-- Marcus Aurelius
Meditation: by May Sarton from “The Autumn Sonnets”
If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one;
If I can come to know what they know,
That fall is the release, the consummation,
Then fear of time and the uncertain fruit
Would not distemper the great lucid skies
This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.
If I can take the dark with open eyes
And call it seasonal, not harsh or strange
(For love itself may need a time of sleep),
And, treelike, stand unmoved before the change,
Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,
The strong root still alive under the snow,
Love will endure - if I can let you go.
Reading: by the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano from Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History
November 2 – Day of the Dead:
In Mexico tonight, as every year on this night, the living host the dead, and the dead eat and drink and dance and get caught up on all the latest gossip from the neighborhood.
But when night comes to a close, when church bells and first light bid adieu, some of the dead get lively and try to hide in the shrubbery or behind the tombs in the graveyard. People chase them out with brooms: “Get going, “Leave us in peace,” “We don’t want to see you until next year.”
You see, the dead are real layabouts.
In Haiti, a long-standing tradition forbids carrying the casket straight to the cemetery. The funeral cortege has to twist and turn and zigzag to fool the one who has died, so he won’t be able to find his way back home.
The living minority defends itself as best it can.
Reading: by the Japanese born author Kyoki Mori from an essay entitled “Between the Forest and the Well: Notes on Death” (The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, p. 45)
Everything we say about death is actually about life. I like to imagine being dead as an endless run because I’ve always felt the most alive while running. My grandmother, who valued family above all else, longed to be reunited with her ancestors and descendants through Buddha. To her, death was a huge family gathering with plenty of food. Every morning while alive, she prayed to the family dead at the Buddhist altar by offering them tea, rice, beans, vegetables, and fruits; then she went to the kitchen to cook breakfast for her children and grandchildren. In death as in life, she wanted to be inside that same cycle of comfort and respect.
My ex-husband, Chuck, hated finishing any projects, especially those he enjoyed. In college, he declared a new major every couple of years, always thrilled with his choice until he got close to fulfilling his requirement. He took ten years to complete his B.S., and when we divorced, he was enrolled in his third master’s program as a no-degree candidate. It’s no surprise, then, that he believed in reincarnation. His ideal death was an opportunity to start over indefinitely.
Reading: by Stephen Levine from Unattended Sorrow: Recovering from Loss and Reviving the Heart (p. 217)
We are reincarnated from day to day. We receive a fresh start with each awakening.
A woman [dealing with grief] who spoke of having lost everything, “and particularly my heart,” said that when she lost love she had lost her life. But in time, she felt something stirring beneath the surface when she read of the suffering of others, especially children. Quite to her surprise, she found beneath the reservoir of her sorrow so much love and another life to be lived.
As the heart revives, many people find a new life beneath their sorrow.
The death of a loved one sometimes marks the end of one incarnation and the beginning of another. Sometimes it is not until we suffer a great loss that we notice all the healing that awaits.
Seasons of the Soul
A Sermon Delivered on November 2, 2014
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
This year in preparation for Halloween, I joined a few others at the home of Barb and Bill Childers for their fourth annual Pumpkinpalooza. A Pumpkinpalooza, in case you were wondering, involves gathering for a relaxed afternoon of snacks and hot cider, followed by a delicious buffet dinner. But the main event is a serious collective effort in pumpkin carving.
It’s been years since I’ve made a jackolantern. And even then my involvement was usually merely a matter of supervising my kids, looking over their shoulders, admonishing them to be careful as they handled kitchen knives that looked dangerously big and sharp in their little hands.
Last Sunday, among the large selection of pumpkins of all shapes and sizes at the Childers’s, I found a midsized one that seemed just right. Picnic tables had been set up in the back yard, covered with big plastic tarps, and equipped with all the tools and paraphernalia needed for the impending mayhem. After an initial period of indecision and reticence in scooping out the gooey pumpkin innards, I got into it. In the end I was pretty happy with my work: two big googly-eyes, and a menacing mouth with three crooked teeth.
