DEATH, REMEMBERANCE, AND THE MEETING OF TWO WORLDS

© Rev. Joy Atkinson 2008
Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation
November 2, 2008

There is a story in the Buddhist tradition about a woman whose son has died, and who went in desperation to Gautama the Buddha, hoping that this holy man could somehow resurrect him. "I will," said the wise Buddha, knowing full well that he couldn't - he never claimed to be a God or to have supernatural powers - "but you must first bring a mustard seed from a household that has seen no death." So the woman went to a house of some neighbors, and asked for a mustard seed, saying that she needed one from a household that has experienced no death. The inhabitants then sadly said, "We're sorry, but our dear grandfather passed away last year." So the woman went to another neighbor and asked again for the seed, providing no death had happened in the family, and again the neighbor informed her "our beloved son died a few years ago." The women went on, from house to house, but she heard the same story time after time. They had all suffered the loss of a loved one. The Buddha's point, of course, is that death touches all households, at some time or another. There is no way around the sorrow and grief.

We just celebrated an American holiday that derives from an acknowledgement that death is an inevitable part of life: Halloween, which we in the U.S. inherited from the ancient Celtic culture of the British Isles and Northern France. Halloween traditions are replete with fanciful and realistic images of death: ghosts and skeletons abound, and there are fearsome creatures from the "other world" - the world of the dead: of zombies, devils, goblins.

The ancient Celts celebrated Halloween over 3000 years ago. Their holiday was named Samhain (Sa-win), the name of their god of the harvest and winter, a god also of darkness and the spirits of the dead. The evening of Samhain, October 31st, was their New Year's Eve, the holiest day of the Celtic year, when ancestral spirits rose and went to visit their living descendants. This special evening was thought to be a time of year when the seam between the natural and the supernatural worlds opened up for a while, and the spirits of the dead could slip through the seam into the world of the living. This day also marked for them the beginning of winter, which people quite naturally associated with death and the coming of darkness. The ancient Celts would light great bonfires on hilltops on that holy eve to help the sun as it began to weaken with the approach of winter, and to attract good spirits and ward off evil ones. They would also hollow out turnips and rutabagas and insert a candle, to guide people to the hilltops - a custom clearly echoed in our pumpkin-carving ritual. On this special night, the God Samhain would guide dead spirits back to their family homes. Samhain was lord of all dead souls, good and evil alike, although later Christian leaders, in order to supplant the pagan customs, equated Samhain with the devil, turning him into an entirely evil force.

The name Halloween, or All Hallow's Eve, was given to the holiday by the Christian church. By the 8th century, the Church realized that the descendants of the Celts and other British Isle inhabitants were just not going to give up celebrating the old pagan New Year's Eve on October 31, as they had done for centuries, so the holiday was renamed All Hallows Eve, the eve of All Saints Day, Nov 1st, which was a day to honor all Christian saints who did not have a separate saint day of their own. The following day, All Souls Day, was set aside to honor all people who have died.

As I'm sure you know, the church was quite clever in co-opting pagan holidays. In the case of Halloween, since the pagans had already been using this time to remember and honor their ancestors, the Church preserved this theme of honoring the dead. In other cultures as well, from Greece to Africa, Sicily to Mexico, the onset of winter, when vegetation dies, is a time set aside to remember the dead.

Our American Halloween custom of dressing up to look like dead spirits came to us via Irish immigrants, but we now dress in any costume, and the religious theme of honoring the dead has largely fallen away from our Halloween celebrations. But in Mexico, and in other parts of Central and South America, the ancient tradition of remembering and honoring the dead is preserved in the Day of the Dead holiday - El Dia De Los Muertos - a combination of the Catholic All Souls Day, the European Halloween, and ancient Aztec traditions. On El Dia de los Muertos, people visit their relatives' graves, decorate the tombstone, leave a gift, light candles and say prayers to the dead, and often have a picnic in the cemetery, eating foods that were favorites of the departed. Fireworks at the cemetery light their way home, where the people continue to celebrate, with music, feasting and games, and home altars decorated with the favorite foods and objects of their deceased loved ones. They eat sweet bread shaped into skulls and bones, and give children skulls made of candy or paper mache, or skeleton puppets on a string. Skeletons are everywhere, often dressed in regular clothes or busy in normal everyday activities, gently mocking the living. One famous Mexican artist, John Gabriel Posada, has created many depictions of these dressed skeletons, including the one reproduced on today's order of service.

