First Parish Unitarian UniversalistDay of the Dead
Sermon by the Rev. Diane Teichert, Minister
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
October 29, 2000
Opening Words
At this time of year, we are conscious of the passing of time, the passing of autumn. We've turned back the clocks and gained an hour, we've seen the leaves falling past our windows and noted that it is time to rake. We are conscious of the passing of time, the passing of autumn, and the passing away of people we love.
We are near the time of the Day of the Dead or, in Spanish, Dia de los Muertos celebrated by Mexican people. Combining All Soul's and All Saints Days in the Christian tradition with 2000 year old Mexican Indian traditions, the Day of the Dead honors and remembers those who died.
Today, for us, is a day for remembering, too. A time for remembering, and celebrating, the lives of loved ones who are now dead. This time has a somber feel to it, for we are sad when a person or pet we love dies. Yet, it is also a joyful, light-hearted time, for it makes us feel glad and lucky to know that love lingers, like an autumn mist, long past death.
Opening Hymn #325 Love Makes A Bridge
Chalice Lighting
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark form another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. Albert Schweitzer.
Covenant
Morning Song
A Time for All Ages
Our altar today is adorned and decorated in the likeness of the Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead. It looks beautiful, doesn't it?? This Mexican holiday isn't like Halloween, with death being kind of scary. Instead, it honors and remembers the dead.
Some of you and some of your teachers placed mementos on the table, objects that you brought from home. I see some things that might be reminders of people and pets who have died in your lives. And some memorial marigold flowers, too, for those who forgot or didn't know to bring an object.
For some Mexicans, the Day of the Dead is celebrated at the cemetery where their loved ones are buried. It's sad, but it's also a happy festival with feasting and processions, pageantry, worship services, and sometimes even fireworks! So, for the happy part, our altar also has funny paper skeletons, the bright light of candles, spry little sugar pumpkins, and beautiful autumn foliage.
Another way the Day of the Dead is celebrated is at home. Some Mexican families set up a special small altar table right in their own house. They put on it the dead person's favorite foods, photographs, flowers, books, and other things to remember the person by. Here we each could bring only one object, but at home you can put on as many as you can fit.
Here is a small altar I made to remember my father by. I was already an adult when he died, but I still feel sad when I think that he died. You can probably tell a lot about what he was like and what he liked to do, just by looking at what I place on the table.
He was quiet and thoughtful, the way he looks in this photograph taken by one of my sisters. His loved his family, so here's a photo of us. His work was making thermometers, like his father before him. He was a Sunday School teacher (of 8th graders) and a leader in the church shown on this tile. He always enjoyed and appreciated a good meal, but he never got fat. He also liked Snickers. Tennis was his favorite sport. His name was Roy Teichert and he was my father.
You could make a altar at your house for the Day of the Dead. It's also a really good thing to do right after some one important in your family dies, or on the anniversary of a death, or just when the spirit moves you.
It is a powerful and loving way of remembering and honoring people or pets in your life who, sadly, are now dead, but whose love lives on in you. If you sit quietly with your little altar, you can almost feel the presence of whomever it honors.
That's the main message of this day. That people and pets die, but love doesn't die if we still love. It's like Dumbledore said to Harry Potter near the end of the first book, "to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever."
It's also like we sang in the last line of the opening hymn, "Love makes a bridge that winds may shake, yet not destroy. Love carries faith through life and death, to endless joy."
Now you and your teachers may quietly go to your classes. At the end of the service, your parents will be sure to pick up your special object so that you can bring it home.
If you would like to stop and look at what's on the altar, you may. But, please do not touch anything!
There is time for the adults to greet one another until the last child and teacher has left.
Greetings
Joys and Sorrows
Meditation in Word, Silence, Song #391 (Voice Still and Small)
Invitation to the Dia de los Muertos
This is the time of the Day of the Dead, of All Soul's Day and All Saints Day. Of Samhein (sah-win) and Halloween. These celebrations differ, yet they all have to do with the thin veil between life and death. Each in its own way somehow invites the dead back into our lives, as we will hear in the song to follow. Each causes our sorrows and losses–past, current and future– to resonate and this helps us to move on in the living of our lives.
I invite you now into our own rendition of the Mexican tradition, both ancient and contemporary, of honoring the dead. Following the Homily and Offertory there will be a time of quiet music interspersed with Readings during which you may, if you wish, place the memorial object you brought with you or a memorial marigold on the Altar and then return to your seat.
Musical Meditation "Allerseelen (All Soul's)" by Richard Strauss; Susanne Osberg, Piano and Ruthie Miller, Soprano.
Homily: "The Thin Veil"
Have you noticed lately, how the autumn air is hazy? I've seen how mist hangs over the fields in the morning and shrouds the street lights at night. In the passing of time and the passing of autumn, something in the air reminds us of death. How it comes to some momentarily without notice…or ever so slowly over many weeks or months or even years. How it sometimes comes too soon for the young and too late for the old and weary.
Autumn's hazy air reminds us of the thin veil between life and death. How the presence of deceased loved ones can sometimes be felt in an empty room or in the words of a song on the radio or in an encounter with someone who bears a strong resemblance. And then the presence fades.
