In America today, not many people heat their homes or cook their meals with wood. We have gas and electric ranges for cooking and gas or appliances to heat and cool our homes.
I grew up in a rural area of northeastern Pennsylvania on a small farm and we did not have electricity in our area until I was in eighth grade. We heated the house and cooked our meals using coal as our fuel, which was twice as efficient than wood. However, coal burning in a home furnace or stove can cause problems. This is because it produces emissions with a carcinogenic effect, which can lead to respiratory problems.
Shoveling coal into a furnace or stove is easier than splitting firewood and less costly than buying it by the cord (4 ft x 4 ft x 8 ft), which today costs about $300. My sister and her husband live in north central Pennsylvania, and they do most of their heating and cooking using wood.
For several years, our family lived in a village setting in the mountains of PNG where the people’s fuel for cooking was firewood. It was also a very wet region at times, so dry firewood was a premium. Every day the women or men would carry long sticks of firewood to their homes. They (often the women) would split the wood lengthwise and then cut the lengths into about three-foot pieces. They would often have wood in a rack above the earthen fireplace so that they had reserves during the worst of the wet season.
The men would go to the nearby forests and cut the firewood, but the women were most often the ones who hauled it into the village. We would see the women with bags of sweet potato, firewood, and even a pig or child perched on top, late in the afternoon, laden with the load. The men had quite casually dropped the firewood by the garden site where their wife (or wives) was working, to let them do the heavy lifting. It was the rare and helpful husband who carried the firewood.
(In 1 Kings 17.10 we also read how Elijah saw a widow gathering firewood to take home and prepare some food for her son and herself. Also, we read in Isaiah 27.11 that it is the women who are gathering the firewood)
There were exceptions among the Kewa, as when old men carried firewood. I learned that it was culturally insensitive to offer to carry an old man’s firewood. It would imply that he could no longer do anything useful.
In Kewa (the language we studied) the words for “firewood/wood/tree” and “fire” can be the same. The word was repona and we heard it in sentences like “Whose piece of repona [firewood] is this?” and “The repona[fire] is blazing in the house.”
The fire itself would have flames, ashes, embers, sparks, and live coals, as we would expect, and the firewood was classified according to its hardness (the length of time it would burn), dryness, and how difficult it was to split. Dry but twisted branches of wood were particularly hard to split.
When we first lived with the Kewa, they had no matches, so fire was made by using a bamboo strip that was pulled back and forth against a piece of hardwood. The friction would eventually produce enough heat that a small pile of dry grass or twigs would ignite and start the fire. It was tedious if the wood was wet at all.
In the story of Isaac in Genesis (chapter 22) Abraham cuts some wood for the sacrifice God has commanded him to make. But it is Isaac who carried the wood (on his shoulder) for the sacrifice, as well as some live coals for starting the fire.
There are parallels between Elijah carrying the wood on his shoulder for his own sacrifice and Jesus carrying the wooden cross on which he would be sacrificed. Of course, Elijah at that initial stage did not know that he would be the sacrifice, whereas Jesus did. But in both cases it was the wood that contributed to the sacrifice.
It is not only Hindu and Buddhist cultures that burn their dead. We call it “cremation,” but it is the same way of destroying the corpse. The former two cultures believe that burning the body will allow the soul to escape. We do it to save space at the cemetery, although some Christians believe it is disrespectful to the dead and even a sin.
Our Christian theological viewpoints come into play when we talk about cremation. Although I respect those who are against it, I do not believe that our shriveled, sunken and dead bodies will be what God replenishes us with in heaven. When buried in the earth, our old bodies will rot, and the worms will eat them. We will no longer have any use for them because the Lord will clothe us with new bodies: “He will change our weak mortal bodies and make them like his own glorious body, using that power by which he is able to bring all things under his rule.” (Philippians 3.21)
“When buried [or burned], it [our body] is a physical body; when raised, it [our body] will be a spiritual body. There is, of course, a physical body, so there has to be a spiritual body.” (1 Corinthians 15.44)
Karl Franklin
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