A widow trudges through a...
Illustration
Object:
A widow trudges through a cemetery, counting off the rows of headstones, until she reaches the one with her husband's name inscribed upon it. As she takes trowel in hand and kneels down to plant those flower bulbs or to pull those stray weeds, she remembers. In her weeding, she remembers. In her planting, she remembers. In those few whispered words of affection, spoken as though he were kneeling right beside her, she remembers.
Maybe he wasn't "a saint," as most people commonly use that word. Maybe he had his faults and foibles like anyone else. But maybe, in the faith the two of them shared, in the grace and forgiveness he asked for and received in his time, she can dare to remember him as one of the saints.
She can dare to picture him seated at that great banqueting table: to which, one day, as the Lord Jesus says, people will come "from east and west, from north and south." Maybe, as she sits in the church pew and partakes of bread and wine, she will sense, in that moment of time, the truth of the final prayer of George Macleod, founder of the Iona Community, the one he arranged to have read at his own funeral: "Thus shall we come to know within ourselves that there is no death and that only a veil divides, thin as gossamer."
Maybe she will remember how the two of them used to sit, in the evening, at the kitchen table, sipping their coffee, sharing stories of the day, looking death in the face and laughing. And maybe, as she thinks now of her own death, a little smile will dance across the wrinkled corners of her mouth, and she will know, deep within her, it is nothing to be feared.
Maybe he wasn't "a saint," as most people commonly use that word. Maybe he had his faults and foibles like anyone else. But maybe, in the faith the two of them shared, in the grace and forgiveness he asked for and received in his time, she can dare to remember him as one of the saints.
She can dare to picture him seated at that great banqueting table: to which, one day, as the Lord Jesus says, people will come "from east and west, from north and south." Maybe, as she sits in the church pew and partakes of bread and wine, she will sense, in that moment of time, the truth of the final prayer of George Macleod, founder of the Iona Community, the one he arranged to have read at his own funeral: "Thus shall we come to know within ourselves that there is no death and that only a veil divides, thin as gossamer."
Maybe she will remember how the two of them used to sit, in the evening, at the kitchen table, sipping their coffee, sharing stories of the day, looking death in the face and laughing. And maybe, as she thinks now of her own death, a little smile will dance across the wrinkled corners of her mouth, and she will know, deep within her, it is nothing to be feared.
