Proper to grow wise in?.

Another perfect, cold day saw me pottering in Holy Trinity graveyard after a rehearsal for Advent Evensong. It was early afternoon, the only clouds were vapour trails, there was no wind. We had sung plainsong and harmony and now it was peaceful and I was thinking Philip Larkin - specifically his great poem Church Going. At the end of the last stanza, the poet talks about the ground where a church may have been in the past as ground which it may be proper to grow wise in, "if only that so many dead lie round".

Later, as dusk gathered, I returned to the church to make the Advent Wreath. I remarked to my fellow wreath-maker that these annually-repeated rituals don't half compress your life, in the sense that it seems little time since we last hauled out the (rather rusty) metal stand and covered it in frankly pagan-looking greenery. Perhaps that is part of wisdom, when we realise the brevity of human life ...

A serious house on serious earth it is.