The Beauty and Education Offered by Cemeteries
Commentary
Since my adolescence I have loved churchyards and cemeteries. I still find entry to them as irresistibly tempting as to bookshops.
Cemeteries are a spur to the imagination; they are an education in the tragic dimension of life and hence are a consolation.
They instill gratitude and a sense of proportion. They are often beautiful; they are peaceful havens in even the busiest or most frantic of towns or cities.
They are reserves of wildlife and, in spring and summer at least, they echo with birdsong.
The French writer, André Gide, once said that, when he went to a town that was new to him, he always visited the cemetery, along with the market, the courthouse, and the park.
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In Jesus’ instructions to his disciples from our Gospel reading today, he describes their ministry as being students of God, and ultimately, servants of humanity. Charles Freer Andrews certainly took both to heart in his ministry. What might we learn from the life of the man who was one of the very few who called Mahatma Gandhi “Mohan”, and Gandhi called “Charlie?”
For starters, few people would have predicted that he would have ended up as an Anglican. Andrews was born in 1871 in Newcastle upon Tyne in England to a family who were practitioners of the Catholic Apostolic Church–a sect that believed in prophecy, speaking in tongues, and the regular occurrence of healing miracles–considered to be one of the ancestors of what would come to be known in the United States as Pentecostalism. His father held the title of “angel” (roughly equivalent to a bishop) in Birmingham. Yet he began to embrace Anglicanism in his teenage and college years and was ordained fi
Sauernheimer preparing communion wafers with wine in them at a bakery in Germany. Photos: Nicolas Armer/dpa
The idea came to her while she was baking a red wine cake for her son, says the pastor of a congregation in the Franconia area of Germany. The whole time, Julia Kleemann was thinking about how to celebrate communion at the confirmations that were coming up.
“I realised it must be possible to bake the wine into the wafers – just like I was doing with my cake, ” she recalls.
That would mean people wouldn’t have to drink from the chalice at communion any more – a danger amid the pandemic – but could still partake in the rite.
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