My brother-in-law buried his mom this week. Literally. We watched as he lowered a vault containing her casket into a hole he had dug with his excavator on his land. There was something earthy, real, pure, profound, and final in it.

Pulling onto the gravel drive of the family farm, parking near a barn being built, seeing the chairs set before a vault and the casket being laid upon the lift that would lower it, I felt that I had entered another world. It all felt very strange, very foreign. Though the funeral held all the normal rituals: prayer, eulogy, music, tears. There was something otherworldly about the burial scene.

After the final prayers, the funeral service was declared complete and the many well-wishers disbanded to go their own ways. We remained to join the immediate family at the gravesite. Before we walked to the grave, I watched as the casket was lowered into the vault and massive lid was laid on top with a mechanized mobile lift. Then my brother-in-law used a large tractor to lift the entire vault and move it to his mother’s final resting place. There was something surreal in watching the tractor slowly move the vault across the field, past a pond, and up a hill into a small clearing in the trees.

Walking with family members to the grave, I realized why this felt strange. There was no curtain between us and the tasks of the burial process. We are accustomed to a host of others who insulate us from the practicalities of death. A funeral home removes our loved one to do the things they do in those mysterious rooms behind the scenes, preparing the body for the viewing and funeral. Everything is carefully staged, the rituals are observed, we process to the gravesite, bid our farewells, and leave the heavy-lifting to others who bring the event to closure.

Standing over the grave and watching as family members tossed flowers upon the vault sitting six feet in the ground, I realized that the veil had been removed. When the first shovel of dirt was cast, I recognized the final closure of the ritual and saw the beauty of this incredibly intimate moment. A few days before, these family members had been witness to her last breaths and now they bore final witness to the close of her earthly journey. The practicalities of the funeral mechanism had become something poetic and ancient, a true coming to ground for her and for those mourning her loss. The frightening strangeness had become a beautiful farewell.

Later that night, Sally and I watched Here, a Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump) film starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. The movie portrayed time though a place – the space of a living room in a house – showing the lives that had passed though that place. We saw the stories of multiple families and got glimpses into generational challenges and the humanity dealing with them. Profound themes of relationship, marriage, children, loss, age, society/culture, women, race, work, dreams, danced across the scenes, mostly following Hanks’ and Wright’s characters as they aged. It covered a lot of ground within the human experience.

Reflecting on the day and the movie, I was filled with a sense of time and its passing. At several points during the film, one of the characters commented, “Time sure has flown by.” How many times have I heard my own voice saying those words?

A neighbor called last night to tell us of the passing of another neighbor. I thought of the veil I saw lifted at my brother-in-law’s farm and the intimate connection between the beginning and the ending of life. That intimacy can get lost in the many things, after all, life and death are filled with the practical necessities. However, with a bit of reflection, we come to recognize the intimate connection as living. Even though we can’t always live it intimately.

Many years ago, C.S. Lewis wrote that “the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.” Here is that moment. This place, right now. We cannot always rest in the intimacy of the moment – there is necessary tension, a both and dynamic that permeates our world of necessities and our capacity to pause and reflect on the moments they inhabit. However, I think my friend Steve is on to something when he characterizes fullness of life in that tension as resonance – the place where the necessary tension yields to a more sonorous intimacy.

If you can, pause for a moment today and consider time’s passing in your own life. See if you can tune-in to the intimacy of that reflection for just a moment and contemplate what it’s telling you. You may find something eternal.