Funeral!

December 14th, 2019| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

If you have ever wondered what your own funeral would be like and wanted to experience it yourself, well, you can. You don’t have to wait till you die. Just head to Seoul, South Korea, to the Hyowon Healing Center.

They have a program including an instructional lecture and video, and then you are led to a dimly lit, chrysanthemum festooned hall. You sit by your own casket and tearfully pen your last testament to someone. Then comes the best part.

You put on a shroud and lie down in the coffin. It is all quite realistic. There is even a grim-looking guy in a black robe, “the Envoy from the Other World,” who will hammer the lids closed (not really: no nails are used, but you, inside the box, can hear the efforts of t.E.f.t.O.W).

For 10 minutes. (Probably feels like eternity.)

A recent participant blogged:

There was not a single ray of light coming in, and how I cried in the dark, suffocating coffin!”

But there’s something even better than being “coffinated” [I’d prefer to be caffeinated any day!]: The program is free. You pay nothing for the privilege.

All of this is apparently part of a recent trend in mock funerals as a way of better appreciating life.

Some of the participants were terminally ill and wanted help preparing for the end; others had suicidal tendencies that they were trying to overcome. Even some businesses wanted to send their employees as part of a motivational program!

Said another who had admitted to thoughts about suicide earlier:

I feel my heart pumping. I am alive!”

And another, a 75-year-old, part of a group from her senior welfare center:

Once you become conscious of death, and experience it, you undertake a new approach to life.”

Jeong Yong-mun, the director of the Hyowon program, said he watches out for the few morbid personalities who seem to feel a little too “comfortable in the coffin.” But after being “resurrected,” most participants confess they feel strangely refreshed afterward, gaining a new perspective on the things that matter in life, like family.

Apparently so. Within a few minutes everyone is usually chatting, laughing and taking selfies with their coffins.

More than 25,000 people have participated in mass “living funeral” services at Hyowon Healing Center since it opened in 2012. Teenagers, retirees, and everyone in between.

Noted Professor Yu Eun-sil, a doctor at Asan Medical Center’s pathology department (he has written a book about death):

It is important to learn and prepare for death even at a young age.”

At the end of each program, Mr. Jeong, Hyowon’s director, tells the participants:

Now, you have shed your old self. You are reborn to have a fresh start!”

That’s all well and good, but it ain’t happening.

Unless you have Jesus Christ. In which case, you have died already.

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me;
and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God,
who loved me and gave Himself up for me.
Galatians 2:20

The new life in Christ, by the power of the Spirit, is new indeed, for …

Now those who belong to Christ Jesus
have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
Galatians 5:24

And so we rejoice!

But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
Galatians 6:14

SOURCES:
Reuters