Holes are very perplexing. Strictly speaking, they don’t exist. The term “hole” refers not to something physical, but to the absence of something. You cannot create a hole in the ground. You can only remove ground. It is the void that is left that we call a hole.

This is especially true in the case of a hole that is dug for a grave. This kind of hole doesn’t even have the dignity of being dug for a positive purpose. A hole that is dug for a tunnel, or a hole that unearths something of value, is at least given a role to play in producing something worthwhile. The hole of a grave is nothing more than an emptiness containing even more emptiness.

Perhaps that is why cemeteries scare us so much. It is not, in fact, because there is a presence there, but because there is nothing there. A cemetery is a rift, a rupture in the fabric of time and space that slowly and sinisterly engulfs the universe around it into a vacuum. The black hole at the center of the galaxy is not nearly as strong. It is only a single hole, after all, but there are hundreds of graves in a cemetery, and each one greedily and thirstily extracts the existence of an entire human life from the continuum of history. All the influences and decisions, every infinitude of rational thought and emotion, the torrential and voluminous power of love itself, is swallowed whole by a 6-foot depression in the soil.

Yet even this is not the deepest hole. There is a hole of a completely different kind, one that does not so much swallow as channel, like a canyon, or a crater being imprinted into the earth by the release of volcano. This is not a hole of emptiness, but rather openness. It is a hole that does not swallow or usurp anything. It is a wound that is inflicted through selflessness and sacrifice. It is a mouth opened to sing praises. It is an empty tomb.

This hole is still an absence, but it is not a void. It is the removal of pain, the uprooting of doubt and fear. It is a treasure that is unearthed. It is a passageway to life everlasting. Light cannot escape a black hole, and this kind of hole does not eliminate the other kind, but it enters it and overturns it from within. Cemeteries will never stop scaring us, and the whirlpool of the grave will never cease to swallow up the very fabric of time and space, but our hope lies beyond time and space. Look beyond the hedges of the graveyard. There you will see the church. The granite obelisks of headstones loom high and cast sour shadows, but the steeple reaches even higher, and the golden cross atop it bears the rays of the sun.

“Where O death, is thy victory?

Where, O death, is thy sting?”

-Corinthians 15:55