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Easter Field
S. M. Hutchens on an Old Cemetery Opening Soon
There is a cemetery just north of U.S. 35 in the little town of Economy, Indiana, some miles northwest of Richmond. I am quite sure that by now the citizens of the necropolis outnumber its living inhabitants, of whom there are about 160. Among the former are my parents, whom my brother and I laid to rest there among the graves of many generations of our family. It is a pretty little cemetery that I try to visit when I am in the area, not drawn so much by duty or filial piety—the dead do not need my company, and are as much with me outside the cemetery as within it—as by a combination of memory and hope borne in our common faith that I may be by some divine chance there when the Trumpet sounds and the dead are raised incorruptible.
If our faith is not in vain, I think I know how it will be: The graves will be broken open in the similitude of our Lord's, and out, with a rush of light and power, shall unbend and rise living men, beautiful beyond description. Their faces will be raised and their arms will be open, for that is how the springing plants, so often used by our Lord and his apostles as figures of the resurrection, come forth. I can imagine no more wonderful experience short of the Beatific Vision itself than to witness the resurrection and ascension of the dead, corruption putting on incorruption, the seed breaking the bonds of its shell and becoming something that can hardly be imagined from the form of the seed, but still truly the very same self that was laid in the earth.
The Devil's Denial
A vision of glory, however, is not the point of this piece. It is being written to help emend an all-too-easy misapprehension. Lewis put it in the miserable valediction of the scientist Weston, who, possessed by the devil, told the believer Ransom,
Perhaps your God does exist—but it makes no difference whether he does or not. No, of course you wouldn't see it; but one day you will. I don't think you've got the idea of the rind—the thin outer skin we call life—really clear. Picture the universe as an infinite globe with this very thin crust on the outside. But remember its thickness is a thickness of time. It's about seventy years thick in the best places. We are born on the surface of it and all our lives we are sinking through it. When we've got all the way through then we are what's called Dead: we've got into the dark part inside, the real globe. If your God exists, he's not in the globe—he's outside, like a moon. As we pass into the interior we pass out of his ken. He doesn't follow us in. You would express it by saying he's not in time—which you find comforting! . . . All the things you like to dwell upon are outside. A planet like our own, or Perelandra, for instance. Or a beautiful human body. All the colours and pleasant shapes are merely where it ends, where it ceases to be. Inside, what do you get? Darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation, stink. (Perelandra, Macmillan, 1944, pp. 168–169)
The denial upon which the devil's error is built is, of course, the denial of Christ—as all his denials ultimately are. Our God does indeed "follow us in." The result is the Resurrection of the Dead, and with it, the final extinction, for those who follow him from the interior, of "darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation, and stink."
The tellers of graveyard tales make us meditate on horror instead of delight, for what arises living from the graves of which they write is living death instead of living life—the misshapen, the decayed, the predatory monstrosity, the twisted product of scientific hubris: rotting things incompetently exhumed by powers other than the Resurrection. The churchyard becomes not an extension of the congregation within, a field planted with good seed in which one might properly sing benedictions, but a place of screams, haunted by ghosts and demons.
A Royal Tributary
There are no monsters or zombies to be seen in Economy's old Quaker cemetery, no crazed killers hiding behind the stones. If there is any fear in it, it is more likely of finding oneself in a place where bright angels' feet have trod. Chesterton wrote about the winding British road taking its travellers at length to heaven. For a long time I thought he overplayed his poetical hand there. Now I am not so sure, for when viewed from a certain angle, the little stream that runs by the old cement plant, past my parents' graves, and out into the cornfields, looks very much like a tributary to the River that flows by the throne of God. •
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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