Beliefs and Practices of Three Faith Communities on Death

Discussion of Sioux practices will be based on in contour lineation from Sioux "medicine men," such as Black Elk and John Fire Lame Deer, with cod consideration to how much Sioux beliefs and practices may have been influenced by exposure to Christianity.

Images familiar even to non-Christians (because of movies and television) are of people filing by an open coffin, people gathered around an open grave, a clergyperson reading canned passages from the Bible or the Anglican view as of Common Prayer, the lowering of the coffin, a few clods of earth and flowers tossed in after it--as if these people were a religious belief fellowship. Once in a while, at a specific funeral, they might be, notwithstanding this is rare. Far more often the people gathered just nearly never have anything to do with one another in daily manner--as was satirized in the Beatles' song Eleanor Rigby: "All the lonely people, where do they all come from?"

Among active Christians, it is not the physical proboscis that is of most importance in the process of expiry. Rather, it is the friendship statement farewell to the physical presence of one of its members, and this will steer place in the sanctuary of the church: at a healing service, which has not been considered a ritual only for the dying and has not been called "Extreme Unction" by Roman Catholics since the twinkling Vatican Council (see Ware, 1972, pp. 258-68 for a discussion of such healing, and of Orthodox beliefs about death, dying, and the share-out of Saints); at a "wake," where the

In these three faith communities, one can see that beliefs about the afterlife and funereal practices do have clear tender dimensions. Christians believe in the " share-out of saints," a faith community that includes both the spiritedness and the departed. Hindus consider that the family has a duty to bring down the departed's dust as his (or, these days, her) major impediment against moksha. The Sioux also attend to believe in a continuity of community between the living and the dead, perhaps not in as arbitrary a light as the Christian concept of the communion of saints, but certainly in the positive sense of collar that human beings are part of nature, not separate from it.

body is viewed; at a Mass for the Dead (as it was once called) or memorial service, usually integrated into the regular worship of the community. lively "catholic" Christians perceive a continuity between life and death. To believe in the concept of saints is to believe that the faithful departed, living right now in the presence of God, continue to form a single Family of God, and participate with the living in community worship. This is what is meant by the phrase "the communion of saints" in the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds, the faith statements held in common by all "catholic" Christians. And this is what is symbolized by the fact that in every Roman Catholic church, the altar must contain a physical relic of a departed saint (see The Code of Canon Law, #1237, ?2, p. 216).

Fisher (1994, p. 57, relying on data from Brown, 1953, and Lame Deer and Erdoes, 1972) says that the Plains Indians believed they had been given the sacred shriek by White Buffalo Calf Woman as a tool for communicating with the spirit world and for consciousness the interrelatedness of all life. The bowl of the cry represented the pistillate aspect of the Great Spirit, the stem the male aspect. When they were ritually joined, the personnel of the spirit was thought to be present as the pipe was passed around the circle
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