El Dia De Los Muertes:

Service of Memory and Love

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

November 3, 2002

When sorrow comes, let us accept it simply, as a part of life.

Let the heart be open to pain; let it be stretched by it.

All the evidence we have says that this is the better way.

An open heart never grows bitter.

Or if it does, it cannot remain so.

Anguish, like ecstasy, is not forever.

There comes a gentleness, a returning quietness, a restoring stillness.

This, too, is a door to life.

Here, also, is a deepening of meaning - and it can lead to dedication;

a going forward to the triumph of the soul,

the conquering of the wilderness. A. Powell Davies

Readings

Stephen Spender:

What is precious is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields

See how these names are feted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life

Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.

Born of the sun they travelled a short while towards the sun,

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Fred Hoyle:

"Perhaps the most majestic feature of our whole existence is that while our intelligences are powerful enough to penetrate deeply into the evolution of this quite incredible Universe, we still have not the smallest clue to our own fate."

FRED HOYLE

Sermon

I stood with a friend this week in Columbia City, Indiana, in a room with pale pink moirι drapes and looked for the first time at her father.  At eighty five he was crisply dressed by the undertaker in a fine suit, well-groomed – looking nearly dapper.  He had a sweet face and I found myself wishing that I had met him in life.  Instead, I met him in death.  He had suffered from severe emphysema -- I could see the barrel shape of his chest – it reminded me of the struggle for breath that had been his life for some years.  I felt a guilty wave of relief that he was no longer struggling for air.  I met him in death – relaxed, released – surrounded by his family and friends.

The funeral home was both formal homey, in that strange way of funeral homes.  My friend had promised her father that she’d perform his funeral.  But, when it came down to it, the role of ministry and the reality of mourner was a complex balancing act – that was where I came in.  When her eulogy ended, I took over, she sat down with her sisters, and surrendered to grief.

At the cemetery I offered further words and we released her father into the sheltering, nourishing, devouring Earth, then we returned to his farmhouse for homemade food delivered by neighbors, baked by family, shared in close rooms among people ranging in age from six to eighty six.  Her father came alive for me as the day passed.  Not only in stories but also in the feel of the house, the food, the land, the small signatures, and the diverse clutter of a long life.

He was alive everywhere I looked – in children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. He was alive in his totality – photographs of his every age were strewn about.  His medicines stood side by side with the cabinets he’d installed, the many signs of his hard-working “why hire out what you can do yourself” life. 

He was alive for me – without the pain of loss – because I had not known him, because he would not leave a hole in my life – and he was just beginning – his family was just beginning the process of making sense of life without him – of calling back to life the man they could have and letting go of the one they could no longer be with.

The poet Mary Oliver put it this way:

To live in this world

            you must be able

            to do three things:

            To love what is mortal:

            to hold it

            against your bones knowing

            your own life depends on it;

And when the time comes to let

               it go,

            to let it go. 

It was tangible for me – this sense of calling him back in a new way – not a denial of death – more a recognition that grief is real, yet constantly changing.  As the stages of grief pass through the heart – like electric shocks – painful and powerful – the person alive and loved among us is transformed into someone loved and yet among us in a different way.  It is such a mystery that every human culture has made up amazing stories to explain it and contain it and yet – it remains a mystery – awesome in the traditional sense – of inspiring terror and wonder.  It remains a mystery that is inescapable, that transforms all of life, that is woven into life.  Culture upon culture, generation on generation we face this awesome reality and find new ways to live with it – some more productive, realistic, and more life-giving than others. El Dia De Los Muertes is one way we can face this reality –

May this weaving of words and melody, silence and tones allow you the space to reflect – to put our hands and hearts on it and with the comfort of one another – face the mystery. 

Stephen Levine wrote:

“We have a will toward mystery, a yearning, greater even than our will to live. And lucky, too, because our will to live, our grasping at life, is killing us. The will to live is our fear of death, our clinging to pleasure, our dread of not becoming.

The will to live keeps us holding each breath, the will toward mystery, the longing for deeper knowing, redefines life. A gradual upwelling of the still small voice within is heard. It is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time, but in timelessness, when we remember who we really are. It draws us to the edge and beckons us to surrender safe territory and enter our enormity.”

Throughout history we – humans have struggled with this enormity – this mystery.  There are many ways to define that word mystery.

At the dawn of the scientific world view the mystery became just that – a puzzle to be solved.  A code to be cracked – the code of life – the code of death.  The archetypal story that tells of this is, of course, Frankenstein – a story we make variation upon time and again in hospitals and nursing homes as doctors struggle with their hopes, skills, and their limitations and the limitations of the human body.  Dr. Frankenstein said: “to examine the causes of life we must first have recourse to death.”  Sherwin Nuland, in How We Die wrote that the desire to defeat death has its noble face – but has neither defeated death nor lead to better deaths but has contributed to the defeat of the natural forces that enable us to die in our own time – whenever that is.

In the Western world we have revolved our management of death around the dominant myths – But no matter how wistfully we may cherish a belief in life-everlasting we know that our span is short and our days all too brief. In the words of Octavio Paz

Between going and staying the day wavers, 

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

Se disipa el instante. Sin moverme,
yo me quedo y me voy: soy una pausa.

Soy una Pausa – I am a pause.

