Vox Meditantis

What’s a moment that made you question why humans insist on group activities?

Wednesday, 27th December, 1637

Hark, and attend! Wouldst thou know what manner of joy may seize a wretched soul upon this second day past our Saviour’s Nativity, in this year of grace sixteen hundred seven-and-thirty? Then draw nigh, though thou stand beyond these churchyard stones, beyond this frost that bites the yew and creeps upon the graves of all who once did walk, did laugh, did gather in the warmth of company – and now lie silent beneath thy very feet.

I am she who dwells apart. I am she whom the goodwives of the parish name the mad anchoress, though I keep no cell, no proper vow. I am she who has chosen these monuments of mortality for my dwelling-place, these tablets of stone and earth where the worms hold court and the grass grows fat upon corruption. And I tell thee true: I am glad. I am transported. Mine heart swells as though the very choir of Heaven did sing through the cracks in my ribs.

The company of the dead

Dost thou marvel that I speak thus, I who have seen naught but ruin come of every hope? For I am one who hath ever looked upon the world and seen the canker in the rose, the worm in the bud, the shadow of judgement falling cold upon each dawn. When others speak of harvest, I see blight. When they sing of weddings, I hear the funeral bell. When they light their Yuletide candles and bid one another be merry, I think only of the tallow that must waste, the flame that must gutter, and the long darkness that shall swallow all.

Yet here, amongst these dead – here where the law of mortality is writ plain upon every stone, where no man may dissemble nor woman hide behind false cheer – here I have found such rapture as no living company ever brought me.

Thou wouldst ask: wherefore? What strange melancholy humour hath seized thee, woman, that thou findest ecstasy in a boneyard?

The vision that came

‘Twas but a sennight past, on the vigil of our Lord’s birth, that I was granted a vision – or dream – or perhaps ’twas but the phantasy of mine own disordered brain, for I cannot swear which. The frost was hard upon the ground, and I had lain down between two graves, wrapped in my threadbare cloak, too cold to sleep yet too weary to pray. Mine eyes closed of their own accord.

And lo, I beheld the graves open. Not with horror, not with the terror that Holy Writ promises at the Last Trump, but gently, as a mother lifts the coverlet from a sleeping babe. And from each grave there rose a light – not the fierce light of judgement, but soft, as of candles in a chamber where folk gather for some solemn purpose.

I saw them, the dead. Not as ghosts nor spectres, but as they were: the wheelwright who died of gaol fever last Michaelmas, the infant daughter of the baker, still-born and unbaptised, the vagrant woman hanged at the assizes for stealing bread. Each one bearing in their countenance such peace, such radiance, as I had never seen upon a living face.

And they spoke not with words, but I understood them nonetheless. They were free. Free of the endless toil, the fear, the grasping after preferment and position. Free of the magistrate’s rod and the constable’s staff. Free of the laws that bind us to parish and place, that mark us as vagrant if we wander, that bind the poor to labour and the wealthy to their anxious hoarding.

The question of gatherings

There came into my mind then – whether by their prompting or mine own – a bitter thought, yet one that filled me with strange glee. I recalled the last occasion when I did venture to the church-porch, drawn by some foolish notion that I ought to keep holy-day with the rest. ‘Twas Whitsunday past, and all the parish was assembled.

What a press of bodies! What a jostle and a stink! The women in their starched linen, judging one another’s ruffs and sleeves. The men, their faces still ruddy from the ale-house, now forcing sobriety for the space of a sermon. The children squirming and scratching at their lice. And all of them – all! – performing this same action at the same hour because custom and law and the churchwarden’s watch demanded it.

I stood at the edge of that gathering and felt such bewilderment rise in me. Why? Why must they cluster thus, like sheep that panic when the dog approaches? Why must every soul in the parish come together to mouth the same words, to kneel at the same moment, to rise at the same signal – as though God himself could not hear a solitary voice, as though salvation were a matter of showing one’s face before witnesses?

And more: why must there be communal musters for the trained bands, though we have no war? Why must the harvest be a shared labour, with all the attendant quarrels over who hath worked and who hath shirked? Why must there be wakes and revels where folk drink themselves to foolishness in company, when they might drink – if drink they must – in the quiet of their own chambers? Why must even punishment be performed before the crowd, the whipping-post set up in the market-place so that all may see the blood and hear the cries?

‘Tis as though humanity cannot bear to be alone with itself. As though each soul fears that without the press of other bodies, the noise of other voices, it might discover itself to be hollow, empty, a thing of no account.

