We’re All in This Together
“All humans want to do is break down every barrier. That's been our great success story. But death is the hard boundary. It's the barrier that everybody on this planet will meet at some point in their life, no matter how wealthy they are, no matter who they are, no matter what their achievements. You know, that's coming for them. And human beings long to believe that there might be something on the other side of that. And you know what? Even the most skeptical of us - when we lose a loved one, we really want there to be something on the other side.”
That was the answer author Jeanette Winterson gave last weekend when she was interviewed on Weekend Edition Sunday, in response to host Aeysha Rascoe asking her, “Why do you think we are drawn to ghost stories not only in fiction but, like, in our lives?”
The interview caught my ear not because I’m all that interested in reading ghost stories, though I’ve read a few in my time, but because I was planning this sermon about the barrier or lack thereof between the living and the dead. A topic of common concern and engagement in various cultures this time of year.
This week just past was a jumble of holy days and sacred times. In the Christian calendar November 1 is All Saints Day–celebrating all the saints of Christianity. And November 2 is All Souls Day–given over to commemorating all (Christians) who have lived and died before us. In Mexico, and wherever Mexicans live, November 2nd is Día de los Muertos, the day of the dead. A day for communing with and celebrating loved ones who have died. Similar celebrations are held in other cultures around the globe. In the Celtic tradition of the pre-Christian British Isles, and for many practitioners of earth-centered religions still today, November 1 is Samhain–the end and beginning of the year, the end of the harvest, the beginning of winter, and it is the time when the veil between the living and the dead is thought to be at its thinnest.
This confluence and conflation of sacred times and beliefs (Christian and pre-Christian and other than Christian) happens over and over throughout the calendar year, for reasons ranging from imperialism to the inherent human impulses to address more or less universal questions and mysteries of life.
In the US, in the 21st century, as in the last half of the 20th century, the night before All Saints Day, All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween, gets the most play. Ghost and skeleton costumes are remnants nods toward the ages old focus on the dead but candy (and, increasingly adult beverages) reigns supreme. Still Mexicans, the Celts and other Northern peoples of old are and were onto something important: paying attention to the dying of vegetation as one part of the eternal cycle of life, and using that season of dying vegetation (and the waning light) as a time to recognize that death is but one part of the cycle of human life, too.
Think of it as sort of an opportunistic object lesson. Seed to seedling, flower to fruit, fruit into decay, decay eventually into nutrient rich soil, nutrient rich soil as home, even in winter, to seeds and bulbs and roots from which green vegetation will again spring. So too, germination, gestation, birth, growth, the fullness of life, decline and death, each in its time for we humans. For some of the scientific-minded among us the metaphor might stretch a bit past the breaking point. After all, mostly our bodies are not returned to the earth, allowed to decay and nourish new life–even if our burial rituals say it is so. And many, perhaps most of us, don’t believe that death is anything other than final. Not simply a fallow time after which new shoots will emerge but an end to our existence. Full stop. That’s what I believe. Or rather, I believe that’s all we can be sure of. That we die and cease to exist as our bodily selves.
Still, the metaphor works to a point. And more to the point, the traditions and rituals of the peoples who celebrate or once celebrated All Souls, Día de los Muertos, and Samhain meet a real human need–or at least desire. The desire to break through the barrier between the living and the dead. I agree with Jeanette Winterson, whom I quoted at the start, that breaking that barrier is what we desire in our hearts, no matter what we believe happens at death with our scientific minds. “Even the most skeptical of us - when we lose a loved one, we really want there to be something on the other side.”
Not heaven, perhaps, not a parallel existence that mirrors this one only without all the bad stuff, not reincarnation (except for those of us who do believe in those things) but something other than nothing.
“For love is strong as death. Many waters cannot quench love, flood cannot drown it.”
A couple months ago David told me he’d worked out this Sunday as the date Mike Daly was available to play for worship, and he showed me the text of the anthem Mike and the choir would perform.
“Perfect!’ I said, “Just right for All Souls.”
“Not All Souls,” David replied. ““It’s from the Song of Solomon. A love song.”
“Exactly!” I said. “All Souls.”
What better time of year for stories of enduring love, love stories, than these waning days of October and the waxing days of November that so many different peoples through the ages and still today, tell us all about tending to our relationships with loved ones no longer living on this earthly plane of existence? This is love work we can and do undertake any time of the year, but autumn, here in the Northern hemisphere, because of the dying of vegetation and the waning of light, seems especially suited to it. Whether on All Souls or Día de los Muertos or Samhain, or a bit later at the Thanksgiving table, we tell stories, love stories of the people on the other side of the barrier.
Some of those love stories are what we might call ghost stories. Stories in which we communicate with loved ones now passed. Telling them how much we miss. Introducing new members of the family to them–through the sharing of photo albums or plates of favorite food items, and the retelling of familiar stories. And they, the ones who have died might communicate with us–as in any good ghost story.
Chickasaw novelist, essayist, and environmentalist Linda Hogan wrote “Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”
English poet Frances Bellerby wrote of a no longing living love whose absent presence calms fears despite the silence of their companionship.
And Catholic writer Mitch Finely declared, in our opening, “those who have gone before us/are still with us”.
We might not hear real, familiar voices speaking to us from beyond this life–though some of us have. But we have known them so well–most of our family members and friends who have died–we have known them so well, we can hear them in our hearts, if not our ears: "I love you." "I’m proud of you." "What did you think of that World Series?" "Remember the fun we had when we did this chore together? Those were some of my favorite times with you." "What a great parent you are!" "I’m with you as you face this new challenge, as surely as though I were there beside you, holding your hand. And I’ll be there lifting a glass to the outcome, whatever it might be."
In our opening words, Mitch Finely also declared “we’re all in this together. All of us.” Because he was writing of the communion of saints, he meant, I think, that the living and the dead are all in a common cloud of humanity. I think he meant what Bil Keene illustrated in the cartoon on the front of the order of service–that living generations are never really separated from those no longer living and those not yet living. Understanding humanity as an unbroken chain stretching backward and forward has profound implications for the ways we live the days given us. We talk about that from time to time–about the gifts and the problems we inherit, about the gifts and the problems we will pass on. I hear something else in Mr. Finely words today.
As I reflect on all the death in and around our church in the past half year or so–Margaret Hall, Joe Rice and Cathy McRae; parents, children, siblings and friends of congregation members–as I reflect on all the death in and around our congregation in recently, I hear a different meaning in the assertion: “we’re all in this together. All of us.” If we widen the circle of time, a year, two years, a dozen years, twenty and beyond, the roll call of people each of us have loved and lost to death grows longer and longer. We the living are all in this state of perpetual grief and mourning together. Sometimes our grief is new and raw. Sometimes it is familiar and well-aged, softened perhaps and faded but no less potent for it. This fellowship of mourners isn’t one any of us would choose but for one thing–it is proof that we have loved.
Memorial services and funerals serve to start us on our lifetime of living without the physical presence of the ones who have recently died. But such services are fleeting, and more than that, in our shock and bewilderment our heads and our hearts often cannot allow the ancient wisdom of such rites to sink into our being. Whatever any one of us might believe or not about ghosts and spirits and the thinning of the veil between life and death, it is good to have a season, the waning days of October, the waxing days of November, set aside to consider that perhaps there is a truth beyond fact spoken by those who have told us “those who have died have never never left,” and “that once you buy the farm/you still live on the farm” and “What has been once so interwoven cannot be raveled/not the gift ungiven” and “love is strong as death”. In other words, to be reminded, in the end, not so much of the continuity of life, as of the continuity of love. Amen.