Cemetery touches hearts of the faithful
After scrubbing gravestones for three hours on a recent Saturday at St. Augustine’s Cemetery with 50 other concerned citizens and sipping on a bottle of cold water, a rabbi from New Hampshire on the restoration team looked over at me and said, “Did anyone ever tell you that you look a lot like Ray Flynn?”
Almost too exhausted to reply, I had to catch my breath before I could say anything. But Mary Joyce, realizing that the rabbi didn’t know who I was, said, “That is Ray Flynn.”
I politely introduced myself and asked his name and where he was from. I might have asked him why he was at this brutally hot Catholic cemetery as part of the upcoming 200th anniversary celebration scheduled for Sept. 15 in South Boston.
But listening to him tell the fascinating history of this oldest chapel and cemetery in Massachusetts, while others joined in with so many additional interesting stories, once again reminded me of the loyalty and dedication that people have for their faith.
No matter how many negative things they hear or bad stories they read, they are not about to give up on what they believe.
This wasn’t just sitting in an air-conditioned church attending a half-hour Mass, this was a 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. labor of love for the church. We had committed citizens, Congressman Steve Lynch, City Councilor Ed Flynn, local media and Father Robert Casey all helping out in a show of unity.
The gravestones go back over 150 years and some weren’t even recognizable, so a lot of hard scrubbing was going on. All the volunteers, myself included, slept soundly that night. The pride that the peo- ple of the community have for this historic cemetery is remarkable.
But there was one scene I will never forget: Just after getting our scrub brushes and cleaning chemicals, my special-needs grandson, Braeden, wanted to get right to work. Looking out at all the unrecognizable epitaphs on the headstones that needed work, he spotted this small but severely disfigured statue of Jesus crucified. He immediately went across the cemetery and spent the next two hours scrubbing the statue.
When he was finished, one of older volunteers said to us, “I have been coming to this historic chapel since I got discharged from the Army after the Korean War. The statute of Jesus looks beautiful. Who did it?”
But the question in my mind is, of all the gravestones in the cemetery, why did Braeden pick the most damaged one of Jesus?