- Feb 5, 2002
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In the light of Christ’s Resurrection, even the resting place of the dead points to the promise that all shall be made new.
“Look, Dad — a burial garden!”
It took me a moment to process our 6-year-old’s exclamation from the back of the minivan. Burial, yes — she was referencing the cemetery we were passing across the road — but did she just say “burial garden?”
A few days before, we had visited the grave of her great-grandmother, who died three years ago. My mom had brought flowers to the cemetery, distributing them to the grandkids for them to place on the ground. We cried; we laughed; we told stories — we remembered.
This was the first time our 6-year-old — who has always had a deep curiosity about death and the afterlife — had visited a cemetery. But apparently, she wasn’t afraid or disturbed at all. On the contrary: Whether it was the flowers, the family bond, or just the orderly rows of headstones in that plot of land, she walked away conceiving of it as a garden — a place not only of tranquility and peace but of vibrancy and color.
Out of the mouths of the young, God has prepared praise for himself (Matthew 21:16) — and almost immediately, the phrase struck me as a perfect summary of the paradoxical attitude of the Christian toward death. On the one hand, a cemetery is a place of “burial,” the interment of our mortal remains into the earth. Burial signals to us the inevitability and finality of death. “We must all die,” a wise woman of Scripture declares. “We are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up” (2 Samuel 14:14).
On the other hand, a cemetery is a kind of garden, a charged place of patient waiting, hidden growth, and, above all, of hope for a future flowering. Indeed, in the Gospel of John, we hear that Jesus himself was buried in an actual garden: “Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid” (John 19:41).
Continued below.
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“Look, Dad — a burial garden!”
It took me a moment to process our 6-year-old’s exclamation from the back of the minivan. Burial, yes — she was referencing the cemetery we were passing across the road — but did she just say “burial garden?”
A few days before, we had visited the grave of her great-grandmother, who died three years ago. My mom had brought flowers to the cemetery, distributing them to the grandkids for them to place on the ground. We cried; we laughed; we told stories — we remembered.
This was the first time our 6-year-old — who has always had a deep curiosity about death and the afterlife — had visited a cemetery. But apparently, she wasn’t afraid or disturbed at all. On the contrary: Whether it was the flowers, the family bond, or just the orderly rows of headstones in that plot of land, she walked away conceiving of it as a garden — a place not only of tranquility and peace but of vibrancy and color.
Out of the mouths of the young, God has prepared praise for himself (Matthew 21:16) — and almost immediately, the phrase struck me as a perfect summary of the paradoxical attitude of the Christian toward death. On the one hand, a cemetery is a place of “burial,” the interment of our mortal remains into the earth. Burial signals to us the inevitability and finality of death. “We must all die,” a wise woman of Scripture declares. “We are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up” (2 Samuel 14:14).
On the other hand, a cemetery is a kind of garden, a charged place of patient waiting, hidden growth, and, above all, of hope for a future flowering. Indeed, in the Gospel of John, we hear that Jesus himself was buried in an actual garden: “Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid” (John 19:41).
Continued below.
‘Burial Gardens’: How a Cemetery Visit Becomes a Lesson in Hope
In the light of Christ’s Resurrection, even the resting place of the dead points to the promise that all shall be made new.
