The Tomb, the Workshop of God..

Burial is a distinct sign of the presence of humans, for only humans bury their own.
It is amazing how the experiences we have in our childhood lie simmering gently in our heads until one day, years later, everything crystallizes nicely and we make sense of many things we could not understand before.
Keeping watch in prayer we can also discern God's loving hand throughout this growth process, and we may eventually come to somewhat comprehend why God led us through that specific path.
Some of my strongest childhood memories belong to a period in my life when as a young altar boy of nine or ten, my mother used to send me out to assist in almost every funeral celebrated in our parish. Celebrated is hardly the proper word, especially for a child, for those events had a macabre and melancholic odor about them that I was particularly sensitive to.
In those days people who died in their homes were kept there, generally overnight, until on the following day the priest, as minister of the Church, and some altar boys representing the faithful, would walk from the church to the afflicted home, and after a brief ritual of blessing and prayer, all would process slowly, bringing the dead to the church for the funeral Mass amid the mournful tolling of bells.The Mass was in Latin, and hardly comprehensible to a young boy. But even then the sense of the Divine was not lost on me.
After the liturgy we would then accompany the coffin to the horse-drawn hearse waiting outside. The elaborate woodwork gilded with gold and powered by two enormous Clydesdale type horses, snorting and fidgeting as they patiently waited to begin their trek to the cemetery. Behind the hearse, a horse-drawn black coach with leather seats which carried the priest and two altar boys as they accompanied the dead on the final journey. I remember those clipclopping trips that slowly made their way to the huge cemetery forty five minutes away. Then came the business of reaching the grave site, navigating steps and narrow pathways amid the countless statues, marble slabs and portraits that marked the graves. There the burial ceremony immediately took place accompanied by sobs, and silence, and  the occasional wailing of relatives. And I would watch the whole process quietly, mentally storing the experience for retrieval  and discernment in some distant future day.
I write all this because years later I came to realize the value and the beauty of funerals. God, the Great Psychologist, willed, that though the soul left the body at the moment of death, He would still be present even in those remains through His Divine immanence. He is present in all creation and in the living organisms that would eventually help the body to return to dust from which it came.
Here we see the love and kindness of God who allowed for a period of mourning and closure for those left behind. Furthermore and most importantly, in His infinite wisdom He provided for the future fulfillment of Scripture as St. Paul tells us. "for I handed on to you, as of first importance, what I in turn had received. That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried and on the third day He rose again in according with the Scriptures." 1 Cor. 15: 3-4)
God provided for the future burial and resurrection of His Son to give us victory over death. The damage done in the Garden was repaired in the Tomb.