Cremation and Spiritism

São Paulo cremates its “dead”

Last month, the first Brazilian crematorium began operating as part of the São Pedro Cemetery, better known as Vila Alpina, in the eastern part of the city of São Paulo.  In the cremation chambers, which are heated by LPG to temperatures above 800 °C, corpses are quickly transformed into ashes.  It takes from 50 to 60 minutes to reduce a person weighing 160 pounds to about 4.5 pounds of ashes.  These remains are deposited in a special urn and collected by relatives of the deceased to be buried or spread in the parks and gardens surrounding the crematorium.

When this facility was planned, everything was prepared to give a more natural meaning to death.  In conceiving the project, the municipal authorities sought to bring a change in the concept of death to the population of São Paulo.  The architect Ivone Macedo Arantes – author of the building’s design – tried to create an atmosphere of humanity and beauty for the new facility.  The building is located in the middle of approximately forty acres of red soil – where city employees prepare picturesque gardens, with trees typical of the region with flowering avenues.

The building has a spacious entrance hall, an amphitheater or ecumenical chapel – an oval room with glass panels on the walls covered with 1,400 meters of white cotton lace.  There is a trapdoor in the center of the room, from where the coffin emerges before cremation, surrounded by one hundred comfortable armchairs.  Soft music inviting meditation and prayer is broadcast by eighteen speakers around the chapel.

According to a survey, 65 percent of São Paulo residents are in favor of cremation.  No religion, it seems, is against it.  In Europe, it has been a custom adopted since 1400 BC.

Cremation will undoubtedly provide relief for the cemeteries of Greater São Paulo, which are already overcrowded.  Some of them are located in areas with heavy traffic and could be used by the city for other purposes.

The Spiritist point of view

Today, when we observe the struggle of some persons to remain on Earth, through the freezing of their bodies, in the eagerness to escape the imperatives of physical death, we, spiritists, feel quite comforted by the naturalness with which we face the biological constriction of organic collapse.  At least, Spiritist teachings, based on philosophical, religious, and scientific concepts of the soundest logic, allow the incarnated Spirit to understand the exact dimension of the cradle-to-grave concepts.

Many people are astonished at how spiritist wakes are held – the so-called indifference towards the dead (or many people think so).  There is no delirium of endless crying, profusion of candles, or the environment charged with the passionate emotions that are usually present in funeral ceremonies.  Before the crematorium, it was possible to distinguish the tombs of people with a Spiritist conviction by their absolute simplicity.  Just a humble tombstone without the weight of marble monuments, true masterpieces of artistic work, but that do not help the Spirit of the deceased; on the contrary, they weigh him down in an embarrassing way.

There is an expenditure of money – sometimes true fortunes are spent on building these tombstones that could have been used to benefit the unfortunate children of this world, alleviating their suffering with food, warm clothing, and education.  And, in this way, the family of the so-called deceased would be contributing to his spiritual well-being in the world without goodbyes, the true homeland, where we will all be reunited one day.  The Book of Spirits (question 823) clarifies this point very well, stating that sumptuous tombs are man’s “last act of pride”.

But what about cremation, how does Spiritism see it?  Emmanuel, our spiritual mentor, is very clear about this: “In cremation, it is necessary to show mercy to the corps, delaying the act of destroying the physical body for several hours.  In a certain way, there are always many echoes of sensitivity between the disembodied Spirit and the body where the ‘vital tonus’ has just been extinguished.  This is because there are organic fluids that still link the soul to the sensations of the material existence.”  The crematory facility in Vila Alpina has several cold rooms, thus allowing spiritists to use it, if they wish.  It would be quite reasonable to wait 72 hours before the cremation, but for us, spiritists, there is no impediment whatsoever to the incineration of our physical remains.  On the contrary, it would be quite poetic and even comforting to spread our ashes across the green lawn, amidst trees and flowers, where happy birds would seek the nectar of our own life, to continue the extraordinary cycle of great transformations…