Wreaths and crosses

For Wilshire Baptist Church

A few evenings before New Years I went to Restland cemetery to retrieve a Christmas wreath off a grave. I hadn’t been there in several years and in the deepening darkness my memory faltered and I became lost in the maze of narrow roadways and dense trees that swallowed all light and made every turn look the same. I stopped and called my mother and she gave me directions: find the Wildwood Chapel near the creek and then go north to the Garden of the Cross.

Those directions were better than none at all but still were really intended for daylight navigation, because while I found the chapel and knew my way north, landmarks were nonexistent. In case you haven’t been there, Restland has flat grave markers so there’s no way to use names or ornate carvings on headstones to find your way. You really do have to know where you are going.

Driving slowly and being careful as I turned in the darkness so as not to stray off the narrow roadway onto the graves, I meandered around until I found a tall white cross marking the same-named garden. I felt some relief until I got out of the car and realized the search had just begun. Restland is huge and in the dark it looked as if the flat grave markers stretched out endlessly in every direction from the cross. My only hope lay in the fact that not every grave had a wreath and that narrowed the search a little bit.

So with the help of the flashlight on my cell phone, I walked from wreath to wreath, reading names and dates on markers. Some wreaths were standing up on wire tripods and the markers were easy to read; some lay flat on the ground and I had to move them a little to read the names. After a while my light fell on a green wreath laying flat on the ground with red ribbons and a few red and gold ornaments. Looking through the open circle in the center I saw the raised number “1962” — the year of my sister’s birth. I picked up the wreath, confirmed the name underneath, and walked back to the car in the dark not realizing how far I had traveled.

If you’ve read my posts here before you know that I’m fond of irony and metaphor, and there was plenty of both on this night. Because there I was, halfway between Christmas and New Years, wandering around the base of a cross in the cold and dark, searching for a Christmas wreath on the grave of someone who has been gone for years but has never been “lost” as we often say of the deceased, but is eternally “found” by the grace of God through the miraculous birth of a baby on Christmas day, who grew to be a man and died on a cross to give us hope for life in this new year and every year that follows. Amen.