Humans love to separate themselves. We love to judge, define, draw circles around ourselves and those in our tribe, circles that say, "We are superior to You." Even in relationships, we easily find ourselves on islands of our own making, comfortable with our position and independence, at ease with the demarcation we've drawn to keep the World out.
While I believe all people are guilty of asserting their special apart-ness, Christians seem especially skilled at claiming superiority. Our faith traces its roots to the chosen people of Israel, after all, and we really like that mantle, like smiling with our faces to the cross, knowing we are now separate and distinct from those who cast their eyes elsewhere. Christians aren't great at remembering that all fall short and we conveniently forget the gift of grace was extended to every single soul.
Last weekend I traveled North with my husband and father-in-law to the small town where my father-in-law grew up, where both sides of his family raised their families since the 1800s. A cavalcade of Norwegian names makes up the town historical record, the majority of which my husband is related to either by blood or marriage. There are thousands of such towns all over the world, towns where families built their histories, entrenched their stories. My dad's side of the family has a similar shared homecoming every year in the mountains of East Tennessee. Landscapes shape us, the stories follow us.
My husband's uncle showed us around the family churchyard, told stories of the folks buried there. But it was the story of someone not buried there that was the focus of our visit. Years ago, in the early 1900s, a man in this town committed suicide. Suicide being an unpardonable sin, the man was buried outside the cemetery. It strikes me as the ultimate cruelty to punish a family in such a way. The deceased is no longer present to defend himself or his family, but the church decides his family deserves no marker at which to grieve. It's a punishment of the living and a final cruelty to the dead.
One reason for our trip to the churchyard was a hunt. It was a search for where they placed that man, no marker, no indication of where they laid his body, our only clues a slightly sunken spot between the trees and the witchcraft-ish crossing of dowsing rods as we walked over the presumed spot. Chester's uncle plans to erect a marker, nothing grand, and likely not a marker many folks will ever notice, but an acknowledgment where one never stood before.
The family of the man is long dead. Anyone who knew him or knew people who loved him has long since faded from memory. His story is just a whisper now, and apart from the few who know what lies in the overgrown bramble beyond the cemetery line, his story has the ring of folktale. So there is no person alive to say, "thank you." There will likely be no visitors to this man's marker, no tearful prayers said to his memory, but I believe the carving of a new line matters, the opening of an imaginary gate, welcoming him into the graveyard of his kin.
It matters when we notice the lines we place between us. And it matters when we, belatedly, erase them. It's what Christ did, bridging the chasm between damned and redeemed. Damnation, not so much that burning cartoon beneath the ground, but separation, from God and from each other, has always been man's deepest ache, deepest worry, deepest question. Redemption is inclusive, it speaks to an invitation to all, it speaks to markers on unmarked graves, and the belated apology to a man between the trees.
