Reinhardt, Clifford

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

ConsensusVolume 21Issue 2 Aspects of Ecumenity Article 811-1-1995Remember meClifford ReinhardtFollow this and additional works at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensusThis Sermons is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Consensus by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationReinhardt, Clifford (1995) "Remember me," Consensus: Vol. 21 : Iss. 2 , Article 8.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol21/iss2/8“Remember me”Clifford ReinhardtPastor, Grace Lutheran Church,Burnaby, British ColumbiaTexts: Festival of All SaintsOne summer morning in 1979, we rolled into the yard ofa Ukrainian Catholic church near the village of Macdowell,Saskatchewan. Like so many other country church yards inSaskatchewan, this one was bordered on three sides by cara-ganas, and fenced all around. But on this particular churchyard, the caraganas were overgrown and the fence sagged withthe weight of rotten posts. Tall grass grew up around the foun-dations of the church and throughout the yard.No one met us at the gate.We came with big diesel trucks, 20-ton hydraulic jacks, steelbeams, other related equipment, and a crew of four. We werebuilding movers. We had come to move the church.This old church building had been bought by a Pentecostalcongregation in Prince Albert. Although I wasn’t informed ofthe details. I’m guessing that the Ukrainian Catholic congre-gation which had first built and used it had dwindled, like somany rural congregations, to the point where it existed only inname, and was now disposing of its assets.It was a large building as country churches go—certainlylarger than our building here at Grace in Burnaby. And in spiteof the fact that it had not been used for some years and showedsigns of neglect, it was still fairly sound. It still housed pews,some of which contained worship books printed in Ukrainian,with English-language leaflets tucked between the pages.We sized up the job and got to work.Now, building moving necessarily involves some destructiveaction—like pulling the front steps off the building. We rarely104 Consensustoyed with niceties. We just loosened up the minimum numberof nails, hooked on a big cable, and yanked it off with the winch (truck. We had to smash a lot of concrete, too. What youneeded for that was a 12-pound sledge hammer, all the muscleyou could muster, and a good set of lungs.Ordinarily, a job is a job, right? You’re paid to do yourwork, so you go in, and you do it to the best of your abil-ity. Well, personally, I felt kind of funny—swinging my sledgehammer and chipping away at concrete walls which dedicatedhands had helped pour; brutalizing wooden steps and trimwork which was simply in the way as far as we were concerned,but was in a sense a memorial to the volunteers who had cutand shaped and nailed and painted.I couldn’t shake this feeling that somehow we were violat-ing the site—that we were undoing a work which had beenordained by no one less that God. On the other hand, it wasjust a building. We all know that the church is not buildings,but first and foremost, a people—a people saved, re-created,and called into mission by God. The church is the communionof saints.And still I was troubled by a feeling that we were disman-tling a trust, treading on memories, desecrating a holy ground.Of course, the truth of the matter was that for all intentsand purposes the congregation had simply died. The people ofthis particular communion of saints were gone, their church siteuntended and forgotten. What we were dismantling wasn’t in-tended to last forever, anyway. And yet when we trampled thesite, pulled things apart, smashed concrete, cut electrical wires,and generally made ready in our rough way to lift the buildingoff its foundations and move it to a new site—somehow, allthat made me feel uneasy.And so I was particularly disturbed when we discoveredthat we had parked our equipment in the church’s cemetery.We hadn’t realized it when we had pulled in. When we haddriven up with our diesel engines snorting, we just rolled into aconvenient open space. The long, unmown grass had obscuredthe few graves clustered to one side of the church building.We made this discovery just as we were making ready tostart jacking the building. We had gone back to the loadsof steel beams and timbers and blocking, and suddenly no-ticed the small headstones, weather-worn and bereft of flowers.Remember Me 105Small headstones marking small rectangular plots in the vastsweep of the Saskatchewan prairie. Tall native grass slowlyreclaiming the land which had been broken by the pioneer-ing homesteaders. No flowers brought by surviving familymembers..perhaps because there were no families left. Thegraves of the saints, like the catacombs of ancient times, for-lorn and forgotten.Now, I’m not a superstitious person; graveyards don’t dis-turb me. But something which I had come to learn to respectdeeply when I moved out to Saskatchewan was the abiding con-tribution which Christ’s saints had made to the church as wellas to the land and its people.They had so little. Their prospects were so meager whilethey lived and breathed. I believed that in death they oughtat least to be permitted their small rectangles of land. At leastthis humble possession ought to be respected and safeguardedand remembered, even if there was no one left to bring flowersto these graves.I asked the boss if we could take a little extra time andmove the trucks and equipment. He agreed.So we took the three-quarters-of-an-hour required to hookthe trucks back up and then move the equipment to a differentplace on the site (we first kicked through the long grass to makesure that there were no more graves to disturb). Then we piledup some debris at the corners of the small graveyard so thatwe would know where it was and wouldn’t drive over it again.And then we went back to work. We jacked the churchbuilding off the old, weatherworn concrete, mounted it on steelbeams, rolled it off its original foundation, loaded it onto axlesand wheels and a Mack truck, and eventually drove it away.The building was granted a new lease on life. It was goingto be restored to good use by living, breathing Christians—not Ukrainian Catholics, now, but Pentecostal Christians witha style that Ukrainian Catholics would not likely understandbut Christians nevertheless.The building enjoyed a luxury which was denied the saintswho had first built it. They had but one life to live on thisearth, before being reclaimed by that earth. They live on onlyin memories, their places perhaps marked by flowers placed bytheir survivors. And when there are no more survivors, the106 Consensussaints lie forgotten. They can only await the resurrection of allthe saints.Because I was driving the winch truck that day, I was thelast one to drive out of the old church yard. I stopped justoutside the gate. Down the road ahead of me, I could seethe church building slowly heading west on the country road,brown diesel exhaust billowing over its roof. I looked back atthe church yard one last time. Its reason for being had beenviolated, first by death and now by us. The site had beenrendered useless as far as its original purpose was concerned.I looked at the little graveyard obscured by the tall grassand marked out only by our shabby piles of debris, its head-stones undistinguished by fiowers.I looked one last time at things forgotten. And I shifted thetruck into gear and drove away.I can only trust that God in heaven will smile down uponGod’s saints dead and living and place upon their lives God’sown marker: a single fiower budding from the stem of Jesse, arose always blooming...Jesus Christ.

Remember me

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Remember me

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