Voices in the Cemetery

I don’t know how many grave markers surrounded me as I walked through the cemetery, the early morning dew glistening on the neatly manicured cemetery lawn, donning the gravesites with a heavenly aura, giving me the sense that I had entered another dimension: a sacred one. Except for a few priests, who had served at the Loretto Motherhouse in Nerinx, Kentucky, I walked among deceased Sisters, hundreds of them, their markers jutting from the ground like erect signposts with their message.

But what? What was it? 

The environs of the Motherhouse, dating back to 1824, had provided an ideal setting for the faculty retreat I had enjoyed with colleagues from the School of Theology at Campbellsville University. The lure of silence drew me into an early morning walk around the Motherhouse campus. Foregoing breakfast, I circled “Badin’s Pond,” glanced at the “1873 House,” and stepped inside the “Church of the Seven Dolors,” but it was the cemetery that kept attracting me like a magnet. The “Seven Dolor Stations,” serving as the vestibule to the cemetery, gave me pause (“Should I take off my shoes?”) before stepping into the graveyard, the centerpiece for my morning prayer walk. 

It was populated with Sister’s name upon Sister’s name, gravestone next to gravestone, row after row, stretching on, cuddled by the morning fog, inviting the potential aspirant to venture onto its stairway to heaven. Here on earth, they lay: God’s servants who educated generations of students across the United States and around the world, the Sisters who lived their calling of peace and justice from this place, welcoming locals and immigrants, at last finding their rest in this corner of the earth, the same environment many of them fought so hard to preserve. 

The breeze whispered their voices of service, sacrifice, obedience, and humility in my ear. And laughter, too, for the Sisters weren’t serious all the time, at least not the ones I’ve known, so surely some of these revelled in their unique measure of orneriness, even as they lived their vocation to God, each voice in harmony with the next, but each with its chosen melody.

And what did they say?

I thought of that scene from the film, “Dead Poet’s Society,” where the late Robin Williams, playing the maverick English teacher, John Keating, speaks to his high school class of boys. Standing in front of an old class picture and pointing to it, Keating says, “They’re not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they’re destined for great things, just like many of you, their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because, you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? – – Carpe – – hear it? – – Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.” 

A few hours later, I saw one of the Sisters I had known for years. Sheepishly, I told my friend about my visit to the cemetery and the sense I had that the Sisters of yesteryear still spoke. Shrugging her shoulders as if it were normal, she told of one of her friends, another Sister, who visits the cemetery regularly, preferably in the morning. “She says she goes there to chat with her friends.” 

I wondered as I walked away, “Do they speak of how they served the Lord together, their work of peace in a violent and troubled world, of nurturing the soil surrounding them, of victories and defeats in their intentions for God? Of fears? Doubts? And hope?” 

Voices swallowed in the voices of thousands, yet still living and speaking, reminding us of their lives lived extraordinaire, throwing down their challenge to us from their hallowed resting place. 

Carpe diem.