From the window of a coach on the drive from Berlin to Wrocław some 20 years ago, I saw churchyard after churchyard lit with candles for All Souls. It was like the Mexican Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). No, it was Día de los Muertos. The church stood in darkness. Around it, hundreds of lights, some of them tinted red from the red znicz, the memorial candles in their red holders. We passed one village and, after a few miles of darkness, there would be another, with another dim church and another churchyard filled with glowing lights. These are the ancestors, their graves kept clean and swept and decorated with chrysanthemums at this time of year.
It is not that different in my parishes, apart from the absence of znicz. Especially in the Wilbrahams and Six Mile Bottom there’s an established tradition of visiting, tending, and decorating family graves. A friend goes every week to St George’s to talk to her mother and leave flowers for her. Her mother came every week to visit family as well. At Fulbourn there’s a double row of flat slate plaques marking the burials of ashes. Some will have fresh flowers on them every week. Some have been planted with snowdrops. A few have potted plants, or, I am embarrassed to say, artificial flowers.
Artificial flowers are not generally allowed on graves in English churchyards. There’s a list of other things that aren’t allowed: it’s generally found posted in the church porch, but the print is small so you may be excused for not having read it. We don’t make the rules. They are the rules of the diocese. I imagine that they’re the rules of all the dioceses, and that they’ve copied one another. Dead or wilted flowers are to be removed promptly. Wreaths of paper poppies are permitted on the Commonwealth War Graves as long as they’re not left all year round.
Recently trouble has come into God’s acre in the shape of a black concrete poodle
Toys aren’t allowed in my parish, but I overlook their presence on a baby’s grave. If that baby’s mother wanted to put up fairy lights at Christmas, nobody on the Parochial Church Council would object. I turn a blind eye to the artificial flowers too, and they haven’t yet got out of hand. Right at the east end of one churchyard there are three graves that vie with each other for OTT expressions of solidarity with the ancestors. Here I turn a blind eye to bottles of rum, whisky, and cream sherry, and big bars of Cadbury’s. Mothers and fathers are near and much loved. Strict enforcement of the diocesan rules in this corner would cause a lot of grief. Sometimes though something’s too big to ignore. Recently trouble has come into God’s acre in the shape of a black concrete poodle which appeared one day by the grave of a man who’s been peacefully at rest for the last 10 years. Said poodle is almost two feet tall, too big for me to overlook. I’ve put the word out, and if it isn’t gone by the end of the month, I shall have to impound it. I mean what’s next? Life-sized weeping angels?
What do my parishioners believe comes after death, I wonder. What do I believe? Every time I conduct a burial I go through the ritual: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our frail bodies that they may be conformed to his glorious body.” Three handfuls of earth dropped onto the coffin in rhythm with the words. Every time I’m testifying that the resurrection wasn’t a special one-off for Jesus, but a promise for each one of us, and, dare I hope, for all Creation. Our resurrection is traditionally expected to be heralded by the sound of a trumpet, followed by the graves opening and those within climbing out, like the people in Sir Stanley Spencer’s The Resurrection, Cookham, newly and fully alive and embodied, casting shadows on their old gravestones.
For people who have managed to live in their ancestral village for several hundred years, whether in Poland or East Anglia, there is a great deal of comfort to be had in knowing that your family is there to be visited with chrysanthemums and a libation of whisky or sweet sherry, a toast and a few drops poured on the earth. Only let there be room for the next generation, and children to come and tend the new graves. One can imagine this continuing forever with no trumpet to interrupt the cycle.
I think of my parents’ graves in the unvisited Goodman plot close by LaGuardia Airport. I think of all the ancestors dispersed into smoke and ash, lost in fire and water, scattered over ploughed fields, molecule by organic molecule. For what it’s worth, I believe that bodies are indivisible from souls. And that, I imagine, is why the resurrection of the dead is so central to my faith, a faith that holds that churchyards are not eternal, unlike those buried in them and all those others who seem to have been lost. Nothing is lost. Not an eyelash.
