I bought a grave today

Nothing exceptional in that of course but it rarely makes it to the top 10 of conversation starters at Christmas parties. In life we are surrounded by death and now can watch it unfold on our TV screens yet still for many this is psychologically still foreign and awkward territory. It’s the winter draught whistling under the ill fitting door. We know it’s there, we feel it but we try and ignore it. So, buying a grave was salutary; it put things into perspective once more. Monks can help us with this one I think. They live in the habit in which they will be buried ... straight into the earth without a coffin. Later their bones will be disinterred and kept in the monastery ossuary for all to see. This life is just a way station on the route to eternity, pleasant or unpleasant in its final destination. Again something we would prefer to ignore, the judgement. Perhaps it’s something we actively resist ... that there is a reckoning. All of which seemed rather distant from the soothing secular soft furnishings of the funeral home. Should Christians spoil the illusion? No, I think not. Life will do that eventually. We can do two things though. We can be prepared ourselves and we can be a sign of contradiction to those who sleep. We should remember that we are the only faith that places death and its resolution in God at the centre of life. We above all should be comfortable with the grave as an ordinary piece of consumer expenditure.