Soul Force

All Saints and All Souls

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

November 1, 2009

Readings Matthew 5:1-12

“Love and Death,” Forrest Church

We gather on All Saints Day today, an occasion to consider those we have lost and indeed our own mortality. A day when we might come to resent the unfairness of death. Forrest Church offers the following meditation:

“What did I do to deserve this?” we ask when things turn against us, forgetting that we did nothing to deserve being placed in the way of trouble and joy in the first place. The odds against each one of us being here this morning to pose such a question are so mind-staggering that they cannot be computed....

Consider the odds more intimately. Your parents had to couple at precisely the right moment for the one possible sperm to fertilize the one possible egg that would result in your conception. Right then, the odds were still a million to one against your being the answer to the question your biological parents were consciously or unconsciously posing. And that’s just the beginning of the miracle. The same unlikely happenstance must repeat itself throughout the generations. Going back ten generations, this miracle must repeat itself one thousand times— one million two hundred fifty thousand times going back only twenty generations.... From the turn of the twelfth century until today, we each have, mathematically speaking, approximately two and a half million direct ancestors. This remarkable pyramid turns in upon itself, of course, with individual ancestors participating in multiple lines of generation, until we trace ourselves back to when our ur-ancestors, the founding couple, whom each one of us carries in our bones, began the inexorable process that finally gave birth to us all, kith and kin, blood brothers and sisters of the same mighty mystery.

[Of course,] each of these ancestors had to live to puberty.... and not only did all our human ancestors survive puberty to mate at the one and only instant that the requisite egg and sperm might connect to keep our tiny odds for arrival alive, but their prehuman ancestors ... our premammalian ancestors, and back from there all the way to the ur-paramecium [– all had to meet and meet at just the right time]; and then, beyond that, to the pinball of planets and stars, playing out their agon into diurnal courses, spinning back through time to the big bang itself. Mathematically, our death is a simple inevitability, whereas our life hinges on an almost infinite sequence of perfect accidents. First a visible and then an invisible thread connects every one of us in unbroken line genetically and kinetically to the instant of creation. Think about it. The universe was pregnant with us when it was born.[i]

Today, November 1^st, is the traditional day for the Feast of All Souls. Although celebrated officially by the Roman Church in remembrance of saints and especially martyrs of the church since at least the time of Charlemagne, more than 1,000 years ago, the feast has much deeper roots in pagan practices as well. In Germany, for example, this day was observed as a harvest celebration, and when peasant farmers brought in the hay from the field, they would break the first straw and offer it as food for the dead, who were thought to be especially near at hand as the year turned the corner toward winter and the dying of the light.

The Celtic celebration of Samhain [SOW-wen] carries forward some of the earlier pre-Christian practices; this holiday is celebrated by Wiccans as the most important of their four quarter days – the turning points of the year. Anne Lafferty describes the Dumb Supper, a common Wiccan ritual which is representative of this tradition:

The table is laden with potluck dishes. There is a place setting for each person present, as well as one in front of an empty chair. This place is for the Beloved Dead, who are being honored by this meal. The first plate filled is given to them. The living eat in silence, thinking about their ancestors and others they cared about who have passed on. When the meal is over, the leftover food, including the food that was on the plate for the spirits of the dead, is taken outside and placed on the ground.[ii]

At this same time of year Diwali, the Festival of Lights, is celebrated in Hindu tradition, and it, too, marks the end of autumn the beginning of winter. El Dia de los Muertos, of which we spoke to the children this morning, is one of the most complex celebrations of this hinge of the seasons, combining mockery of death with loving memory of the dead. I first encountered a Unitarian Universalist celebration of this tradition at Arlington Street Church while I was serving there as ministerial intern a few years ago. There we created an altar where members of the congregation could bring mementos of those who had been loved and lost and provided a ritual of remembrance to mark the day. It was a wonderful celebration of memory and hope which allowed grief and healing to flow together freely.

Of course, Halloween, the eve of All Hallows or All Saints, remains as the reminder – somewhat diluted – of all these ancient celebrations of this hinge of the seasons when the departed are especially close and when we can imagine ghosts and skeletons walking about. Fright is one of the hallmarks of the contemporary celebration of Halloween, and movies which bring back a wonderful eery chill are featured in all-night programs at some of our theaters and on TV. On the other hand, it seems to me that Halloween – especially commercialized as it is – lacks some of the depth of a celebration like El Dia de los Muertos, in part because our North American culture as a whole tries to minimize our awareness of death. We are surrounded by appeals to youthfulness, to the possibility of remaining “Forever Young,” as the song goes. I was once part of a circle of friends who tried their best to shield our children – and ourselves – from any awareness of death whenever possible. On one occasion, a friend whose children had a pet bird that died desperately went around to myriad pet stores to find a replacement that looked as much like the dead bird as possible, and then declared that evening that, despite slight incongruities, the bird was indeed the original bird. I have heard of families who bought a dog to replace one that had died, acting as though the new dog was the indeed the same old dog. Of course, this becomes much more difficult with people, who do indeed die and can’t just be replaced with other people. And indeed death comes to us all; grandparents like Pablo’s abuelita from our story this morning, aunts and uncles, parents and even children – all we humans are subject to death. Peter Morales, the new president of our Unitarian Universalist Association, elected at this past June’s General Assembly in Salt Lake City, reminds us of the wisdom of his own Hispanic traditional celebration of El Dia de los Muertos:

