All Saints and All Souls

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

October 30, 2011

Reading:  Martin Buber, “The Angel and the World’s Dominion” from Tales of Angels Spirits & Demons, New York:  Hawk’s Well Press, 1958, pp. 9-11.      

There was a time when the Will of the Lord, Whose hand has the power to create and destroy all things, unleashed an endless torrent of pain and sickness over the Earth. The air grew heavy with the moisture of tears, and a dim exhalation of sighs clouded it over. Even the legions that surround His throne were not immune to the hovering sadness. One angel, in fact, was so deeply moved by the sufferings he saw below, that his soul grew quite restless….   He could no longer understand why death and deprivation need serve as connecting links in the great Chain of Events. Then one day … the Lord called him by name and gently touched his lips. The angel … begged God to place the administration of the Earth in his hands for a year's time, that he might lead it to an era of well-being.   [God looked at the angel] with great love, and He [agreed to put the angel in charge of the Earth for a year] ….

And so a year of joy and sweetness visited the Earth. The shining angel poured the great profusion of his merciful heart over the most anguished of her children, on those who were benumbed and terrified by want. The groans of the sick and dying no longer disturbed the world's deep, surging harmony….  When summer was at its height, people moved singing through the full, yellow fields; never had such abundance existed in the memory of living man. At harvest time, it seemed likely that the walls would burst or the roofs fly off, if they were going to find room to store their crops.

Proud and contented, the shining angel basked in his own glory….

But one cold day, late in the year, a multitude of voices rose heavenwards in a great cry of anguish. Frightened by the sound, the angel journeyed down to the Earth and, dressed as a pilgrim, entered the first house along the way. The people there, having threshed the grain and ground it into flour, had then started baking bread—but, alas, when they took the bread out of the oven, it fell to pieces, and the pieces were unpalatable; they filled the mouth with a disgusting taste, like clay. And this was precisely what the Angel found in the second house and in the third and everywhere that he set foot. People were lying on the floor, tearing their hair and cursing the King of the World, who had deceived their miserable hearts with His false blessing.

The angel flew away and collapsed at his Master's feet. “Lord,” he cried, “help me to understand where my power and judgment were lacking.”

Then God raised his voice and spoke: “Behold a truth which is known to me, and only to me from the beginning of time, a truth too deep and dreadful for your delicate, generous hands, my sweet apprentice —it is this, that the Earth must be nourished with putrefaction and covered with shadows that its seeds may bring forth life — and it is this, that souls must be made fertile with flood and sorrow, that through them the Great-Work may be born.”

Sermon:  All Saints and All Souls                     -Rev. Paul Sprecher

Henri Nouwen tells this story of Befriending Death:

On December 31, 1992 … Maurice Gould died. He died … after a long struggle with Alzheimer's disease.

Maurice—"Moe," as we called him—had been a member of L'Arche, … a worldwide network of communities where people with mental disabilities and their assistants create home for one another. Maurice had made his home in the L'Arche Daybreak community in Toronto for fourteen years. He was known for his joyfulness, gentleness, and love of home. The countless people who met him over the years speak about him with much endearment. Somehow his condition – a Down's syndrome—seemed only the other side of his great gift: to give and receive love….

I knew at once that I must return to Toronto as soon as possible to be with Moe's family and many friends and to experience with them the sorrow of his leaving, as well as the joy of his fifty-eight fulfilling years of life….

During the eight-and-one-half-hour flight, I thought not only about [Moe] and these questions, but also about my other dying friends and my aging father….

People are dying. Not just the few I know, but countless people everywhere, every day, every hour. Dying is the most general human event, something we all have to do. But do we do it well? Is our death more than an unavoidable fate that we simply wish would not be? Can it somehow become an act of fulfillment, perhaps more human than any other human act?

When I arrived … in Toronto, [I learned that] family and friends had been with Moe during his last hours. Both sadness and gladness had been there. A beautiful friend had left us. A long suffering had come to a gentle end. "Moe was so much loved by everyone," [my friend] Nathan said. "We will miss him, but it was time for him to go…."[i]

“It was time for him to go.”  Blessed are those whose time has come and who can then let go.  Not all dying is timely so.  Too many the world over die before it is time, in ways that may be violent, or preventable, or just tragic; illness, accident, famine take far too many, and we cannot help but wish that we could be that angel in Martin Buber’s story who stopped all the suffering of the world, only to learn the secret of all of our living, “it is this, that the Earth must be nourished with putrefaction and covered with shadows that its seeds may bring forth life — and it is this, that souls must be made fertile with flood and sorrow, that through them the Great-Work may be born.”