In the changing light of this time, thoughts of our own mortality and that of those we love flicker in and out of our consciousness. We might even picture it, and shudder. A premonition, and then it passes. Or, it doesn't.
The mysteries of our connections, one with another…. how is it that sometimes someone miles away knows that a loved one has just died? Or was it only a thought that flickered in and out of consciousness many other times, until this once it proved true? So many unknowns, whence we came and whence we go?
Our own death and that of those we love are beyond imagining, really, but we wish for them to be painless and peaceful; at home in a familiar place, surrounded by loved ones. For ourselves and those for whom we care, we wish for an easy death. Whatever it may feel like to die and whatever may or may not happen afterwards, we hope to meet it unafraid. Like the poet William Cullen Bryant,
Sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
But, the Day of the Dead, All Saints and All Souls Days, are not about deaths yet to come, but about lives already lived to their ends. The creation of an altar on which to display artifacts of a person's life that call forth memories and learnings from the living seems a powerful way for love to conquer death, as we say it does.
Indeed, the most meaningful part of a memorial service may be the artful display of such artifacts in the vestibule for people to see as they gather or in the Parish Hall as they linger after.
Whether in public or in private, at the time of death or on an anniversary, or just when the spirit moves, the visual effect of such an altar can be longer-lasting on the heart and mind than words spoken in comfort or in memory. This is not about worshipping the dead, of course, but in remembering them, for the purposes of healing and solace.
There are ways other than altars that may better suit those that are not visually oriented. For example, in The Eyes of the Heart: A Memoir of the Lost and Found, Frederick Buechner's latest memoir, written at age 72, he imagines inviting deceased loved ones, into his spacious library for one-on-one conversation. With shelves and shelves of books and more books and fascinating objects of familial significance as a backdrop, they "talk."
For each conversation guest, he describes in rich detail those books and objects related to the person's place in Buechner's life, a deeper version of how I earlier told the children about my father and the objects I placed on the altar in his memory.
In the warm setting of Buechner's library, he carries on conversations with his loved ones. In telling the life-stories of, and in imagining these chats with, these friends and family members, Buechner comes to new understandings about them and himself. He gets to retrieve misunderstandings, make amends, finally say what he'd never been able to express, ask leading questions, and otherwise re-create his relationships with them. In a manner of speaking, he comes into right relationship with them, post mortem.
Any of us could summon the dead for imagined conversation in that manner. What would you want to know, if you could ask?
Buechner mainly wants to know about life after death, is there any? So, he brings Naya, his grandmother, into his library and asks her to tell him about death.
"Naya is knitting a sock and has her knitting face on–her eyebrows slightly raised, her lips pressed tight…She glances at me over the top of her spectacles and lets her needles come to rest.
'My poor, ignorant boy,' she says, 'don't you know better than to ask a question like that when I'm turning a heel?'
The ball of wool falls off her lap and rolls toward me across the green carpet. I pick it up and put it on her lap again.
She says, 'When somebody once asked your Uncle Jim if some friend or other had passed away, he answered in his inimitable fashion by saying, 'Passed away? Good God, he's dead," and I know just how he felt. I always thought 'passed away' was a silly way of putting it, like calling the water closet a powder room–or calling it a water closet for that matter–and I am here to tell you that it is also very misleading.'
She says, 'It is the world that passes away,' and flutters one hand delicately through the air to show the manner of its passing. Her sapphire ring glitters in the sun.
'When I used to lie there in that shadowy little room… that looked out onto the garden, with your blessed mother or Ruth dropping by every day or so to keep me abreast of the local gossip…I could feel the world gradually slowing down more and more until one night…I realized it was finally slow enough for me to get off, and that is just what I proceeded to do. It was rather like getting off a streetcar before it has quite come to a stop–a little jolt when my foot first struck the pavement, and then the world clanged its bell and went rattling off down the tracks without me.'" (pp. 11-12).
We would hope that death came as easy as that for all the loved ones who are or will soon, in a few moments, be represented on our altar table.
And, may it be that, when our times come, yours and mine and all those we love, our streetcar rides will have been long and fulfilling ones, with lifetimes of love to guide our feet to safe landings on the pavement. Amen.
Offertory
Invitation
Now, let us join in the tradition of remembering and honoring the dead. Let us dwell in shared silence together, to call upon our memories of loved ones, family and friends, mentors, heroes and heroines.
Three readings will be spaced by two or three minutes of quiet music, during any of which you are invited to place an object or a flower on the altar in memory of someone who has died. We will sit quietly during these spaces of musical time.
Readings
"Autumn Speaks" by Robert T. Weston–Rich
"Boundlessness" by Willi Barbour–Jean
"Autumnal Invitation" by Elizabeth Tarbox–Diane
Closing
Our beloved dwell with us no more in mortal form. Yet we know that the best in them (and the worst, too, if we let it), will live on in those who knew them and that the last word, more powerful than death, is ever love.
Hymn
Please rise as you are able for the closing hymn, #95, "There is More Love Somewhere."
Benediction
And now let us go forth in faith and in hope, trusting ever in the mercy and goodness of life to hold us in all our days. May the love we've shared with those who walk with us no more serve to guide and cheer us in the years to be. Amen.
( Readings from 100 Meditations, collected by Kathleen Montgomery, Skinner Books)