Focus: “I Call You Friends” Forever continued from page 15 and told stories of the old friends at their feet. Someone would point to a row of graves and tell how the flu epidemic of 1918 took all those people. Collectively, cousins, squatting above the almost-flattened mounds, worked out who was related to whom. A tall, city-clothed, Cadillac-driving man stood alone by two gravestones, in silence, eating fried chicken and crying. And all the while, the off-tune piano and accompanying voices continued singing what they called gospel music. And the cloud of unseen witnesses were understood to be not far away, just beyond the thin boundary that separates the living and the dead. They were, I believe, comfortable with death and their moral limitations. Creation is filled with smells, sights, and sounds incomprehensible to human senses. My dog can smell infinitely better than I. Eagles can see infinitely better. Cats and barn owls can hear infinitely better. Limited as we are, we humans occasionally sense something beyond ourselves. Sometimes, though, we might feel the humming of the communion of saints, easing the way for a dying friend or loved one, warming up to welcome her into the eternal life we will share. God, who created both heaven and earth, delights in both. The Spirit of God roams between the two, and through Christ all that is seen and unseen, heard and unheard, felt and unfelt, living and dead, hold together. The communion of saints is in the midst of all this holy glue. Several years ago, I spent some time with my children in Hillsborough, North Carolina. The Old City Cemetery there, dating from colonial times, was just down the lane behind us. It actually looks like
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the foundations of a mansion that once had many rooms. A maze of ivy-covered stone walls divides groups of over 120 graves. Its deceased inhabitants were once families of shopkeepers and farmers, politicians and soldiers, doctors and adventurers. Almost a third of the graves belong to those whose names are now forgotten on earth. The undulating ground was, that April, covered in soft grass and bright dandelions. I spent many hours there with my grandson, watching him crawl among the graves. He would grab onto weather-worn tombstones and carefully pull up on markers that read: “Her Price Above Rubies” or “He hath Done What He Could.” He stood up and smiled at the lamb above the inscription: “Of Such Is the Kingdom of Heaven (11 months)” – a little boy he had already passed in age. This memory is an apt metaphor for the communion we share with the departed dead. Rather than being far from us, the saints remain with us in some way that we can’t quite grasp. They hold us up in prayers as we hold them up in ours. The memory of them pulls us up, helps us stand upright on our own feet in the world around us and before God who grounds us.
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The Rev. Lera Tyler is assistant priest at St. Thomas, San Antonio. Reach her at ltyler@tom1604.org
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Reflections
– Fall/Winter 2010