St Oswald’s Church, Howell

St Oswald’s Church at Howell in Lincolnshire is a veritable treasure house. It is still lit by candles, which populate large candelabras hanging from the roof. Pointed gothic arches meet rounded, Norman ones, from a previous age. Pious Elizabethan gentry are memorialised on the walls, while in the porch rests a thousand-year-old coffin lid.

It has a fine website for a small, rural church, though it speaks little of its overtly spiritual life, to which I can offer little comment. But to the architectural and social historian, there is enough at St Oswald’s to set the heart racing. And the eyes a-weeping.

There is a peculiar gravestone belonging to a woman attired in the garb of the fourteenth-century, gazing out from what appears to be a model of her coffin. To her right, however, and there is a little trefoil, out of which peeps a child, probably a boy. This is likely her beloved son from whom she was parted by his early death. So great was her grief and her longing to be reunited, that here they lay, carved and buried together, till the day of resurrection.

A dead child is one of the arch-tragedies of any parent’s life and this nameless woman likely grieved till her last breath. I hope she trusted in the Lord Jesus' finished work and that both may somehow be united, not as mother and son, for such relationships might not exist before the Throne, but as brother and sister, as fellow saints, as co-heirs with Christ.

And they said, “He is dead.”

So David arose from the ground, washed and anointed himself, and changed his clothes; and he went into the house of the Lord and worshiped. Then he went to his own house; and when he requested, they set food before him, and he ate. Then his servants said to him, “What is this that you have done? You fasted and wept for the child while he was alive, but when the child died, you arose and ate food.”

And he said, “While the child was alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, ‘Who can tell whether the Lord will be gracious to me, that the child may live?’ But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.”

2 Samuel 12:19-23, NKJV