Religion: Ashes to Ashes

For the first time since 1603,* the Church of England has been seriously revising its entire body of church laws. Anglicans are finding that many traditional religious practices have become outmoded over the centuries, that many new ones have come into usage. No new practice is more unusual—and none has gained speedier acceptance—than one discussed in convocation at London last week: scattering the ashes of the cremated dead.

Cold Ground. In crowded Britain, where many cemeteries have three layers of dead and the burial vaults are crammed with urns, ash-scattering is more common than in any other Christian country. More than 76% of the 50,000 Britons cremated in 1949 had their remains scattered. Said an English girl: “I scattered the ashes of my father in the Thames . . . where he had so often fished and boated … So much better than delivering him into the cold ground or placing the urn of his ashes among hundreds of others, like another bottle on a store shelf.” Britain’s Cremation Society considers that scattering best fulfills the words “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Since 1884, the Roman Catholic Church has formally disapproved cremation. Many Hebrews also frown on it, though Sir Philip Sassoon of the great Jewish banking family had a bomber squadron scatter his ashes. The Church of England sanctioned ash-scattering in 1944, if disposal were on consecrated ground. No Britain of top prominence has yet availed himself of the method. Although the last two Archbishops of Canterbury were cremated, as was Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, none asked that his ashes be scattered. (But South Africa’s Jan Christian Smuts had his ashes scattered on a hill at his farm this week.)

New Roses. Some resistance to the practice comes from its cheapening by would-be wits, e.g., the golfer who specified: “Scatter me well over the tenth green at the club. It’s been my nemesis so often I want to haunt the place.” The Rev. Geoffrey Hilder called ash-scattering “pagan —even if it is utilitarian.” Canon Cyril Sansbury denounced “sprinkling someone’s remains in his own rose garden . . . in hope that dear George who died last year would grow up into new roses next year. I call this a kind of pantheism.”

Other churchmen, led by Canon Henry Graham, commended this “sensible custom.” The result was a typical British compromise: a vote to delete all reference to ash-scattering from the new church law. This would neither prohibit the custom nor give it full and absolute sanction.

The Cremation Society was unperturbed. Figures show that Britain will have 20,000 more cremations in 1950 than in 1949. The percentage of services in which ashes are scattered is also rising.

*The year Queen Elizabeth died and a new code of canons was drawn up under church-conscious James I (King James translation of the Bible).