A Thin Membrane

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

October 31, 2010

 

^Opening

^{We gather today to celebrate the fun and excitement of Halloween;}

^{Some of us love to wear costumes, others would not be caught dead in one.}

^{Some love to scare and be scared, some not so much.}

^{Some love candy, some eat too much, some need to eat less candy, some need to avoid candy entirely.}

^{We gather today to remember}

^{Those who have died – members of our families, friends, relatives, loved ones near and far,}

^{Pets whose companionship we miss.}

^{Those who have cared for us, whom we have cared for, whom we have loved.}

^{We gather today to share}

^{our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our highest aspirations, our memories, our fears and our sorrows.}

^{We gather to celebrate, to remember, and to share.}

^{Welcome all.}

^Reading

Forrest Church, Love and Death, pp. 4-7 passim.

I was raised as much by my grandmother as by my mother, who accompanied my father around the state for two years between the time I was five and seven as they ran together for the Senate. Jean Clark raised me attentively and well. She took me on Sundays to her Presbyterian church and tucked me into bed every night, where she taught me to say my prayers. "God bless Mommy. God bless Daddy. And you, Mom Mom, and Pop Pop," and—to postpone the inevitable—as many more blessings as I could tack to a single litany: Lala and Smoky. Chris. Jimmy. My guppies. The sun and the moon.

"That's enough, dear."

Like millions of other children, to close my prayer I would then repeat words once passed down to her and to her parents before her: "If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take."

Gently my grandmother would smooth and kiss my forehead. "Sleep tight, dear. Don't let the bedbugs bite."

What a curious notion of comfort, to haunt children to sleep, interjecting specters of death and biting insects: I wasn't haunted, of course; I was lulled, in the spirit of that famous lullaby: "Rocka-bye, baby, in the treetop, / When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. / When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, / And down will come baby, cradle and all."

It's difficult to imagine a panel of modern childcare professionals stamping its seal of approval on this ancient verse or on the prayer my grandmother taught me, not to mention her playful goodnight warning. Yet, something deep is at work here. The coupling of night and sleep with death and danger is not accidental. These old-fashioned bedtime runes spring from a time when death and danger were embraced as so intrinsic to human experience that parents unselfconsciously prepared themselves and their children for them every sundown. In this respect, the words do carry a powerful implicit message. By definition, life is precarious. The most protective mother, cradling her child, sometimes cannot prevent the bough from breaking. No matter how hard they try, or how often they are reminded, sleeping children cannot keep bedbugs from biting. And when, like a thief in the night, death pays a visit, we cannot pray that the door be bolted or the window shuttered, only that the Lord may keep our soul.

Reflecting back on my grandmother and her simple faith, I sense that many of us today have lost something precious. Not dogma, not a rule book, but a sense of life that did know death, that accepted all-too-human as human enough, and led to a reconciliation of human being with human love, weakness, failure, and loss.

My grandmother was remarkably ordinary, by no means saint or a sage….  She took life as it came and died at the age of ninety-six…. I don't remember … her ever complaining that life was unfair….

Given how strong she seemed and yet how quiet she was, I expect that she might have been a very different woman had she come of age today. Yet, my grandmother did appear to have understood one important thing about life that many of us resist acknowledging. She seems never to have questioned that life, by definition, is a struggle, with suffering its frequent cost and death its final price.

^Prayer

At this darkening time of the year, our thoughts turn to things past, to life retreating, to those who are no longer with us. Images come to our minds; of dear companions, who once graced our lives, loved ones whom we miss, persons whose lives made an impact on our lives; of all those who were here, contributing, caring, and are now gone.

Our memories bring both joy and sadness; let us not push these feelings away. For our recollections attest to the enduring importance of these friends, this love, our memories.

May these brave and lovely spirits live again in our tender thoughts, and prove that death and distance are powerless to sever the bonds that connect truly loving hearts.

And now, let’s take a moment to call out the names of those whom we are especially remembering on this day of celebration and memory.

…………………..

Spirit of Life, whom we know best in our own loving and being loved, hold us as we remember those we have loved, and those who have loved us. May our gratitude sparkle in our lives, may our tears lubricate our souls. Help us to know that we are not alone in our grieving, and help us also to come to that peaceful place in which we can take what we learned from those who have gone before us into our own lives. Remind us that we, too, are mortal; and that the only enduring legacy we leave is the love that shines through our lives.

 

Let’s take now a moment of remembrance, of dedication, of hope, in the silence of the bell.

 

^Sermon

Forrest Church recounts this story of how others may react to a death in our family:

I knew only this about the young couple who were driving me to the airport. Just before Thanksgiving, they had lost their eight-week-old daughter. No one knows why she stopped breathing….

As this couple and I traveled together toward the airport exchanging pleasantries, I tried to summon forth the courage to acknowledge their loss. This shouldn't have been difficult. I do it all the time. Yet, for some reason—perhaps rationalizing that they weren't my parishioners and therefore not my "responsibility"—I couldn't muster the necessary presumption to shift our conversation away from the weather and the morning news. But then Cathy and Stewart asked me about my family. "Do you have children?"

"Yes, I do."

"How old?"

I couldn't go on. Just as I was about to tell them how sorry I was about their baby's death, Stewart said matter-of-factly, "You should know that we lost our daughter this fall."

"I do know," I replied. "[Your minister] told me. Nothing is more tragic than the death of a child."

Cathy commented crisply from the backseat, "Sometimes I get the feeling that other people have a harder time dealing with it than we do. It's so real to us. We know what we've lost. But other people can't face it. They can't talk about it. They're frightened."

"They're frightened of us too," Stewart added, "as if we had some kind of disease that they might catch if they got too close."

