One of my favorite places to visit is cemeteries. One of my earliest memories is being in a cemetery with my family as we buried my uncle, my dad's brother. It was my first experience with grief and sorrow as I witnessed my dad shed tears at the loss of his younger brother.
It was also my first memory of love as my mother informed me that dad was crying because he loved his brother. Thus, cemeteries unlike what hollywood tries to get us imagine with ghost and haunting, have always been a we go to remember that we have loved and we have loved in return.
Every year during lent, my family would visit the cemetery to clean the graves of those family members who had gone before us and put fresh flowers down as a sign of respect.
I would often spend time roaming through the cemetery looking at the tombstones and reading the headstones. They were always fascinating for me. I was never concerned with the bodies beneath me but also curious about the untold stories written in abridged fashion on the headstones themselves. There I would catch a glimpse into the life lived.
When I was preparing to be ordained to the priesthood, I spent a week in silent retreat in Dallas. On this retreat center where I stayed was a really old cemetery. So I found myself spending time reflecting and thinking as I strolled through the cemetery, again trying to piece together the stories with the information etched on the headstones.
As I recall there was one family where according to the dates on the headstone, the wife was 20 years younger than her husband and that got married when she was 19 and he was 39. Imagine that conversation when she went to tell her parents she was going to marry a guy as old as her father. Now I am sure that was a interesting dinner conversation.
There was the stone family, where both children died young, one at 7 and the other at 10. Shortly after the children died, the mother passed on as well. The father was left by himself for nearly 30 years. I could only imagine the grief and sorrow and loneliness this man must have carried as e said goodbye to his children and his wife in such a short span.
There were some people who loved 80 years and others who barely made it to their 20's. Some had a long life of adventure and others never knew the adventure of life and love.
There were a few headstones that were nameless and just simply had the date of the death of the person. Nameless concrete slabs was all that remained of their life. Even that tells a story of how they journeyed in society. To remain nameless in death speaks volumes.
All of these stories would remain untold lying beneath the cold, dark, damp ground were it not for the story told at Easter.
The story begins with the tomb of Christ. The story begins in a cemetery. We must learnt o read the headstone of Christ and to penetrate the tomb so as to truly get what reality is.
The story of Christ changes everything. We discover that in the empty tomb, our life and our story does not end in a cemetery but rather it begins there.
The empty tomb becomes the guarantor that our story live in His story, will not end in the cold, dark, damp ground.
If we live with Christ we shall rise with Christ. He has made the grave a sign of hope even as it claims our mortal bodies. Our story has meaning in his story we celebrate these 50 days of Easter.
The limits of life have been stretched beyond our wildest dreams. We are no longer bound by the beckoning of the cold dark ground. The warmth of light radiating from the empty tomb that is filled with the brilliance of the resurrected presence of Christ calls us into a new dimension of being human.
Truly our life has endless possibilities, for in Christ, as we look into the empty tomb, we see a life that knows no ends.
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