THE symbol “x”, signifying a kiss, was inappropriate for a headstone over a grave in consecrated ground, the Commissary Court of the diocese of Canterbury ruled, on a petition for a faculty to replace a headstone in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Great Chart, Ashford.
The petitioner for the faculty, Nigel Champion, wished to replace the memorial to his late parents, Frederick Edward Champion and Doreen Patricia Champion, who were buried in the churchyard in 1972 and 2020 respectively. He proposed a double headstone in materials and proportions which were in accordance with the relevant churchyard regulations.
The design appended to the petition included two small engraved pictorial images of a dove and a stairway to heaven in the upper part of the headstone, neither of which gave rise to any objections. There were objections, however, to two elements of the design in the bottom half of the headstone. These were a pair of carved swans, which, the petitioner said, were his mother’s favourite, and the letter “x”, meaning a kiss, which was placed at the end of a poem which had been written by the petitioner’s daughter for his mother’s funeral.
The objector to the proposed headstone stated that the image of the swans was too big, that swans were of no spiritual significance, and that the “x” should not be included. The DAC had also indicated that the “x” was out of place.
The Commissary General, Robin Hopkins, said that the petitioner had been accommodating, receptive to dialogue, and had shown a willingness to compromise. There was another headstone with a similar swan motif in the churchyard, and there were several headstones featuring pictorial images chosen for their resonance with the deceased rather than their Christian connotations. Such images included a hockey player and musical notes.
The Commissary General decided to grant the faculty for the headstone design as detailed in the petition, but with the omission of the “x” kiss symbol. Although there was another headstone in the churchyard containing an “x” symbol, that was not of itself sufficient to justify permitting it. The symbol was “not appropriate”, he said, and it “conveyed a tone that was excessively casual and informal” befitting “transitory person-to-person communication but not a permanent message on consecrated ground that serves future generations as well as the current one”.
Although the swan imagery had no obvious Christian connotation, the Commissary General was persuaded that swans were sufficiently important to the petitioner’s mother “as to be in some material way symbolic of her in the eyes of her family”.
The proposed extract from the poem was unconventional for a headstone, but it deployed Christian imagery (for example, “shepherd” and “dove”), and, again, was important to how the petitioner and his family encapsulated the faith and outlook of his late mother.
The faculty was granted for the petitioner’s proposed design, with the omission of the “x” kiss symbol. The Commissary General was satisfied that the diversity of headstones in this churchyard and the cumulative effect of several headstones erected in recent decades, meant that the petitioner’s proposed headstone would not cause material disharmony with this churchyard setting.