Reflection from Salem Cemetery Memorial Service - Sept 9th 2012

I like little country cemeteries.

I like exploring them, I like spending time in them. I just like them.

I like them because they represent the history and heritage of the area that hosts them – the stones and graves are the people who have created the communities we enjoy today. These places are where we’ve come from.

United Church musician and composer Linnea Good, has written a beautiful and haunting hymn entitled Roots and Wings, that celebrates the dynamism of our faith, and the importance of knowing where we come from as we prepare to live and celebrate our dreams and visions and hopes.

For Linnea the ability to fly – be it flight through life choices, career choices, education, experience – whatever it is as we grow and mature – that ability to fly is provided by the grounding we have in places like this that inform and education the foundations on which our lives rest.

In my life, I have three or four little country cemeteries that inform my journey and help me remain grounded as I live my life and seek to realize and embody my dreams and hopes. Two of them lie not far from here – one in Tara where members of the Cain family on my mom’s side of the family lie up at the back – the other is over in Chesley where many members of the Elliot family (the other side of my mom’s family) lie scattered through the old section of the cemetery in the town they founded and built.  

But the most meaningful cemetery for me is on the south side of Hwy 7&8 just west of New Hamburg, where many members of the Ankenmann side of my family lie. When I stand at the grave of my father, my mother and my brother, I can see the graves of my grandparents, my uncles, my great grand parents and a an assortment of other family members who were part of my journey to this time and place.

As I stand at the grave of my parents and my only brother I can see over the hill to the west the farm my Dad’s family called home for almost a century and a half, and to the right, I can see the Church where my father was baptised, my parents were married, and my father was buried with an OPP honour guard accompanying his casket to its final resting place …

As I stand in the cemetery of my family, I am immersed in the history and memories of my family – some bad, but many of them good. The names etched on the cold stones around me are in my memory, living people who laugh and joke and share life … 

There’s my Uncle Bruce the pig farmer with the heavy Germanic accent and loud laugh … my Uncle John who raised cats and was seldom seen without a smile on his face … my Great Auntie Marie who’s german ‘auch’ was ALWAYS followed by a smile, a laugh, a hug and a kiss …

As I stand in the quiet of the cemetery and remember – one of the things Cemeteries are good for – life is affirmed, and our memories and experiences that have made us the people we are today, are recalled and celebrated.

American writer Robert Fulghum, the author who gave us books like “everything I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten” offers a very powerful example of how one can actively live that process of remembrance to inform the path we have ahead.

Fulghum was given a gravesite by his children in a scenic west coast cemetery, and in one of his books, he shared that he enjoys taking a lawn chair to that grave and sitting on it to reflect on his life. Fulghum says he things of the chair and the grave as the bookends to his life. He is sitting here, and one day, he WILL be lying THERE – and he has an opportunity to fill the space in between with meaning.

I’ve frequently encountered a reading entitled “living your dash” that talks about the life that lies between our birth and our death. The reading challenges us to fill that dash with meaning and actions that care for others.

Fulghum is offering the SAME reminder. From this moment, standing, or sitting here – to the moment sometime in the future when we are left lying here – we have an opportunity to use the lessons we’ve gleaned from the lives that went before us, to continue to build a better community, to care for our neighbours, to share our enthusiasms and our faith, to embody and live out our dreams and hopes and – like Linnae Good suggests – TO FLY.

To fly – to fill our lives with meaning and hope and faith – because of the lessons the people we remember in places like this, have taught us.

To fly – to make the world a better place by achieving, sharing and living our hopes and our dreams and our aspirations that have been nurtured and encouraged by our circle of family and community. (The very people we come here to remember today)

Personally, when I stand by the graves of my dad, my mom and my brother in the little country cemetery, I pray that I may be the kind of person their tried to be in their life, and sought to teach me to be through their guidance and influence … each generation seeks to inspire and teach the generation that follows us by building on the lessons and experiences of the past – and it is when we pause and stand quietly in a cemetery surrounded by the names and reminders of those who went before us, that we are able to actively embrace that process.

Cemeteries are reminders not so much of the past, but of the lessons these folks have offered through their lives, and how their lives and experiences inform, educate and inspire OUR LIVES.

The stones may be cold – but the memories that are recalled by the names etched on them, are a place of warmth and comfort because they tell us ALL we need to know about living a life worthy of the legacy we’ve been left, and the heritage we’ve inherited.

In the coming days may we continue to live our lives with faithful enthusiasm, continuing to build the good community that places like this, are part of creating.

I would like to end with a poem I often use at Memorial Services that stands as a reminder that death, and places like this are not the end of the story, but merely the turning of a chapter:

Death is Nothing at All

Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name.
Speak to me in the easy way
which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect.
Without the trace of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?

I am but waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just around the corner.

All is well.

Henry Scott Holland