The Remains

After you stop breathing, they call what is left of you, "The Remains."  The remains must be gotten rid of, buried, burned, thrown somewhere, like so much garbage.  Garbage is what remains when it has no more use to anyone.  The best of the Catholic Church is seen in our funeral liturgies.  We treat what is left over after death, with some sense of sacredness, plus reality. We incense the remains, going back to the custom that combines the reality of stench with the belief in the sacredness of the body, breath or no.  We refer to the body or ashes as part of a person who somehow still lives, though no longer in need of the "remains."  With God, nothing is garbage.  All is sacred.  When you stop believing in Creator, or God, things just become, "remains."  The purely secular, without the sacred, is just so much "stuff."