There is a sadness in the autumn leaf: I feel a sorrow that its beauty dies And feel its message for the lives of those, As of myself, whom I have known and loved. The leaf comes not again, though other leaves And flowers will bloom, and other lives, Richer than we have been, shall take our place. Perhaps the autumn teaches us a wiser grace Through which we live, by learning to let go.
“When I was very young, my yesterdays were few. Tomorrows came on endlessly and even cold December days were Spring to me. Then a world of timelessness was served at breakfast with my orange juice. When I was very young and every world was conquerable. Even now, sometimes, the child in me pretends that nothing ends, especially in the Spring. I am April-fooled by new leaves easily. This year, when April came and lilacs were just days behind, the crocuses kept promises across the lawn, and there was time enough for everything. Then, behind a bush, I found the feather-fragments and the skull of what had once been a bird, and I was not a child again. I have never been one to know the birds by name. This one least of all. This bare beaked bone had never sung to me until I found it there. And then it sang silently, ‘Not everything in Spring is yet-to-be.’ Some birds die kindlier where children find them and, with hearse-hands cupped round, bear them off for burial. No such pitying procession of one had found this bird and made him Christian by a twig cross on a backyard grave. Sun and rain, grass and ground, had tried to take him back, but they worked too slow for me. A bit of what he was, was left to sing, ‘Not everything is yet-to-be.’
Now I am not so very young, and time runs faster than it did. I am much more mortal than I was at ten. Day by day my yesterdays pile up and my tomorrows dwindle down. I know now there is too little time for everything, and knowing this, today’s more precious than all the past that was and all the might-yet-be can ever be. Death is not one thing, one time, for everyone, doled out like bargains one to one. Too many things and times and places die, for me to be deceived by those who fear that final time, for me to think that death comes only in the Wintertime or life in Spring.” (Max Coots)
Today we celebrate the Day of the Dead, an ancient Mexican festival. Why in the world, you might be thinking, would we celebrate death? Why in the world now, would we celebrate death, when so many have died and continue to die through wars and violence in Darfur, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Israel-Palestine. Why celebrate death when it brings such sadness? Lots of reasons. Death, as Max Coots pointed out to us, is a part of our lives. That fact has to be noted and treated with respect. Death is a part of our lives – for many, often an uncomfortable, feared, unwelcome part. Yet we all experience it. We are of the nature to die. Some Native Americans say that death lives just over our left shoulder and if we pay attention, every so often we can sense it. That is not a bad thing. Life is finite; life is precious and if we think of it that way we will treat it that way. Death is a part of our lives that we have to come to terms with, in one way or another. Celebrating the Day of the Dead can help with that. Celebrating the Day of the Dead is about remembrance of the loved ones who have died; it is about remembrance of people we don’t even know who have died. In remembering we celebrate the gifts of their lives and we honor them. In remembering we divest ourselves of the parts of their lives that were not gifts. Remembering can be a chance to forgive. In remembering we ground ourselves in our past so that we can move into our future. When we mark our history we lift up the continuity in our own lives. We recognize where we come from so that we can better know who we are. Setting aside this time for our dead also helps with our grieving, as it allows it a voice and perhaps, a tear. When someone we love dies, we feel, some deeply, some not, sadness and grief and sometimes a whole host of other difficult, uncomfortable emotions, including maybe anger, or a feeling of being alone, of being abandoned, or regret, or relief. Some of us cry, some of us talk, some of us don’t talk, some of us get busy doing things, some of us walk around in a fog. We experience grief in our own ways. Celebrating the Day of the Dead gives us a chance to experience grief, if that’s what we need to do. More, celebrating the Day of the Dead helps to move us closer to acceptance of death, both our loved ones’ and our own. And when we can remember with some measure of acceptance, how joyful and how freeing are the memories.
Re-member us, you who are living, restore us, renew us. Speak for our silence. Continue our work. Bless the breath of life. Sing of the hidden patterns. Weave the web of peace. (Judith Anderson)
The Day of the Dead has been celebrated in Mexico, from October 29 through November 2, for centuries. It is a time to remember the dead with joy and to honor them with feasting, processions, pageantry and religious rituals. It combines the Roman Catholic All Souls and All Saints Days with 2,000 year old Mexican Indian traditions. It is a very important time of closeness between the living and the dead. A Mexican folktale relates the story of a man who scoffed at the Day of the Dead and did nothing to mark it. On the closing day of the village celebrations he went out and partied with his friends and late at night, as he made his way home, a parade of dead souls followed him, each carrying the offerings their loved ones had made to them. In the crowd, the man saw his parents, alone among the dead souls, empty-handed. He felt great sadness. He went home and died of grief.
The Day of the Dead has a long history in Mexico. The Aztecs had rituals around the dead. They believed that heaven had thirteen layers and the underworld had nine and that souls went to different layers depending upon how they died. Warriors, for instance, accompanied the sun god and after four years became hummingbirds. Children went to a place with trees that sweat milk. The journey for all souls takes years to complete and so the Aztecs brought the dead food and drink to sustain them, believing that the dead could extract the essence of the offerings and leave the physical remains. On certain days of the year, they invited the dead to come and visit the living. The more recent Christian customs reflect these ancient indigenous ones. Home altars are made, trimmed with satin cloth and filled with marigolds--the flower of the dead--votive candles, offerings of food and drink, photographs, statues of Mary and Jesus, skeletons, calaveras--skulls made of sugar with the name of the dead on them--and depictions of the tree of life. There are masquerades and parades. There is a belief that the dead return for a visit. At midday on October 31 the children come and stay until midday November 1, when the adults come. That is All Saints Day, when Catholics pray for the dead. Adults stay until midday November 2, All Souls Day, when Catholics remember the spirits of all sinners who have died. On that day, especially, Mexicans go to the cemetery and sweep and decorate the graves with flowers. They have a party there and some stay all night.
