Our Churchyards

From time to time it is necessary to think with you about our churchyards and the way we keep them and use them, both as Churches, who have the care and responsibility of the areas as a whole, and as individuals who may have the bodies of relatives and friends buried within them.

Our churchyards are very much community areas, areas shared by us all. They are places of quiet beauty and tranquillity, of shared memories and of shared grief. It is for this reason that we have to take care that what happens in them and how they are used is acceptable to as many people as possible and causes offence to as few people as possible. It is also important to remember that they are Christian burial grounds and consecrated as such by a Bishop. Because of this a Christian ethos and understanding of Creation, Death and Resurrection must guide our approach to them and must guide what we agree that we should or should not do with them – both as a whole and also in terms of the treatment of individual grave sites.

That Christian understanding of Death and Resurrection is well summed up in this extract from a reflection by William Penn, who lived some three hundred years ago:

“We give back to you, O God, those whom you gave to us. You did not lose them when you gave them to us and we do not lose them by their return to you. Your dear Son has taught us that life is eternal and that love cannot die, so death is only an horizon and an horizon is only the limit of our sight.”

From this we must understand that, when we come to a burial, what we are burying is not a person, but that person’s body. The body itself is a part of God’s Creation and, as such, needs to be treated with all proper respect, but the living person, who we once recognised through that body, continues to live, albeit beyond the limitations of our physical sight.

It is for this reason that it is not right to try and turn a grave into some sort of shrine. The person whose body lies in the grave is simply not there. (Molly and I are incredibly aware of this when we visit our son’s grave, some two hundred miles away from here. We are often very conscious of Simon in our daily lives here in Norfolk, but very rarely find him at his graveside in Wiltshire. We are content with the simple dignity of that Wiltshire grave and take great joy in the knowledge that he continues to live and love just beyond our sight.)

It is with these thoughts in mind that I have to remind everybody that, as with any other area of community life, there are certain conventions that do need to be observed for the good of all and for the preservation of our churchyards as places of tranquillity and beauty. These ‘conventions’ take the form of a set of regulations which have been drawn up by the Diocese of Norwich and its Chancellor and which have been approved by your representatives at Diocesan Synod (a sort of Church Parliament). These regulations have not been made by a ‘faceless bureaucracy’, but by ordinary people all of whom, like you and me, have been bereaved themselves.

The most important thing to remember is that nothing at all may be brought into a churchyard without permission from me – and I am obliged by law to apply the Churchyard regulations. If you want to read these regulations in detail you will find them displayed in the Churches. In brief the regulations tell us what size and type of stone may be used for headstones and they also very explicitly tell us some of the things that we may not

bring in to a Churchyard or do there. High on the list of these are kerbs, chippings and the creation of gardens or the planting of trees and shrubs within the area of a grave – also the use of artificial flowers. I hope that the reason for these exclusions will be understood from what I have written earlier and that everybody will take care to observe them.

I have to say that there are a number of graves in our churchyards where these conventions have been overlooked and that this has caused considerable distress to other people. I will be making contact with the families concerned as soon as I can, but if you know that one of these is in your care I would ask you to put matters right as a priority. Please do not feel that anybody is under attack in this matter as I fully accept that many will not have realised that these rules exist at all.

Quite apart from the need to be involved with individual graves, the Clergy, Churchwardens and PCC have a responsibility for the care, husbandry and conservation of the Churchyards as a whole – and this includes the trees growing within them. Trees and their proper care are becoming an issue for us in Coltishall Churchyard particularly and I want to alert everybody to that fact. We are about to get recommendations and quotations from tree surgeons for urgently needed work in Coltishall Churchyard. We then plan an open day to which all will be invited to give their comments and be informed of the planned action. Needless to say, this will be an expensive process, but we must have a management plan in place however long term it may be. Watch this space!

Chris Walter