Cill Einne

A black-and-white photograph that is dear to me hangs on the wall of my room. It is a picture of the Cill Einne cemetery on one of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. I bought it from a street vendor during a festival about twelve years ago.

It is not a pretty picture. Twelve tombstones in black silhouette stand below a cloud-filled sky. Tall grass hides the graves. A grey sea defines the horizon and by it one can see that some of the gravestones are not quite vertical. The tombstones have been there a long time. The picture tells of a bleak, windswept loneliness.

The Cill Einne cemetery has existed for 1500 years and is still in use. Legend has it that Saint Enda, who brought Christianity to the island, is buried in an unmarked grave. An Internet search showed that Michael Kilmartin joined Saint Enda on December 6th.

The grave markers are topped by crosses and some of them are Celtic crosses. When Saint Enda arrived, he found what is called a "sun cross" symbol consisting of a circle surrounding a cross. It was used by the people of the island in their sun worship. According to legend, Saint Patrick extended the cross outside the circle to indicate the superiority of Christianity over pagan religion.

The power of death has been strong recently. I write this article in the aftermath of the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. My cousin Paul died a few days ago. My beautiful Facebook friend, Tiziana Cardillo, has died from ALS. I have lived under the specter of death from ALS for nearly six years.

Christians understand that the power of death is limited. It does not have the final word. Death itself will die and be replaced by a glorious resurrection to eternal life. As a result, our grief at the time of death is profoundly changed. We grieve, "but not as those without hope," as St. Paul reminds us. We can grieve death without denial or despair because we, like our Lord, will live again.

There is much more to the picture than stark loneliness on a windswept island. On the contrary, the grave markers are sentinels of the faith and the souls they mark are our brothers and sisters in Christ. They wait with us for the return of our Lord who will raise them from the dead. No Christian cemetery is a place of despair, but rather a place of cherished faith and hope for eternity that will one day be fulfilled.