Our service today tries, not to recreate the Mexican holiday, but to learn from its wisdom by making a remembering of our dead. “Some of us remember with pleasure aunts, uncles, fathers, mothers, friends and lovers, cousins and neighbors, other times and other places: cities and farms, homesteads and rooms, yellow sunsets, chilly sunrises. Some of us find it hard to remember, for the memories that clamor inside us are jagged, like glass we ourselves did not break. Some of us remember people we have never met, but who through history, recent events, book and poem and film and painting have met us and entered the secret chambers of our heart. Some of us remember children, and cannot be comforted. Some of us remember and are set free in our thanksgiving. Some of us remember and are tight with guilt or shame. Some of us struggle daily to remember with greater charity. Some of us weep easily and often. Others weep rarely, but grieve all the same. Some of us are stoic and say, “ These things happen.” Some of us rail against the unfairness of it all, and clench teeth and fists with discontent. Some of us bear the burden of those who took their own lives, or who suffered greatly at the end. Others among us remember only vast meadows of love and charity in which we played with joy. But all of us remember, whether we speak or are silent, whether we deny or affirm, whether we love or find it hard to love. May the power of love embrace us all, as the curtains between then and now are drawn open for a moment, and the fullness of life impresses itself on us, each in our own way.” (Mark Belletini)
Phil Sullivan reads his poem Samhain.
Now can be a time to remember. If you will, please take a moment to quiet down. Settle comfortably in your chairs, feet flat on the floor, eyes closed, hands resting lightly in the lap. Breathe gently, as steadily and as deeply as you can and listen quietly. “In an unsettled world, we seek . . . to enter a stillness that resides in the depths of each of us, a stillness that is at the center of all that exists. . . . For a few moments, let us seek quiet . . . not the quiet that is the absence of noise, for there is always noise. Rather it is like the stillness of a friend listening, . . . the noontime silence of sunlight on a lake, . . . the silence of a new idea, a thought that makes the world pause, . . . the quiet of growing plants, the quiet of a child sleeping, . . . the silence that brings rest, . . . the silence from which hope and love emerge.” (Bruce Marshall)
If you wish, allow yourself to remember the person or persons who have died. . . . Picture them in your mind. . . . Let this be a time for remembering. . . . And if you would like to share your memories, please stand and simply say the person’s name, either aloud or to yourself, then remain standing until everyone has had a chance. Today I remember my mother, who for me, her daughter, died twice. First, because she contracted tuberculosis and had to move to a sanitarium, she left me as a 5 year old, wondering if she would ever return, and second, because she had a massive stroke, she left me as a 37 year old, knowing that she would never return. I grieve as that child, as this adult. Yet I am also mindful of the visits to museums, of baking cookies together each holiday season and giving them all away, of long walks in Manhattan after work, of making a big deal of her birthday because it came right after Christmas. Her name is Harriet Hillman.
(Naming of the dead)
(Remain standing for the Kaddish by Mark Belletini)
Praise for Life. Praise for all the senses of the body reaching out and plucking the universe like an autumn apple. Praise for the dream of justice here upon the earth, equity and well-being for the whole commonwealth of humanity. May our children’s children harvest the dreams we plant in our brief lives. Praise for Life. Praise though all of our philosophies and explanations trickle through the fingers of our experience like water. Praise for Life. Praise for it though it is brief before the lives of stars, and the lives of worlds, and the lives of even the trees that shade us. Praise for Life. Praise for the sacred power of remembrance. Praise for the sacred power of forgiveness and letting go. Praise for Life, the beginning, middle and amen of this prayer.
“A one paragraph newspaper article describes a subway platform during the morning rush hour at Grand Central Terminal. A train pulls in; a well-dressed woman gets off. Before the doors close, the woman realizes that she is holding only one of her . . . gloves. She looks back into the train and spots the matching one on the seat. It is obviously too late to dash back in to retrieve it, so with a cavalier shrug, she flings her arm out and, the doors about to close, tosses her glove onto the seat alongside its mate. The doors shut, and the train pulls away.” (Jane Rzepka) “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.” (Mary Oliver)
Will you say these words responsively with me? Your part is We remember you. Dearly departed, rest in peace.
For those who have gone before us, who loved, shaped and nurtured us, We remember you. Dearly departed, rest in peace. For the unknown ancestors who risked the journey for their children’s children, We remember you. Dearly departed, rest in peace. For the unsung saints and martyrs whose lives and deaths blazed the way for us, We remember you. Dearly departed, rest in peace. For those before us who struggled for justice and racial and religious harmony and for those before us who suffered persecution, injustice and bigotry, We remember you. Dearly departed, rest in peace. For those who died before we were ready to let them go and for those who died with words left unsaid between us, We remember you. Dearly departed, rest in peace. For those who fought death and did not want to go and for those who sought death and found a release, We remember you. Dearly departed, rest in peace.For all those, we the living carry them with us: we are their voices, their hands and their hearts.
May it be so.
Song #101 Abide With Me
Closing words attributed to Kalidasa
Look to this day! For it is life, the very life of life. In its brief course lies all the verities and realities of your existence: The bliss of growth, The glory of action, The splendor of beauty; 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.