Dear Saints,

There’s a strange phenomenon about visiting a cemetery: even as it represents the universal tragedy of death, its effect on our mind and heart is largely bound up in the reason for our visit. Tourists who walk among the acres of tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery, for example, will likely react with grateful reverence and a fairly vague sense of community sadness, while the widow who sits for hours in her lawnchair next to her husband’s grave experiences deep personal grief and loss. It’s natural and right that the distance between us and those whom we remember would shape the depth of our ache.

And yet apart from - or at least alongside of - our personal experience, a cemetery always offers each of us the same two opportunities. The first is to pray for the dead. St. John Vianney once said “consider then…the magnitude of these sufferings which the souls in Purgatory endure; and the means which we have of mitigating them: our prayers, our good works, and above all, the holy sacrifice of the Mass.” As members of the Body of Christ, we have the power - and therefore the responsibility - to help relieve the suffering of every other member we encounter. That power and responsibility does not end with someone’s death; on the contrary, if anything it is all the more important that we exercise it faithfully and well. We must love those who have died with special fervor, and our charity must be poured out through prayer and sacrifice.

The second opportunity a cemetery offers is to contemplate our own mortality and decide what we want to do with the days we have left. A number of saints have warned that when we leave this earth we will take with us nothing that we received, only that which we have given. In other words, we will be judged on how much we have loved, and that alone. A visit to a gravesite can be a good time for a gut check.

It’s just a simple fact that someday ours will be the graves that others visit. Between now and then we should live so that, when the moment comes, the souls we once prayed for in Purgatory will intercede for us, and those we left behind will come and sit with us awhile, speeding us home with prayers of their own.

Christ’s Peace,

Father Daniel

δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