There have been eras when grief has been loud – keening – the wailing of women, the scowling of men, the tearing of cloth, the draping of black or white.  Early in Christian history it became both extravagant and faithless to grieve – for, after all, the dearly departed might be going on to a better place – this offered options –

Either they were going to a better place in which case the mourner was selfish and codependent.  Or they were condemned to hell in which case the mourner was foolishly grieving the decisions of a wise god.  Likely either way the mourner might see them in the next life and that again was no cause for joy or sorrow – only hope against fear.  This view of death quieted mourners considerably and volumes of verse were written praising the strong hearted and dry-eyed, beseeching the mourners to move on with life, rejoice, and to forget the dead.

The tombstone of an ancient three year old reads:

No Tears of sadness, no beating of your brest

O father and mother, I have reached the kingdom of heaven.

There was a time – not long ago – when we did not even tell the dying that they were, in fact, dying.  It was a secret.  More recently we worried – a la New Age – that if we or a doctor told them it would make it so—just knowing might destroy the will to live. Even the dying – who always do know –– even the dying would be complicit in the lie acting as though they did not know – to make it easier for the survivors.  It was the secret that everyone knew. And the silence prevented many people from reconnecting before death in ways that would have both healed the past and made the transition to death less lonely for both the dying and the survivors.

Eventually weeping returned to the west – though restrained, as any of us might attest.  As a minister, I often look out over a roomful of faces and see the brave restraint of public grief.  Often, we move apart like wounded creatures.  We gently, quietly tear at funerals, then go alone to cry out our private sorrow – our sorrow which is not truly private at all – it is the other secret we all share. We sorrow and grieve.  

            It’s this grieving that begins to clear out the heart – and allow the reality of loss in. This same thing allows the heart to heal and let life return – a new and different life – but a real one.  It cannot be changed – there is – thank goodness – no doctor Frankenstein.  At some point – ready or not we have each a standing invitation to meet with mortality – if we are wise we become at that moment, more fully alive.  We don’t cling feverishly to life but we cherish the lives of others because they, too, are such brief and remarkable occurrences.

Just as the spring is no less precious because the summer will come, nor summer less precious for fall, nor fall for winter and so it is and will be with the seasons of our lives.

I’m tired of the commercial Halloween with green faced witches and rotund ghosts.  Where is our clear eyed realism – our gratitude for life and for all that has come before us – our sense of connection with that which comes after?  El Dia De Los Muertes is a holiday based upon the peekaboo theory of living well.  …To adjust to death.

About the day and the picnic and about all that is cherished

Like that day I spent with my friend’s family – a time to remember that one you loved or fought with, to honor the ancestors who brought you here for joy and challenge. It is a time to grieve loss, honor loss, and celebrate life tangled in those losses. 

Rupert Brooke wrote:

“These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,

Washed marvelously with sorrow, swift to mirth.

The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,

And sunset, and the colors of the earth.

These had seen movement, and heard music; known

Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended ;

Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;

All this is ended.

There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter”

Let us take time to light some more candles on our tables of memories – this is the time to bring out pictures if you brought or just remembered them.  This is a time not to be alone in mourning -- in mourning again or for the first time.  El Dia De Las Muertes recognizes what May Sarton called “our mourning without end” – but it also realizes that that mourning changes – stretches to include the richness of life, the promise of the present, the sweetness of memory.  We discover that we can both ache at loss and celebrate life.  We have lost the familiar presence of that one in our lives but we have found something new.  The person we lost has become something new – like ice that has melted into a drink, a cloud that has become rain.  A person becomes the sum of their choices and actions – unbounded by time.

Bill Staines wrote these lyrics:

“Only the truth that in life we have spoken,
Only the seed which on earth we have sown,
These shall pass onward when we're forgotten,
Fruits of the harvest and what we have done.”
This time is for the ripening of life, the passing onward of the fruit of the harvest of human history.   Time to let the music of a Mexican lullaby soothe you -- to let in memory – this is a time to be together in the core of our humanness – our precious vitality and our mortality.

We light these candles for our families, our beloveds, our friends, for all our relations;

For those who are near and for those from whom we feel an unwanted distance;

For those whose lives are vulnerable, For our own vulnerable hearts

For all those we have lost – known and unknown

For the suffering we have experienced as people – As a planet torn by pain.

Let us light these candles in hope and healing --

Candle Interlude

“Pablo Neruda wrote

If suddenly you are not living

I shall go on living.”

We shall go on living and living wisely.

May the candles inspire us to use our lives well. 

May the radiance of these candles pour out upon our hearts, and spread light into the darkened corners of our world.

Octavio Paz wrote:
”The universe rhymes with itself,
it unfolds and is two and is many
without ceasing to be one.
Tree of blood, we feel, think, flower,
and bear strange fruits: words.
What is thought and what is felt entwine,
And time and space fall dizzyingly,
 into themselves.
We and the galaxy return to silence.
Does it matter? Yes but it doesn't matter:
we know that silence is music and that
we are a chord in this concert.”

May the radiance of these candles and in every face here, remind us all of the beauty and radiance of life, the strength of our hearts and of the deep need of this place, this community, this world, and our times. We are needed to shape the changes that are inevitable – our hands are the hands of hope – baking the bread of life – clearing the path of life.  Reaching into the earth and toward the stars to plant the future and to touch infinity.  We are a feast, a fiesta, we are alight and alive and together.