Back home, I proudly displayed my handiwork to Elaine, my wife. She dutifully positioned it on our front porch, and added a candle on Halloween Eve. By this time, the squirrels had enhanced its artistic expressiveness by eating away the left side of the pumpkin face, making it look much more monstrous.
* * *
The playfulness of Halloween - the cute little kids in costumes tromping up to our doors asking for treats – provides some welcome levity, at a time of year when our spirits might otherwise start to sink.
The days are growing shorter, and colder, and darker. The leaves are beautiful. But the fact that they dying, that they are falling from their branches, and returning to earth and soil – this is an unmistakable reminder of the sad truth that all things living must invariable die.
For everything there is a season, the poet says: a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to time to keep, and a time to throw way; a time to be born and a time to die.
There is a time when our life begins, and there is a time when our life ends. Much in life is uncertain. But one thing is undisputed: it ends with death.
* * *
But is death really the end? Maybe the dead do not disappear into oblivion, maybe they continue to exist somewhere else. Maybe in a Netherworld with the god Hades, where Persephone spends half the year, and where Orpheus tries to save his beloved wife. Maybe in a heavenly world surrounded by seraphim and cherubim, and a heavenly host of other angels. Maybe the dead are reunited with their ancestors sitting around a big family table, with plenty of food. Or maybe they are lazy layabouts, spending their days and nights hiding in the shrubbery, or behind tombstones in the cemetery.
Our bodies are buried, and return to the earth – ashes to ashes, dust to dust – but maybe some aspect of our existence continues on. Some kind of spirit. Something like a soul.
Hindus imagine something called Atman, that dwells deep within each of us. In the Bhagavad-Gita it is described like this:
Unborn, undying,
Never ceasing,
Never beginning,
Deathless, birthless,
Unchanging for ever…
Worn-out garments
Are shed by the body:
Worn-out bodies
Are shed by the dweller
Within the body.
New bodies are donned
By the dweller, like garments.
Not wounded by weapons,
Not burned by fire,
Not dried by the wind,
Not wetted by water:
Such is the Atman…
In Hindu thought, individual souls enter the world mysteriously for reasons we cannot fully explain. As the religious scholar Huston Smith puts it, our souls are
“like bubbles that form on the on the bottom of a boiling teakettle, they make their way through the water (universe) until they break free into the limitless atmosphere of illumination (liberation). They begin as the souls of the simplest forms of life, but they do not vanish with the death of their original bodies,” instead the soul migrates from one body to the next. (The World’s Religions, p.63)
Reincarnation is an idea that may appeal to those of us who feel we don’t quite have enough hours in the day to do everything we would like. Or those of us like Kyoki Mori’s ex-husband, who are uncomfortable with closure, who hate finishing things – whether college degrees or home improvement projects. Reincarnation allows us to imagine we will have endless opportunities to start over again. “In my next life, I will learn to play the piano.” “In my next life I will be a gardener.” “In my next life, I will be more adventurous.”
The scientist Richard Dawkins is an avowed atheist with little patience for religious belief. He imagines a scientific form of reincarnation. Rather than in a soul, he believes in the immortality of the genes contained in our DNA. A gene does not grow senile; he writes
“it is no more likely to die when it is a million years old than when it is only a hundred. It leaps from body to body down the generations, manipulating body after body in its own way and for its own ends, abandoning a succession of mortal bodies before they sink into senility and death. The genes are the immortals… When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.” (The Selfish Gene, p.34)
* * *
It may be comforting to imagine that the soul, or some aspect of our biological or spiritual self will live on forever. But the danger is that we end up denying the reality of death, and thus lose out on life.
* * *
Grief is painful. But it is necessary, it is healthy, and ultimately it is good. And though death is probably the greatest loss we must face, it is certainly not the only loss we will grieve in the course of our lives.
