Orthodox Christian Funeral

Most funeral liturgies work by consolation. The Byzantine burial service begins by refusing it. The hymns attributed to John of Damascus, which form the spine of the rite, ask what earthly thing remains untroubled, describe the body as it will be in the grave, and address the dead person directly about the silence that has replaced their voice. They are sung, not read, and they are sung to the congregation's faces with the coffin open in front of them.

Only after that does the service turn. The same hymns move to the prayer that runs through the whole of the rite, that the departed be given rest in a place of light, a place of green pasture, a place of refreshment, where there is no pain, no sorrow and no sighing. The order matters: the Orthodox rite gets the grief said out loud first, and treats the hope as something set against a real loss rather than as a way of avoiding naming it.

The service ends with the farewell, when the mourners come forward in turn to the open coffin to give the last kiss, to the icon or cross laid on the body. Then the priest sings "Memory eternal", and the congregation takes it up. The phrase is not a wish that the dead be remembered by the living, which is how it is often heard; it is a prayer that they be held in the memory of God, which in this tradition is what it means to continue to exist.

The burial service is not one text. The books give a separate order for a priest, longer and with additional readings; a separate order for a monastic; and a distinct order for a child, which drops the petitions for forgiveness of sins on the grounds that they are not needed and asks instead for consolation for the parents. The differences are small in length and large in what they say about who is being buried.

The sharpest variation is seasonal. During Bright Week, the week following Pascha, the funeral is largely replaced by the paschal service: the mournful hymns give way to the Easter canon, and the burial is sung as a resurrection service. A tradition that is willing to describe a corpse in detail is equally willing to suspend the description for a week of the year, which is a good illustration of how the two moods sit together rather than competing.

The rite continues past the burial in the memorial service, the panikhida, kept on the third, ninth and fortieth days, at anniversaries, and on the appointed Saturdays of Souls. Cremation is a live question. The Orthodox churches have generally not permitted it, on the grounds of the body's dignity and the resurrection, and several jurisdictions maintain that position strictly, while others have made pastoral provision where civil law or cost leaves a family no choice. This atlas records the general position and the variation between jurisdictions rather than presenting either as settled.