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Easter Field
S. M. Hutchens on an Old Cemetery Opening Soon
There is a cemetery just north of U.S. 35 in the little town of Economy, Indiana, some miles northwest of Richmond. I am quite sure that by now the citizens of the necropolis outnumber its living inhabitants, of whom there are about 160. Among the former are my parents, whom my brother and I laid to rest there among the graves of many generations of our family. It is a pretty little cemetery that I try to visit when I am in the area, not drawn so much by duty or filial piety—the dead do not need my company, and are as much with me outside the cemetery as within it—as by a combination of memory and hope borne in our common faith that I may be by some divine chance there when the Trumpet sounds and the dead are raised incorruptible.
If our faith is not in vain, I think I know how it will be: The graves will be broken open in the similitude of our Lord's, and out, with a rush of light and power, shall unbend and rise living men, beautiful beyond description. Their faces will be raised and their arms will be open, for that is how the springing plants, so often used by our Lord and his apostles as figures of the resurrection, come forth. I can imagine no more wonderful experience short of the Beatific Vision itself than to witness the resurrection and ascension of the dead, corruption putting on incorruption, the seed breaking the bonds of its shell and becoming something that can hardly be imagined from the form of the seed, but still truly the very same self that was laid in the earth.
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S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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