If we dismiss the Day of the Dead as pure superstition, we can easily miss the profound spiritual and psychological insight that makes this tradition powerful. A Mexican boy spending the night at his uncle’s grave has a connection across time with his forebears that our children do not. While we dwellers in a technological age are connected to the World Wide Web, cellular phones, and cable TV, [while we] have message machines, voice mail, pagers and call waiting, we have cut ourselves off from the web of time. Traditional cultures, with their mediums and ghosts and reincarnations, have understood intuitively something we’ve repressed: the dead don’t die; they live on.[iii]

I believe we do a disservice to our children and to ourselves when we deny the reality of death in our midst. Indeed, living with death is at the very heart of the religious enterprise. As Forrest Church puts it in our centering thought this morning: “If religion is our human response to being alive and having to die, the purpose of life is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.”[iv]

Perhaps we can gather some wisdom from the ancient traditions which celebrated this day of the turning of the seasons and remembrance of those who have passed on before us. In doing so, it seems to me wise to combine two aspects of these traditions: First, the memory of those who have passed on before us, all the saints – to remember out loud. And then, second, to bring to mind our own mortality and to consider how we might apply that awareness to how we choose to live each day.

Part of the process of mourning and remembering involves accompanying those precious to us who are beginning their journey to another place. As we have professionalized the process of dying, we have lost some of the intimate reality of this process. As Forrest Church puts it:

When grandparents, parents, even children died at home, death was an inescapable presence in our lives. Today, shielded from intimacy with death by the cold, mechanically invasive and antiseptic chambers of hospitals, we lose touch with how natural, even sacramental, death can be. If we insulate ourselves from death we lose something precious, a sense of life that does know death, that elevates human to humane, that reconciles human being with human loss.

The word human has a telling etymology: human, humane, humility, humus. Dust to dust, the mortar of mortality binds us fast to one another. All true meaning is shared meaning.[v]

I am glad that the widening availability of hospice care allows us to return to some of the more traditional experience of intimacy when death comes among us; I believe we need to honor these passages rather than ignoring them. Nor are we doing favors to our children when we try to shield them from the reality of mortality. My mother tells the story of how her father, already sixty when she was born, experienced a heart attack when she was quite young. When another friend of the family died soon after, her older sister insisted that my mother attend the funeral so that her first experience of mourning would not be for her own father. When my mother’s granddaughter Rachel was devastated by the death of her great-grandfather, my mother told her that story to help her understand that death comes to us all and that in mourning comes healing for the loss. Just so, the celebrations of All Souls, Samhain, El Dia de los Muertos and Diwali all provide us an opportunity to remember out loud each year those who have passed on.

These festivals also remind us of our own mortality and the tasks that face us the living. The remind us that we need to answer the question of how we shall live in the face of the reality that we, too, will someday leave this precious life. There are days when we don’t feel especially saintly; the Christian calendar contains two feasts, back to back. All Saints day, or All Hallows, celebrates the heroes and martyrs of the faith, while tomorrow, the feast of All Souls, offers an opportunity to pray for those less saintly, who are thought to be in Purgatory. We Unitarian Universalists take a broader view of who will ultimately be saved, and a remarkable number of our churches bear the name “All Souls” in honor of our traditional Universalist belief that all souls will ultimately be reconciled and saved, including our churches in New York, Tulsa, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Washington, D.C., Shreveport, LA, New London, CT, Greenfield, MA, and of course our local Braintree congregation.

The Latin phrase memento mori – remember that you must die, that you are mortal – became in the Middle Ages a dread reminder of the nearness of death. It originated, however, in a custom of the Roman Empire where conquering generals in the midst of their triumphal marches through the streets of Rome were accompanied by a servant constantly repeating memento mori – remember at this moment of greatest exaltation in your life that you will die.

Since we know we will die – since living with the awareness of dying is at the heart of our religious tasks – it is well that we be reminded on the occasion of this day of All Saints to set about the work of reconciliation in our lives, to ask questions like “How do I want to leave things when I go?” and “What work do I need to get done while life remains?” and “What is in my power to do?”

Let us take this opportunity to remember well those who were dear to us and are no longer present among us, and to apply the knowledge of our mortality to our own living day by day.

As Forrest Church contemplated his own impending death, he became increasingly committed to his life mantra:

Do what you can.

Want what you have.

Be who you are.[vi]

Let us use the wisdom this day brings to live more fully in these days we are given.

Amen www.secondparish.org