Why We Bury the Dead
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they came up to scatter his ashes in Lake Superior. And as they said this, my heart just dropped. Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and this is Ascension Presents. So recently I was able to be part of a group that led a number of teens from our diocese out to a Steubenville Youth Conference. We took our group from the Diocese of Duluth all the way out to the Archdiocese of Denver. It was awesome outside the Rocky Mountains. We also always want to include a component of service. And if you've ever had to do like, you know, service hours for your church or for confirmation or something like that, you kind of know the experience of, I'm just volunteering in this place and it might not hit my heart.
How did a Steubenville youth service trip introduce the topic of caring for the dead?
That's the kind of thing, right? It might not feel like this is meaningful work. So whenever we try to decide where we're gonna go or what we're gonna do, the question is, is this meaningful service? We contacted the Archdiocese of Denver. They run multiple cemeteries. And so what happened was we had this group of about 80 of our teens plus the adults. We went to the cemetery and the man who runs the whole thing, he gave us their philosophy of taking care of, not only taking care of those who are grieving, but taking care of the dead. And there are a couple of lessons about this that was just so powerful. Number one, he said in one of their lines is, we fill the void of loss with faith. For those who are grieving, they experienced this void, this void of loss.
And I loved that line. We have a mission. The mission is to fill the void of loss with faith. with faith. If you've ever had a loss, if you've ever had that grief, you know that a lot of things kind of cram in. We can fill the void of that loss with distractions. We can fill the void of that loss with destructive behaviors that just kind of try to numb ourselves to the pain. We can sometimes fill that void of loss with superstition or with those kind of those things that I might tell myself in order to make myself feel better. but to fill the void of loss with faith connects this pain I'm going through with the reality of God, like the reality, the truth of who God is, and particularly the truth of who God is in Jesus Christ, and particularly the truth of who we are, made in God's image, redeemed by Jesus Christ, that we all have a destiny, and that destiny is meant to be eternal life with him.
And so to be able to fill the void of loss with faith in that sense of like, okay, you can pray here, because why? Because God hears our prayers. That even in the midst of your grief, even in the midst of your loss, God is with you. And that's so powerful, so important. So they have this mission to care for those who have lost, those who are grieving. But also this mission to care for those who have died. The guy who ran the whole thing, he kind of gave me a, hey, Father, would you like to be in that place where we prepare bodies? He didn't take any of the teens, obviously. He didn't take any of the other adults. He just said, would you like to be there? Because he knew that I would want to pray. And I said, well, please.
And so walking back, the people who were working and caring for the bodies of these deceased people It was remarkable, the respect they had for the bodies of those who had died. Just the care they had for the bodies of those who had died was remarkable. And it gave me the opportunity to pray for the souls of those who had died. Then the work we did, the service we did, after all this preparation and we care for those who are grieving, fill the void of a loss with faith, but also we care for the bodies of those who have been placed in the earth. And so we went out to a location where they had a special part of the cemetery dedicated to essentially what you might call unborn babies. That could be children who were killed through abortion, but most often was children who were lost in the womb.
or children who were born stillborn, or those who were born but then a short time later had died. It was remarkable to see these high schoolers who were just so struck by, oh, this baby, or oh, this child, or this young adult.
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