Friend & mentor, Fr. Mark Michael, wrote today on the Covenant blog about the significance of graveyards.

It made me think about my own place of ministry…

Trinity Cathedral’s graveyard is brashly located on the quarter of our city block closest to downtown, what a “foot” to put forward to the town of Columbia!  At one time, a church building, one of Trinity’s early iterations, also stood on that corner, but for some reason or another, later structures were moved to a more central location on the campus, leaving the dead to serve as a sort of welcoming committee for entrants to the cathedral grounds.

As Fr. Mark argues in his post, the dead are just as much a part of the church community as the living.  The inclusion of prayers for the dead in our liturgies, reading together the stories of saints and the faithful departed of generations past, and allowing our lives to be shaped by the lives of those who have come before are perhaps especially strange parts of Christian life, but they are nonetheless vital and rich.