It is an honour to be asked to offer a reflection today as we gather to dedicate our local Cemetery.
I may be a bit of a freak, or it could be an occupational hazard, but I actually enjoy cemeteries. I love wandering amongst the old tombstones looking at the designs and carvings – like the old tree stump up near the front.
For some, cemeteries are places avoided – places that make them uncomfortable. I’ve even heard people say cemeteries are a waste of space – writer Bill Richardson once mused of a fictional community who felt pressed by the perception of their expansive cemetery taking up too much space and decided to combine uses … they laid the tombstones flat on the ground and turned the green grounds into a golf course. Richardson described this unusual combination by saying “it was hard to determine where a hole in one ended and one in the hole began.”
Cemeteries are a fact of life in most of our rural communities, and I for one enjoy walking through cemeteries and reading the inscriptions and checking out the magnificent diversity of stones and markers that we can find there. When I lived in Manitoba I discovered in the cemetery in the town of Neepawa both where the writer Margaret Laurence was buried, and the stone angel that became central to her most famous novel.
Over the years I’ve visited cemeteries across Canada and throughout the world, but over and over I am drawn back the memories I have as a young child wandering through the cemeteries where my own family have been laid to rest. Chesley with the Elliots and McClures on one side of the family and the Krugs and the Ankenmanns on the other, and there is the country cemetery not far from Shakespeare where much of my father’s family rest along with my mom and dad and my brother … you can learn a lot about your family history wandering through a cemetery, and you can learn a lot about the community around you by wandering through a cemetery.
In a cemetery you will recount the highs and lows of a community. You will find the aged community leaders who after a long and healthy life have taken their leave and you can also find the young lives that ended too soon and too suddenly, and in between are the lives and legacies of family, friends, neighbours, community characters, and the average person who helped build our community into what it is today …
I came home to Ontario after a stint in rural Manitoba. While living in Manitoba I learned a few things about cemeteries.
The first is – when you build a cemetery in Manitoba it would appear that you MUST chose the windiest location available – winter OR summer, cemeteries in Manitoba are rattled by winds that freeze you in the depths of winter, and roast you in the hot dry summers … and every cemetery I stood in shared the common characteristic of WIND … howling, relentless wind …
The other thing I learned in Manitoba is the importance of cemeteries as something that truly anchors your roots and heritage. There is one community in the heart of Western Manitoba where the Ukrainian settlers came and built their farms and communities where you realize just how important the burial grounds really are.
The town consists of two or three houses, a cross roads, a church and one of the biggest cemeteries I’ve ever seen … there are hundreds upon hundreds of tombstones, almost ALL bearing Ukrainian and Eastern European names.
People who have lived their entire lives miles and miles away, are brought back to be buried when the time comes.
Generations of families are buried in row after row in the cemetery that dominates the community … a community that has largely ceased to exist if it was not for the Church and the Cemetery beside it … but it provides an anchor that gives people roots to return to and to draw meaning from … to some cemeteries are creepy places that are all about death and the past – but from our past we draw wisdom and understanding to guide our present and our future. We can learn from our past, and our learnings inform our present – and that is never a bad thing. As the old saying goes – those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
Cemeteries are good places to wrestle with our own mortality, and to ponder what we will leave behind as our legacy. When archeologists explore ancient cultures they usually find temples and sacred spaces, the houses of the rich and powerful, and the burial grounds. Much of what we know about Ancient Epypt has been gleaned from the tombs and burials of the ancient society. In ten thousand years hopefully those who explore our culture and society will have more than the plastic and metal gadgets and gizmos we use far too much, and will glean their understandings from places like this – places that celebrate the life and legacies of the generations that have gone before us – places that record the highs and lows of our communities and remind us of the fragility of life, and the preciousness of this moment.
In a Cemetery we stand in a place where the future unfolds before us, and the past grounds and anchors us … and we become better people, and stronger communities for their presence because they remind us of the values and hard work and lives that have made us who we are …
Let us pray …
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