By André (Duplechain) Polaniecki ‘03

Cemeteries have long been sites where I have enjoyed visits or mini-pilgrimages. 

One of my favorite places on the campus of the University of Notre Dame is the community cemetery for the Congregation of Holy Cross. It is the place where I go to pray and meditate, where I go to find God’s peace. I’ve found that these holy places easily lend themselves to occasions to meditate on the “big” questions—why are we here, who is God, what is death, where am I going, why be good? A cemetery—in stark simplicity, by its very existence—tells the story of being a Christian. 

My brother passed away suddenly when I was nine and, because of this, I spent a lot of time at his grave in the cemetery in my hometown. Rarely would we go to Mass at our parish without a cemetery visit afterwards. Those early visits were very hard—watching one’s parents grieve and suffer immensely is extraordinarily difficult. For someone far too young to truly understand death and the Christian significance of suffering, I struggled with what my brother’s death was supposed to mean. And these were spiritually formative years for me. How I was to reconcile a good and loving God with the pain that my family was experiencing? Why did we have to carry this cross that seemed to be so heavy?

I don’t know that one ever receives the answers that we demand to the “big” questions that we often bring to God in prayer, the ones that drop us to our knees. Not answers that one can articulate without falling into either sentimentality or legal-speak. I do believe, however, that God can speak answers to one’s heart that point our suffering to something greater and that teach us truth, beauty, and goodness and that tell us that we are here for something. 

When my brother died, his grave was a place of mourning and sadness. While it didn’t remain that way—because we believe that Christ’s love defeats death—it took some time to see the new life instead of the death, to see the gift instead of the cross. I love the line in the Constitutions of Holy Cross that says, “It remains only for us to find how even the cross can be born as a gift.” It gives us the hope that God’s love can and will swallow up in victory all our humiliation, anger, failure, and suffering.

In Images of Hope, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote, “Cemeteries as place of hope … hope does not simply cancel sadness. Faith is human, and it is honest. It gives us a new horizon, the larger and comforting view into the expanse of eternal life. It lets us at the same time remain in the place where we are. We do not have to suppress mourning; we accept it, and through the view into the expanse, mourning is slowly transformed and thereby purifies us, makes us more keen-sighted for today and tomorrow.”

We are all given time on this earth to do good and avoid evil, to choose a life lived in virtue and holiness, to offer our lives for others. The faithful departed who reside in cemeteries are joined to the faith of the saints and the martyrs. They are witnesses to our belief that Jesus Christ is more powerful than death—that death, while unavoidable, does not get the last word. These places exist because of our belief in the resurrection and, in doing so, become places of hope.