“Three Glances at the Cemetery”
November 2, 2022
FOR this All Souls Day, readers might appreciate “Three Glances at the Cemetery” by Rev. John Evangelist Zollner, 1884:
If we cast a glance into the grave what do we see? We see:
1. What the dead man has in the grave. Alas! he has nothing but his winding-sheet and the coffin which contains his mouldering body. Though he may have been rich during life, though he may have had money by the millions, superb houses, immense possessions, and a lucrative business, he now possesses nothing of all these things; he must say with Job: “Only the grave remaineth for me.” The Caliph Hesham, who died at Baspha, in the year 742, possessed seven hundred boxes of gold pieces, and so large a quantity of clothes and silk garments, that to remove these goods from one place to another six hundred camels were required. He had scarcely closed his eyes in death, when his palace was plundered, and there was not left even a basin in which to wash his inanimate body, not a piece of linen in which to wrap it for the grave. How poor death made this rich ruler! Did it leave him anything but the grave? How foolishly, then, do Christians act, who fix all their thoughts and cares upon temporal goods and thereby forget God and the salvation of their souls; yea, who suffer themselves to be governed by avarice and covetousness to such an extent, that they hard-heartedly turn the poor and needy from their door, and in their business transactions commit many injustices. Or, is it not the greatest folly and blindness, to forfeit heaven for the sake of such vain, perishable goods of earth, and to incur eternal damnation. Consider this well, and entertain no inordinate love for money and the goods of this world, be solicitous for temporal goods only in so far as they are necessary for your subsistence in this life and never forget the words of the Lord: “What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul.”–Matt 16: 26.
Even worse than the mouldering body in the ground is the lifeless pile of cinders, smaller than a pizza box. They clinically call it “cremation,” obscuring the violence of the procedure.
Before You, humbled, Lord, I lie,
my heart like ashes, crushed and dry,
assist me when I die.
Full of tears and full of dread
is that day that wakes the dead,
calling all, with solemn blast
to be judged for all their past.
Lord, have mercy, Jesus blest,
grant them all Your Light and Rest. Amen.