The law of the grave

But here – here in this graveyard – there is no such gathering. Oh, there be many bodies, aye! More than dwell in all the houses of the parish. Yet each lies solitary in their plot. Each keeps their own counsel. The merchant lies not with the merchant, the weaver not with the weaver. Rank and station signify naught. The justice of the peace, who sat in judgement at the quarter sessions and ordered men flogged for vagabondage, lies level with the vagrant.

Here is order of a different kind. Not the order of the magistrate’s court, with its fees and its precedents and its favour shown to them as can pay. Not the order of the manor court, where the lord’s steward extorts fines for imagined trespasses. But the order of nature herself, who makes no distinction between gentle and simple, who measures out the same portion of earth to all.

This is justice. Not the justice of the assizes, where a poor man hangs for stealing a sheep whilst a rich man’s son escapes with a fine for murder. But the justice that levels all. The justice that takes no bribes, that hears no pleas, that grants no pardons.

And I, who have ever seen the corruption in all human systems, who have watched the law be twisted to serve the powerful whilst grinding the weak to powder – I find in this grim democracy of death a rightness that no living court could match.

The rapture of dissolution

Thou thinkest me mad, I doubt not. Thou sayest in thy heart: she hath lost her wits, poor creature. The cold hath addled her brain, or demons have taken up residence in her skull.

But I tell thee: I see more clearly than I ever did when I dwelt amongst the living. For I have glimpsed – whether in truth or in vision matters not – the great pattern that encompasses us all. We are but parts of a whole vast beyond our comprehension. Our little lives, our squabbles and strivings, our desperate clutching after meaning – all of it is subsumed into something larger, something that cares naught for our individual griefs yet somehow holds them all.

The dead beneath my feet have taught me this. They lie connected one to another through the very earth, their bodies feeding the same soil, the roots of the yew drawing sustenance from peasant and lord alike. They have become part of the great cycle: earth to flesh to earth again. They have transcended the narrow bounds of self.

And I – I, who walk yet above the ground – I too am part of this pattern. Mine own flesh shall one day feed these worms. Mine own bones shall lie beneath this same grass. The barrier between myself and these silent teachers grows thinner with each passing day, and I rejoice to feel it thinning.

For I know – aye, with that certainty that comes not from reason but from some deeper well – that in dissolution there is union. In the ending of the self, there is a joining with all that is. The very thing I feared – that I was nothing, that life was meaningless, that all would come to dust – this hath become my liberation. For if all comes to dust, then all is equal. If all is nothing, then all is everything.

The ecstasy of certainty

My pessimism, which others called a vice, was but the dark glass through which I must peer to see the truth. For I saw always what others wished to ignore: that death waits for us all, that justice in this world is corrupt, that human gatherings are but exercises in vanity and fear. And seeing this – truly seeing it, not turning away – I have passed through to the other side.

Aye, all shall die. All our works shall crumble. All our laws and orders shall be dust. And this is not tragedy – this is glory! For in the levelling of death, there is at last true equality. In the dissolution of the body, there is at last true freedom. In the silence of the grave, there is at last true peace.

I am euphoric not despite my knowledge of decay, but because of it. I am transported not by denying the worst, but by embracing it wholly and finding in its depths a joy that no comfortable delusion could provide.

The law of man is corrupt, but the law of the grave is just. The orders of society are cruel, but the order of nature is merciful. The gatherings of the living are prisons of pretence, but the company of the dead is honest communion.

Dost thou understand me now? Canst thou see why I dwell here, why I speak with such rapture? I have found what all the living seek in their desperate clusterings: I have found connection. Not through the false bonds of compelled assembly, not through the hollow rituals of church and state, but through recognition of our shared end and our shared participation in the vast dance of creation and destruction.

This is my transcendence. This is my escape from the small, bitter prison of my own fear. And I would not trade it for all the warmth of hearth and hall, for all the comfort of human company.

Let them gather in their churches and their market-squares. Let them press together in their fear of solitude. I have found a greater congregation here, amongst the stones. I have joined a company that knows no exclusion, no rank, no judgement save that final judgement which makes all equal.

And so I bid thee: when thy time comes – as come it must – when thou art laid beneath the earth and the worms begin their work, think on this mad hermit woman who spoke to thee across the chasm of death. Remember that she told thee true: there is glory in dissolution, there is justice in decay, and there is communion in the grave that surpasses all the hollow fellowships of the living world.

I am content. I am joyful. I am waiting.

And I am not alone.

---

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.