About a year ago, I came home to find my microwave held together with half a roll of duct tape. Naturally, I summoned my children to the kitchen to ask about the now-broken appliance.
“Guys,” I said, “would someone explain what happened?”
My then eighteen-year-old pursed her lips, then blurted, “I accidentally karate-chopped the microwave.”
Now, you might wonder how one accidentally karate-chops a microwave. As it turns out, though, my daughter didn’t chop the microwave. She chopped her brother’s hand when he grabbed the handle so he could steal her food from inside. Regardless, the consequences were the same: a broken–but somehow still functional–microwave.
Strange though it sounds, I feel a lot like that microwave. Broken but still functional. Still hanging around. And it may not be a pretty sight, but in a way, I’m glad I still have that microwave. The things we break–and things broken by others–remind us of something important. They remind us that actions have consequences.
In today’s throwaway culture, when something breaks, it’s often more economical to replace than to repair it–and that’s exactly what we do. Even if it’s not more economical, we frequently replace the broken thing anyway. We are willing to shell out hard-earned cash in order to replace what is broken, ugly. We don’t want to see the cracks. We throw away broken things. We tear down reminders of broken histories. We cast off broken relationships. Broken people. Identities. We cast off our very selves.
We even cast off our dead.
Around the time of my daughter’s incident with the microwave, our family suffered a much more serious loss. After years of pain and suffering, my mother-in-law passed away.
If you’ve ever watched a loved one’s prolonged agony, you know the confusion about how you feel when they pass. Sadness, yes. But relief? That the pain has ended, that the brokenness is laid to rest? It feels wrong, but relief lingers anyway.
Still, we remember. We mourn our dead. We erect monuments. Cemeteries with granite stones to mark where they lay. And these, too, share something with my microwave, bizarre though it may seem. Cemeteries remind us of the consequences of actions–the consequences of sin. Original sin. Personal sin. Everything. When we see them, we hear the echo: Memento mori. Remember that you will die. As I am now, so you shall be, as is carved in one of the catacombs. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.
And while in time, we must replace our microwaves, we must think twice before we replace our dead. The theology of the body does not just apply to living bodies. The dignity of the human person–even broken by sin and death–lasts beyond the grave.
A week after we laid my mother-in-law to rest, I stood in my kitchen with its duct-taped microwave, a sadness in my chest. I had just read an article about the latest “trend” in dying, and it sat ill with me. Did I know, the article asked, that instead of interring my mother-in-law in a cemetery, we could have put her remains in a “death pod” that reduced her to soil in three months? Soil that could be used as fertilizer for plants, scattered about like ashes (another “trend” the Church has always stood against)?
I was fiercely glad I hadn’t known. Glad that her funeral wasn’t marred by the idea that, in some places, it would be perfectly legal to reduce to Miracle-Gro the woman whose arms had hugged my children. and whose whole face, in youth, had been nearly identical to that of my microwave-breaking daughter.
And I am fiercely glad that, for now, at least, I live in a world with cemeteries and broken microwaves. They remind me of the horror of sin. That actions have consequences. And they make me ever more grateful to the One Who can fix all broken things.