together with the Beatitudes, an epistle on the resurrection of the dead, and the Gospel in which Christ promises that whoever hears His word "is passed from death unto life" (John 5:24).

At the heart of the service are a set of hymns by St. John of Damascus, the eighth-century monk and poet, arranged one in each of the eight tones of Byzantine chant. They are startlingly honest — meditating on the body's silence in the grave, the emptiness of worldly glory, the strangeness of death — and yet each turns to prayer for the departed and to the hope of the resurrection. This is the note the whole service holds: unflinching about loss, unshaken in faith. Because Christ is risen and has emptied Hades, the Church can look death in the face and still sing Alleluia.

The casket is kept open through the service because the body of a Christian is not discarded but honored. It was washed in baptism, sealed with chrism, and fed for a lifetime with the Body and Blood of Christ; it is a temple of the Holy Spirit awaiting resurrection, not mere remains. Orthodox Christians therefore do not turn away from the dead but keep vigil with them, often reading the Psalter beside the body in the days before burial.

Near the end comes the moment many families find most consoling: the last kiss. One by one the mourners approach and give the departed a final farewell — a kiss on the icon or cross they hold, or on the brow — while the choir sings the parting hymns. Then all join in "Memory Eternal" (in Slavonic, Vichnaya Pamyat), the Church's prayer that God, in whose memory nothing is ever lost, hold this person forever. Grief is not denied its place; it is given somewhere to go.

Burial in the earth is the Church's normative practice, and the reasons are theological as much as customary. St. Paul likens the buried body to a seed sown in the ground: "It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption... it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body" (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). To lay the body in the earth is to plant it in hope of the general resurrection, echoing the burial of Christ Himself. The grave is traditionally oriented to the east, toward the rising sun and the coming of the Lord.

For this reason the Orthodox tradition has not practiced cremation, understanding burial as the fitting honor for a body destined to rise. Where cremation has been chosen — sometimes by law, sometimes before a family understood the Church's mind — pastoral responses vary, and such questions are best brought to one's priest rather than settled by rule alone (see orthodoxy-and-cremation). Whatever the circumstances, the Church's prayer for the departed does not end at the graveside: it continues in the memorial services and on the third, ninth, and fortieth days, carrying the departed forward in the love of the whole Body of Christ. This is not fear of death but faith in the One who defeated it — for the Christian, death is a sleep, and the grave is a bed until the morning of the resurrection (see more on death).