On Church Graveyards

In ‘An Arundel Tomb’ Philip Larkin describes with that quality peculiar to poets and prophets of attention to pregant details and potential associations, a late-fourteenth-century monument in Chichester Cathedral. As he describes the effigy: 

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd –
The little dogs under their feet. (lines 1–6)

He notes ‘with a sharp tender shock’ that the earl’s stone hand is withdrawn from its gauntlet ‘holding her hand’ (line 12) – not knowing that this detail was added by Edward Richardson, commissioned in the mid-nineteenth century to restore the eroded and separated effigies (but that matters not at all to the poem or our present purposes). Monuments like this one are not an uncommon sight in English churches, though not all are this lovely. Most churches are full of monuments within – on walls and even in the floors – and situated amid a graveyard. 

This is not a feature common to American churches. It is true that some of our oldest churches (quite young by European reckoning) have graveyards. Indeed, early on in the colonization of the continent this combination was assumed normative. In the 1790s plans for what became Knoxville were being sketched out. The founder of the settlement, James White, had built a fort and a mill and planted a turnip patch at the fork of the river, where the Holston and French Broad meet to form the Tennessee River. General White instructed that his turnip patch be set aside for a church and a graveyard. Today, if you visit Knoxville, you can see White’s monument in the cemetery next to First Presbyterian Church downtown on the site that had been his turnip patch. The two went together in his mind, the church and the graveyard. And he was not unique in thinking so. From Burton Parish in Williamsburg, Virginia to the little Presbyterian Church along the Euharlee River in the hills of northwest Georgia, Americans too once associated churches with graves.

When I first visited the UK, I was struck by the prevalence of monuments in and around most churches and began to wonder what difference it makes to the worshiper. What difference does it make for a church to be surrounded by the graves of the faithful departed rather than a vast asphalt parking lot? What silent theological messages may it convey? 

The more I thought on it, the more the strangeness of a church without graves struck me. After the legalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when the first churches were erected, most were built over the burial sites of martyrs. The tombs of martyrs often served as altars; indeed, until the Second Vatican Council, Rome required that altars contain relics – they were all, in a manner of speaking, tombs. Protestants rejected the business of relics, the commerce in surplus saintly merits, the invocation of saints, Purgatory, and its industry of offerings, chantries, and masses to ease the suffering of souls believed to be in torment there, but they certainly did not sever their connection to the dead. Indeed, they rejected those things precisely because they distorted the New Testament teaching about ‘them which sleep in Jesus’ (1 Thess. 4:14) and the basis of the hope of both the quick and the dead. 

The loss of church monuments and graveyards was not an inevitable consequence of Protestantism. As St. Paul says, ὃ μὴ γένοιτο! By no means! The images of saints that had been foci of devotion were removed or defaced, chisels taken to the prayers for the dead etched in stone. But the monuments were kept. And many, many more erected by Protestants in the centuries since then. East to West, Roman to Protestant, Anglican to Baptist, the association between churches and graveyards is ancient and pervasive. 

In late modernity we have done all we can to distance ourselves from the dead. We pay professionals to handle the bodies. We keep cemeteries out of sight. We kill with remote-control drones. But the distance, born of fear, is illusory – ‘For man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain; * he heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall gather them’ (Psalm 39:7). The Prayer Book won’t let us live under such illusion. The dead are everywhere. In the Prayer Book, the dead, or rather, as Eliot put it, the already living ¹T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, Perspecta 19 (1982), 36–42 (42). The full passage is [The poet] is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living., are close. When we stand for the Te Deum, we sing

The glorious company of the apostles * praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the prophets * praise thee.
The noble army of martyrs * praise thee.

Kneeling to pray the Litany, we plead ‘Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers’ because we live with and struggle against the multiplying consequences of their sins, as they lived with the sins of their ancestors, against the weight of which we are powerless. Then we plead by Christ’s ‘most precious blood’, ‘his precious death and burial’, ‘his glorious resurrection and ascension’. And with confidence recall 

O God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers have declared unto us, the noble works that thou didst in their days, and in the old time before them. 

Not only their sins, but their love remains too – as Larkin found the Arundel tomb made him almost believe: 

Time has transfigured them into  
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be   
Their final blazon, and to prove   
Our almost-instinct almost true:   
What will survive of us is love. (lines 37–42)

The Prayer Book would have us ‘both almost, and altogether’ (Acts 26:28) believe that. The love of the dead survives with us, and their hope; indeed, their faith too. Their faith – whatever divine grace wrought in them – inspires us. And so when the Church Militant kneels to pray before Communion, we thank God for them:

And we also bless thy holy name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear, beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom.

The Prayer Book doesn’t want us to forget them, even as it does not want us to fear Death, that incestuous whelp of Sin and Satan. A churchyard full of graves and monuments in wall and floor together make a great cloud of witnesses, a choir singing ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it’ (Song 8:9). 

The Prayer Book’s Order for the Burial of the Dead assumes the church will have a graveyard. It begins like this: 

¶ The priest and clerks, meeting the corpse at the entrance of the churchyard and going before it (either into the church or towards the grave), shall say or sing: 

‘I AM the resurrection and the life’, saith the Lord. ‘He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.’ St. John 11:25-26. 

The heart of the burial office is a reading of 1 Cor. 15:20–58. In that rich meditation, Paul develops a garden analogy. The buried dead are seeds sown in the ground (esp. vv. 36–44) and the resurrected spiritual body is the incorruptible fruit (vv. 20, 23). Every churchyard with its graves, shaded by the trees and adorned with flowers, testifies to this faith – ‘he is not the God of the dead but of the living’ (Mark 12:27).