Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow ...
To walk in a churchyard during a dark, cold November day is to walk upon ground sanctified by a liturgy offered numerous times over the years, in some cases over centuries. What is more, it is a liturgy offered in the very face of mortality and death, as Comber describes in his commentary on the occasional offices:
Being come to the grave, which is by the Jews called "the long habitation,” and by Christians "the bed of rest;" whilst the corpse is made ready to be put into it ... our Church hath drawn up a most pious meditation for the blessing and sanctifying of our own souls, and the application of this example to our spiritual advantage.
And it is there, in the very face of mortality and death, that the Church proclaims the hope of the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. As Wheatly states:
This phrase, of "committing his body to the ground," implies, that we deliver it into safe custody, and into such hands as will faithfully restore it again. We do not cast it away as a lost and perished carcass; but carefully lay it in the ground, as having in it a seed of eternity, and "in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life" ... And this being a principal article of our faith, it is highly reasonable, that we should publickly acknowledge and declare our stedfastness in it, when we lay the body of any Christian in the grave.
On a dark, cold mid-November day in a churchyard, therefore, on the days before Stir-up Sunday, we walk on ground sanctified by a liturgy that points to the Advent hope: "the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal". The burial office, prayed many times in the churchyard, is the proclamation that our mortality and the grave, are caught up in and transfigured by the Advent hope:
and that, at the general Resurrection in the last day, we may be found acceptable in thy sight, and receive that blessing, which thy well-beloved Son shall then pronounce to all that love and fear thee, saying, Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world.
In the dark and cold of the season, as Autumn gives way to Winter, with the trees now bare, when we are surrounded by the graves of those who have gone before us, on ground sanctified by the oft praying of the burial liturgy, we are brought before the Advent hope.
(The photograph is a the churchyard in The Middle Church, in the heart of Jeremy Taylor country, on a late November day.)
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