Funerals and the Humble Art of Gardening
Author: Abby Robert
March 06, 2025
Editor’s note: For our first blog post of Lent, when we take spiritual stock and look forward to Christ’s resurrection, Abby Robert reminds us to “etch [a] magnificent understanding of Christian death into our hearts.” How? By going to a funeral.
If you find winter sad or depressing, you’re not alone. During this cold and oft-bleak time of year, there are more deaths than births and more funerals than weddings. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the months of January, February, and December typically have the highest average daily number of deaths.1
But Scripture encourages us to look beneath the melancholy surface. The author of Ecclesiastes says:
It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth (Ecclesiastes 7:2-4).
How can the house of mourning be better than the house of feasting? How can sorrow possibly be better than laughter? How can attending funerals be good for our souls?
Funerals reveal the difference between reality and its counterfeits. When we look at life, it seems that death is the ending, the epitome of doom and inevitable despair. Tragically, we often mistake what seems for what is, the underlying reality that includes God’s plan of redemption in Christ, who died and rose again on our behalf. With this biblical worldview, we see that death is not the ending, but the gate to life. Death is not man’s defeat, but a path of glory. A burial is not the end of the body but the planting of a seed.
I attended several funerals this winter season and was reminded of the loved ones who passed the year before. At one funeral, the family of the deceased asked mourners to take soil from the deceased’s beloved garden and cast it onto the tomb during the burial ceremony.
As I pinched the dry dirt in my fingers and walked toward the tomb, the texture of the soil took me back to a summer day when I was four years old. I had just cut open an apple for the first time and was thrilled to see several seeds inside. I carefully packaged the seeds in a paper towel and went to my backyard to plant them. Without a shovel, I made holes in shallow, sandy soil I could breach with my fingers. I covered the seeds and hosed them down with water, excited to watch my future apple trees grow.
Tossing the soil was not merely an act to gain closure or say goodbye, nor was it just a symbol of returning to the dust from which man was originally made. For the Christians present, tossing the soil transformed sorrow into hope and excitement, the end into the very beginning, the act of mourning a brother in Christ into gardening. It was a tangible way of experiencing the true reality of death as a Christian that requires looking beyond the shadow of despair.
The idea of a corpse as a seed should be obvious to us. Lilias Trotter, a British artist and Protestant missionary to Algeria (1853-1928), demonstrates how even seeds point us to death’s real delivering power in Christ:
In many cases, as in the chestnut, before a single old leaf has faded, next year’s bud may be seen, at the summit of branch and twig, formed into its very likeness: in others the leaf-buds seem to bear its mark by breaking through the stem blood-red. ... Be it as it may in nature, it is true, at any rate in the world of grace, that each soul that would enter into real life must bear at the outset this crimson seal; there must be the individual ‘sprinkling of the Blood of Jesus Christ.’ It must go out through the Gate of the Cross.”
Lilias echoes God’s word in her analysis of the chestnut and acorn seeds, as John 12:24-25 states, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” And 1 Corinthians 15:35-39, 42-45 says much the same concerning the ultimate reality of death for Christians. As Paul concludes, “What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.”
Therefore, at funerals we only see what our deceased brothers and sisters in Christ seem to be, mere corpses. Instead, Scripture encourages us to consider them as they truly are: seeds. Let us place them in the dirt, cover them with soil, close our eyes, and imagine them entering life everlasting bearing the blood-red and blossoming into their imperishable bodies in the presence of their Savior.
Yes, funerals are good for us if we can etch this magnificent understanding of Christian death into our hearts. To do so, we must invest time and energy into the humble art of gardening.
Soon, we will get our hands into the moist dirt and place our own seeds into the ground. Soon, we can watch with awe, as the green spouts come forth from the earth with their crimson seals. Soon, from the perspective of eternity, we too will be buried like a seed and be reunited with our believing loved ones in glory.
Abigail Robert is a Classical Studies and Biosciences student at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is the author of Forget Me Not: Memories of a Memory Caregiver.
1 QuickStats: Average Daily Number of Deaths, by Month — United States, 2017. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2019;68:593. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6826a5.
Photo by Gabriel Jimenez on Unsplash.
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