Cemeteries always provoke a lot of thought from me. I find them beautiful, restful places; full of history, architecture, and mystery. There are so many stories in these quiet places with neat lawns and rows of gray monuments, and the only clues left are forgotten names and short inscriptions about the life of the deceased. This evening, I went for a short walk, and found myself, as I so often am, drawn into one of several small cemeteries neighborhood. This one holds a few hundred grave sites, and is nothing impressive. There are no grand monuments, and in fact, many of the gravestones have cracked, broken, fallen, or from years of weather and wear, become indecipherable. It's a strange graveyard, that has no name, and no explanation. There is no church beside it, although perhaps there once was in bygone years. Tall pine trees hover above the gravestones, and many have been enveloped into the shrubbery of the forest that edges the cemetery. A woodchuck made a desperate lunge for cover, surprised by the human intrusion in his own personal sanctuary. I have never seen anyone other than the groundskeeper there, and not a single gravestone has decorative flowers or tokens left beside it. The most recent date of death I have seen is from 1964, and that was obviously scratched in much later on a family tombstone that predated the deceased.
The stories of those that no longer can speak not only elude my discovery, but in their silence, remind me of the realities of mortality. No one here was less important than I, no one less loved, I am certain. They dreamed, they strove, they labored, they sinned, they loved, they grieved, they felt, and they had as much value and worth as you and I in the eyes of God and their fellow man. Yet as my mind reads their names, it is the first time those names have been pronounced in any manner, or thought of, in a hundred years or more. There are no faces to them, no mourners, no one to memorialize them, or tell of how they walked in this life. There is no one who remembers their laughs, or what made them sad, or their weddings, birthdays, and funerals. The young mother buried beside her 7 month old daughter-so much promise lost in one fell swoop! Did they die of some sickness, or could neither recover from a traumatic birth? Were there other children left behind? Did her husband love her, and weep to lose her? The three soldiers, who marched off to the Civil War and came back in boxes. How did they come back, and where did they fall? Did their mothers and wives meet their caskets, and did they converge at this very spot, dressed in black, to mourn their brave young sons? A young wife, only 22, lies beside her husband, and I think, "I have outlived her already." A child, "the only daughter" of so-and-so is buried beside her parents, only twenty when she left her parents to continue life's journey without her. I feel almost guilty, passing over the gravestones that have succumbed to the passages of time, with no way to even wonder who Eliza, or John, or Ezra was. There is no one who cares enough to repair the broken stones. I wonder if any record even exists of those who were once memorialized beneath them, or if their bodies, returned to dust, have forever erased their record from the annals of history. All these people, all of this life lost, and this is one small cemetery in a young country that happened to build places of memorial for the dead, or at least the dead of the class that deemed a proper burial. How may more the vast, scoreless mass of humanity that has passed before us the world over!
Maybe it is melodramatic, or morbid, of me to dwell on these thoughts, but I think it is reality more than anything, and one that is almost to overwhelming to consider. When I was a child, I was determined my name would mean something, and that I would not lead a meaningless and forgotten life. I no longer believe any life is meaningless, no matter how short, or seemingly insignificant, but it is sometimes easy to fall into the lie of feeling that it is; whether it is my life that I am considering, and the little impact I have had, or someone else whose story bespeaks a "wasted" life. I do want my life to count for more than it has so far; for more in God's kingdom, and for more in the impact I have in living his love to those around me. Life is like the grass in the field; the wind blows over it, and then it dies. I get so caught up in the little things, the day to day mess that mires my feet to this earth, and forget the grand scheme and picture. I want my life to shout out, even if that shout is like one drop in a roaring sea. So far, it has been more of a self-centered whimper, and may God's Spirit consume that self-serving spirit in me! Yet it is about his grace, and not my performance, and I find comfort in knowing that I have a God who knows the number of hairs on my head. When I cry in secret, my pain lost in the crush of human triumph and agony stretched over the ages, as the Psalmist says, I know he keeps my tears in a bottle. And if I live a life where I have known the love and hope that comes from walking with Jesus, even if my gravestone crumbles and is forgotten in a hundred years, it will have been something beautiful.
Monday, July 12, 2010
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