One of my favorite things to do on sunny days is to wander around in old cemeteries. It’s not because I’m morbidly fascinated with death. No. I love them because they’re beautiful, full of history, and beneficial to my soul and spiritual life. Usually they’re well-cared for, orderly, green, and the monuments and headstones are beautiful. And more than that, they’re peaceful. Cemeteries are not parks. They’re quiet, solitary. What a beautiful place to walk, or settle on a bench or under a willow to think or pray.
Cemeteries make me feel remarkably human. After all, they’re full of untold stories. They’re a reminder that people’s lives are full of joy and loss. I always imagine the funerals of the people interred—the stories their family and friends could tell about them. The sorts of stories my family tells when we reminisce about our past. The funny mishaps we got into or the jokes we played. There are whole lives buried in cemeteries; whole histories, represented by one headstone. The untold stories in cemeteries are various: the mannerisms and daily way of the deceased have been lost, but also the stories that were family legends, told and retold to endless delight. Stories of average people that were passed down to maybe the next generation or the next, but lost to the generations to come. You can just feel the line of generation after generation stretching back behind you, adding the perspective of history to your own struggles—maybe your problems aren’t as big of a deal as you thought. In fact, cemeteries remind me that maybe I’mnot as big of a deal as I thought. I’m humbled in cemeteries. They remind me that my story is just a small part of a much bigger story.
In cemeteries, it’s okay to be weak. It’s okay to think of failure, longing, and mortality. It’s a good place to remember the dead, and mourn. And it’s a good chance to think of resurrection. Scripture talks of death as sleep, a waiting for resurrection. The dead in Christ are simply waiting. When we walk through cemeteries we can imagine what it will be like to greet the faithful believers who came before us or loved ones lost in our lifetime as brothers and sisters in Christ, in our new, resurrected bodies. Won’t that be a wonderful day? In cemeteries, we’re among family. And we can long with them for the day when Christ returns. I don’t know where their souls are, or what their experience is, but I know that they are waiting, like me, for the return of Christ. And in that waiting there is a sort of camaraderie and connection. We can groan in longing, with all of creation, including the dead in Christ, to be with Christ in the resurrection.
Maybe it’s silly, but I also love to be happy in cemeteries. I think that when I am dead, I would want people to be happy around my grave. I think I want my grandchildren, my great-great-great-grandchildren, and those of strangers, to play hide-and-seek behind my headstone. And maybe it’s presumptuous, but I would assume others felt the same way. Why must the dead be alone? Bringing children to cemeteries, letting them play around the headstones, doesn’t feel disrespectful or improper to me. It’s a way of honoring the dead by not forgetting them, but bringing them into our daily lives. We remember that they are not simply corpses, but they were men and women, humans made in the image of God, with eternal souls.
And, for my children, it’s a way of including the dead in their own lives. My hope for them, and this is probably worth another blog post, is that they will learn at an early age that life is a gift, and that it is short. I also want them to understand that souls are eternal, and that, as I said earlier, the body of Christ is made of saints both living and dead—we have a whole family from ages past that we will see and know in heaven after Christ’s return. The truths we believe as Christians are not just something we believe today, but they are old truths, things that have always been true, and always will be true.
So, the next time you need to, as Pooh says, “think, think, think,” try your local cemetery. And let me know how it goes.