It is a blessing to be able to prepare for death when it comes; it is a blessing for both the dying and those they love to be able to say goodbye; it is a blessing to die gently and at peace.  But every life ends no matter how much care we take and how blessed we may be in its manner. 

And when we have loved and lost, we the living have only the memories that we carry in our hearts, and it is fitting to take a day like this to caress those memories, to look over the photographs, to remember, to mourn – but also to rejoice.  As we move from the warmth to the cold of the year, ancient rituals help us to carry out this necessary and fulfilling work.  Halloween is a reminder of the scariness of the things that are associated with death – ghosts, skeletons, graves, witches, vampires, zombies – and of course the 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 sometimes we neglect 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 – most festively in the Mexican Day of the Dead – but at least some of the themes go back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, 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 honored and invited home while harmful spirits were warded off….[ii]

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

In the ancient Christian tradition, there are two feasts to remember those who have departed:  All Saints, for those of particular virtue, and All Souls to remember everyone who has died.  As our traditions have grown and developed, we have come to see that all souls are sacred, that all lives are a mixture of the best that humans can achieve and the worst to which we can sink, and that for most of our time we lead our lives somewhere in between our best and our worst.  Our Universalist theology teaches that all souls will be saved, without regard to our deeds – whether for good or for ill – because God is Love and in that loving reconciles all.  That there is such love inspires us to live as much as we can in the light and to avoid as much as we can the darkness.

We gather together soon after a loved one has died to have a memorial service and create the beginnings of a tapestry of memories that will help contain our grief.  It is fitting that this afternoon we are holding a memorial service in memory of Carleton Kemp, whose family brought the flowers for today’s service.  It is also fitting for all of us to find a time each year to strengthen that tapestry and to renew our gratitude for the lives we have been privileged to share.  And so today we come together in this beloved community of memory and hope to take that time. 

In our own living, if we are wise, we have learned to know that there are seasons to life, times of gladness and times of sorrow, times of joy and times of pain, times of elation and times of depression.  As is said in the third chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Jewish Bible:

“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.”

This is a time for taking stock of our own lives, a time to bring to mind our highest aspirations, the ideals we have set for ourselves, the virtues of forgiveness to reconnect shattered relationships and to remember that what is past is now gone, and that what remains for us each day is to renew our commitments and to participate yet again in the healing of our world and of the frayed web of relationships in which we live each day.  We sometimes become forgetful that we, too, are mortal, and that each day is precious, each day is an opportunity to hark back to what most ennobles us.

Although it is difficult to keep this in mind, we need to remember each day the fragility and contingency of our lives.  We need to live each day such that we would be satisfied if it were 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 call someone with whom you have lost touch, some loved one to whom you have neglected to reach out: a parent, a child, a friend, perhaps someone from whom you have been estranged.  You may have some task to do to fulfill your highest ideals; 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.

As Henri Nouwen returned to his community to join in saying goodbye to his friend Moe, he used the opportunity to consider the larger realities of living and dying.  He remembers that during his flight back to Canada,

I thought a great deal about life and death and began to wonder how our dying can be as much our own as our living….

I had ample time to think about dying: Maurice's dying, my own dying, and the dying of so many people every day all over the world.

Is death something so terrible and absurd that we are better off not thinking or talking about it? Is death such an undesirable part of our existence that we are better off acting as if it were not real? Is death such an absolute end of all our thoughts and actions that we simply cannot face it? Or is it possible to befriend our dying gradually and live open to it, trusting that we have nothing to fear? Is it possible to prepare for our death with the same attentiveness that our parents had in preparing for our birth? Can we wait for our death as for a friend who wants to welcome us home?[iii]

And so here at Second Parish, this is the challenge that we face today and every day.  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, the one day that we are given.

May we do so, and Amen.

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