Stephen Levine writes,
“Nothing is more natural than grief, no emotion more common to our daily experience. It’s an innate response to loss in a world where everything is impermanent. We don’t know what to do with our pain, and we never have. We have been told to bury our feelings, to keep a stiff upper lip, to “get over it and get on with our lives” as though loss were not an inevitable part of life…” (p. 3)
He compares the pain of sudden grief to the sharp ache of rope burns, when something we held onto firmly and fiercely is suddenly yanked out of our grasp.
The death of someone we love is one of countless losses most of us will face in the course of our lives. Levine speaks of a multitude of ungrieved everyday losses:
“losses of love betrayed, of trusts broken, of lies sent and received, of words spoken that can never be retrieved, and of the repeated bruises left by unkindness. It is the long-delayed grief of miscarriages… lost opportunities, a thousand and one insults, and clutching misgivings that ricochet in the mind and instill restlessness and depression.”
All of these little losses, if left unattended, will weigh us down, leaving us dispirited and depressed.
* * *
It was Elizabeth Kübler-Ross who famously described five stages most people need to pass through in order to work through unresolved grief. These stages include: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.
Stephen Levine imagines just three stages. The first is to soften the pain. This means, rather than avoiding the sorrow, or tightening up in an effort to protect ourselves from the hurt, we allow ourselves to feel our feelings, even though they are painful.
The second stage is to cultivate mercy or forgiveness. This means trying to be gentle and compassionate toward ourselves, in the midst of our pain. Or, as he puts it, “opening… the fist that grabs the pain, exposing it to a willingness to let love in… We start to flood the area once filled with the hatred for our pain with a soothing, cooling kindness.”
The third and final stage in healing our sadness involves making peace with it. Grief is war, he says. It is an inner conflict between hope and despair, between trust and doubt, between acceptance and resistance. Healing means making peace among all the conflicting voices clamoring within us. “To have closure is to make peace with your pain.”
This is important work, not only for the sake of our own spiritual health and well-being, but also for the sake of those around us. The unresolved conflicts that we carry within our hearts, invariably take shape in our lives. Or as Levine puts it, “the less we make peace with our pain, the more we tend to make war on others.”
* * *
The holidays at this time of year – whether Halloween, Day of the Dead, or All Souls – encourage us to remember the dead. The dead are always close by. They like to linger among us, and catch up on the gossip.
Death wears many different masks. Some of them frightening, some of them familiar, some of the surprising, some of them expected. We never know for sure how or when death will arrive.
My grandmother lived to be a hundred. Together we watched death approaching from miles away. And every year our time together grew more precious, as the powers of body and mind slowly left her.
A good friend, who was my age -- we didn’t see death coming at all. He was in the very midst of life, with a calendar filled with plans for the future. He was a man full of energy and enthusiasm, and amazing creative gifts still unfolding – when his heart suddenly stopped, with little warning at all.
In one instance sorrow is quiet ache and somber understanding. In another instance grief is sharp pain and shocked disbelief.
* * *
Loss is an inescapable fact of life. And if we love, our losses will invariably be painful. The intensity of our pain is in direct proportion to the depth of our love.
There is nothing more natural than grief. We must grieve. But we cannot remain in the place of sadness. The soul longs to move on. The soul knows that the experience of love lost will lead us into sorrow. But beneath the reservoir of sorrow there is more love, deeper love, and another life to be lived.
When we are able to make peace with our sense of hurt, we will find healing, and our hearts will awaken to new life.
* * *
Death does not need to be the enemy of life. The reality of death can help us savor the deepest realities of life.
What would it be like if we woke up one day, and knew this was the last day of our life? What if we knew we had only a few more hours left to bring our life to completion? What if we lived this day as if it were our last?
I think we might be profoundly grateful for every moment. We might be grateful for every breath we take. We might be deeply grateful for the food on our plate. We might savor a glimpse of sunshine, and the scent of cool autumn air. We might be most grateful for the memories of love we have known, and the knowledge that we have the capacity to love more.
Every day we receive a fresh start. Every day we are offered an opportunity for awakening. Every day we can be reborn.
Grateful for the blessings of love we have received
Grateful for the gifts of love we have yet to give
May we cherish every moment this day,
And in our every action prove
That love will endure.
Amen.
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