"You're absolutely right," I said, all too knowingly. "The only taboo left, the only subject almost no one dares to talk about in polite company, is not politics or sex or religion but death."

"We're doing pretty well," he continued. "Cathy's right about that, but we sure could use some help, and not just from the therapist we're going to. On any given day, one of us may need to work on the past, just as the other is trying to break free from it and focus on the present or make future plans. Yet with the whole world, our family and friends, tiptoeing around us, we are left almost wholly dependent upon each other. Sometimes the resources just aren't there."

We went on chatting, now easily. About the conspiracy of silence concerning death. About how the most natural thing in the world has been turned into a monster that people are frightened even to name….

[As I left the car, Cathy said] in a bright, clear voice. "I know one thing.  Now, when someone I know loses a loved one, I'll be there with a casserole and all the time in the world."[i]

Halloween is a reminder of the scariness of that which is close to death – ghosts, skeletons, graves, witches, vampires – and of course of many other fancies and fantasies – superheroes, princesses, robots and a host of others.  In our society we remember a little bit of the scary part of these three days around All Hallows – toned down to be age appropriate and smoothed over with a liberal supply of chocolate, to be sure – but we forget the remembering that also goes with these three days – All Hallows Eve, All Hallows or All Saints, and All Souls.  There are many variants in Christian and other traditions in how these days are celebrated, but at least some of the themes go back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain [*Sowen*], which marked the end of the lighter part of the year and the beginning of the darker part.

The ancient Celts believed that the border between this world and the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both harmless and harmful) to pass through. The family's ancestors were honoured and invited home while harmful spirits were warded off. It is believed that the need to ward off harmful spirits led to the wearing of costumes and masks. Their purpose was to disguise oneself as a harmful spirit and thus avoid harm. In Scotland the spirits were impersonated by young men dressed in white with masked, veiled or blackened faces.[ii]

They believed that only a thin membrane separated the living and the day, particularly on this day. 

I admire the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead, of which we spoke at length last year, because it combines the complex emotions of festival fun, special treats, scary ghosts and goblins, and remembrance of loved ones at the cemetery, singing, laughing, remembering, and feeling the continuing presence of their loved ones.  They know that a thin membrane separates the living and the dead, especially at this spooky time of year.  Unlike Halloween, this festival engages the whole family, not as a competitive children’s enterprise to see who can beg or threaten tricks to score the most candy. I think the kind of isolation the parents in Forrest Church’s story would be lessened, the pain of loneliness in the face of loss would be less searing, if their friends had been willing to acknowledge death and loss and grief more openly, and to celebrate even the loss of an infant, and to mourn, and to comfort, and to be present, and bring a casserole and all the time in the world.

Our reverse trick or treating, in which our children give back fair trade chocolate to those who give them treats, is one way to counter the rampant consumerism that can infect our children at this holiday.

Most of us have lost that connection between mocking the evil spirits, the bad memories, and holding dear at the same time those whom we love who have died.  This Sunday, which by chance falls on All Hallows Eve, gives us the opportunity to remember and celebrate that odd but essential connection.

We all, of course, have also our own deaths to face.  Our responsive reading this morning reminded us of those words of wisdom from the Jewish Bible in the book of Ecclesiastes,

“For everything there is a season,

and a time for every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born, a time to die,

a time to weep, and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”

What we do here in this beloved community of memory and hope is to practice and celebrate together, to carry out an essential part of remembering those cycles of our own lives and of those we love.  As Forrest Church puts it in our centering thought this morning, “Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.”  In the face of the brute fact that as all were born, so all shall die, our task is to live a worth dying for. 

We don’t know for certain what happens after we die.  We may believe by faith that there is a sure and certain hope of resurrection; we believe, as was taught in the Jewish Bible, that we all go down to the earth, to Sheol, and know nothing further; we may believe that we will have a shadowy existence of an entirely different order, symbolized imperfectly by tales of ghosts and ephemeral appearances.  Science will never penetrate beyond that membrane between the living and the dead, no matter how thin it may be.  We do know that we have this live to live, and to live with worth and dignity; that the more we love the more we are held in blessed memory by those who remain; and that we must live out the fullness of our own capabilities and capacities.  There are those who face the prospect of death by living that old adage, “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”  Some would live out a variant of that supposed wisdom, consciously or otherwise:  “Work, eat and sleep, for death comes too soon to us all.”  Some of us would even stint on eating and sleeping, the better to and harder to work.  Some of us engage in arguments and strife with those we love, forgetting the wisdom of the words of the Buddha in the Dhammapada:

Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time:

hatred ceases by love, this is an ancient and unalterable rule.

The world does not know that we must all come to an end here,

but those who know it, their quarrels cease at once.

All of these forms of blindness to the reality of our own death shortchange the fullness of the living we ought to be doing, leaving time for every purpose under heaven.  

Although it is difficult to keep this in min, we need to remember each day the fragility and contingency of our lives.  We need to live every day such that we would be proud that it was our last day.  As the poet puts it, “Look well to this day.”  Indeed, it is the only day we have.  To look well to this day, you may wish to someone with whom you have lost touch, some loved one you have neglected to reach out to: a parent, a child, a friend, someone from whom you have been estranged.  You may have some task you need to do that needs doing to fulfill your purpose; you may have some love to offer, some caring to render.  Look well, then, to this day, for there is but a thin membrane that separates our living from our dying.  Look well to this day.

Amen.

                                                                        www.secondparish.org

Benediction

Look to this day, for it is life,

The very life of life,

In its brief course lies all the realities

And verities of existence:

The bliss of growth, the splendor of action,

The glory of power.

 

For yesterday is but a dream

And tomorrow is only a vision.

But today, well lived, makes every yesterday

A dream of happiness!

And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day!

 [Sanskrit Proverb attributed to Khalidasa]

Amen