End of Life, Natural Burial, and Spirituality

So what is natural burial? It entails four primary characteristics:

• Elimination of embalming in caring for the body.
• Burial in a biodegradable covering/casket.
• Placement of the covering/casket directly in the ground without a vault.
• Burial in an environmentally conscious and responsible burial ground that encourages the natural decomposition of the body and its return to the earth from which the Lord created it.

By placing the body into the ground, as God created it and in the condition in which it died, we sustain the earth entrusted to human creatures by God. We avoid pouring into the earth each year:

• 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluid
• 1.6 million tons of concrete
• 20 million board feet of hardwood
• 64,500 tons of steel
• 17,000 tons of copper (Lee Webster, “The Science behind Green and Conventional Burial in Lay Terms,” Green Burial Council, accessed February 1, 2023. A very helpful article summarizing the science on decomposition.)

As Joe Sehee, the founder of the Green Burial Council, observes, each year “we bury enough embalming fluid to fill eight Olympic-sized swimming pools, enough metal to build the Golden Gate Bridge, and so much reinforced concrete in burial vaults that we could build a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit” (Quoted in Fournier, The Green Burial Guidebook, 24. Fournier is the owner and operator of Cornerstone Funeral Services in Boring, Oregon. She serves on the advisory board for the Green Burial Council and is a leader in advocating for natural burial). In contrast, by practicing natural burial, we confess the name of the Creator who fashioned our bodies from the earth and will re-create them on the day of his coming.

Natural burial best represents the creation and re-creation story of God for his creatures. It reflects the language of many funeral rites: “We commit the body to the ground . . . earth to earth,” entailing that we place our bodies back into the earth from which they came without embalming and sealing the body off from the earth, that is without the use of any concrete or metal vaults or grave liners. The body is placed into the ground surrounded by simply made, readily biodegradable materials.

Adapted from Lay Me in God’s Good Earth by Kent Burreson and Beth Hoeltke. ©2024 by Kent Burreson and Beth Hoeltke. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.