As many of you know I have walked through many of the cathedrals in Europe, both on pilgrimages with other St. Bartians and on my own personal travel with Nina and other friends. One of the things you notice as you walk through the various cathedrals and abbeys is that there are a lot of people buried under the floors - thousands, in fact.

Westminster Abbey in London is essentially an indoor graveyard with the remains of dozens of famous and infamous people tucked under the stones or in the niches of that ancient place.

In Bath Cathedral, some 6,000 people are buried beneath the floors. So many that it has created an underground void that threatens the stability of the church building. While a “great cloud of witnesses” is certainly present in the nave as people worship in these places, there’s also a great number of moldy saints under the flagstones!

One of my favorite places in Europe is St. John's on Malta. Although the method of marking the burials is much more understated. Yes, a couple of stone sarcophagi near the altar serve as monuments to abbots buried there, but to see the other burial places, you have to look closer. In fact, this cathedral, built by the order of St. John, has many of its knights buried under the Nave. There is something very strange about walking on the graves of these knights and recognizing that their engraved names and dates are being worn off by foot traffic. But just outside the walls of this famous church, you will find something special. On the perimeter of the nave, there are small circles filled with pebbles cemented in place.

Some have more pebbles than others and there are no names attached to these small silent monuments. But they are grave markers nonetheless. They are the graves of the many servants to the Knights who once served in the crusades.

During my visit, the members of the community told us that these grave markers were unique in that the pebbles came from the beaches of the island - the same beaches where their predecessors landed during the crusades.

The differing number of pebbles, I was told, indicates how many years each of these servants served in that particular Abbey, a monastery on in the Crusades - one pebble for each year of service. These little circles of pebbles stand as a silent witness to lives lived for Christ in a faraway place.

I found these little stone monuments to be far more compelling than any of the elaborate gravestones I have seen around the world because each stone represents a year of tragedy and triumph, years of wrestling with God’s call, years of praying seven times a day, years of endless chanting of psalms, and years meeting the needs of others who came to Malta for respite and hospitality.

Even before they became grave markers, these little pebbles had spent thousands of years being rolled and shaped by the sea, perhaps all the way back to the time of creation. They are monuments to a short period of time in the midst of the long story of God.

The symbolism intrigued me, so I picked up some rocks from the beach on Malta and carried them home. I look at those stones as I write this story and I’m grateful for every single one and for the years of great joy and even granite-like hardship they represent.

They are the building blocks of a life of ministry. Those living Stones represent to me what the late Eugene Peterson called “a long obedience in the direction of God.”

As I write this I am grateful for the “living stones” with whom I serve here at St. Bart's every day. As Peter wrote to the church of his day, “Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:4-5).

My prayer is that we will continue to build a spiritual house together out of the stones of years spent serving others and helping them to become more like the “living stone” of Christ Jesus himself.