A popular custom is to make up Calaveras - skull stories - rhyming epitaphs or poems, often humorous, of living friends and relatives. I tried my hand at a couple of Calaveras, incorporating participants in today's service:

Our good friend TJ will lose his jet-black curls
Then he can do some preaching for us from that other world.

Linda our pianist plays her music with such ease
The sound will be quite different when just bones click on those keys.

I didn't spare myself:

There goes Joy, a skull with top knot red,
How svelt she will finally be, when she is good and dead.

In celebrating El Dia de los Muertos, the Mexicans are playing with, and almost befriending death. In our American, death-denying society, where death is usually treated as an entirely serious and solemn business, to make a festival of death like El Dia de los Muertos may seem horrifying and even blasphemous. Some people react with shock likewise to the tradition of the Irish wake, when mourners have a party and may even dance with the corpse. But these kinds of celebrations see the occasion of death as an integral and necessary part of life, and a reminder that we, too, all of us, are mortal. These traditions make death seem more natural and less of a fearsome thing. Adults and children, instead of hiding from death, eat candy and bread skulls, construct and dress up skeletons, make up silly epitaphs, and generally laugh about one of the greatest terrors of human existence, our mortality. They also acknowledge that although death is necessary to make room for new life, the dead are never fully gone - they live on in their descendents, and in our loving memories.

As the Day of the Dead customs tell us, we are all skulls, all skeletons who are temporarily mobile. From Mexican writer Carlos Valdes: "[We] defend [ourselves] from death with mockery. Our sense of humor prevents [us] from breaking [our] skulls against the blank wall of a graveyard." This attitude of mocking death reminds me of Zen philosopher Alan Watts' description of how the medieval church fathers approached death in the construction of a particular church crypt in Rome:

I think of the crypt of the Capuchin Church on the Via Veneto in Rome: three chapels entirely decorated with the bones of the departed fathers. Altars made of piled skulls and shinbones; ceilings adorned with floral garlands, vertebrae for the flowers and ribs for the stems. Every fixture, every decoration, 'dem bones.' Hundreds of disassembled skeletons crammed into this small crypt with a narrow stairway. What an uproar there will be on the Day of Resurrection, when all those bones try to reassemble themselves and go scurrying upstairs for the Last Judgment! 'Excuse me, father, but isn't that my fifth metatarsal?' When I saw the gently wicked glint in the eyes of the bearded little friar who was collecting the tourists' offerings, I realized that such chapels could have been created only by people who had completely seen through the terrors of death. Some dread skeletons, others play with them.

Some dread skeletons, others play with them. This kind of light touch and frankness about death strikes me as healthier and more realistic than our sanitized modern American way of death, by which the dead are quickly, quietly memorialized and then swept away, while those of us still living tend to avoid looking death so intimately in the face. There is something sweet about picnicing atop the grave of a loved one, something endearing in the custom of leaving a present for the deceased, something wisely witty in writing a little skull poem for living family members, something whimsical about eating bread and candy shaped into skulls and bones, something downright joyful about the celebrations connected to the earnest and serious, and yet playful, Mexican holiday.

Today, in bringing photos to the altar and calling out names, we have remembered those loved ones of ours who graced our lives while living, and who have passed through the rift in this lovely world into the realm of death. On this day, our loved ones have metaphorically slipped back through the crack between the worlds to be with us for a time in our loving memories. Our glowing candles and their spoken names and pictures are a tribute to those who went before us, those whose lives have indelibly touched our own, and we fondly, with humor and grace, remember them. I close with the words of African poet Birago Diop, from his poem Breaths:

...The dead are not gone forever.
They are in the paling shadows,
They are in the darkening shadows.
The dead are not beneath the ground,
They are in the rustling tree,
In the murmuring wood,
the flowing water,
The still water,
In the lonely place, in the crowd;
The dead are never dead...

They are in a woman's breast,
A child's cry, a glowing ember.
The dead are not beneath the earth,
They are in the flickering fire,
In the weeping plant, the groaning rock,
The wooded place, the home.
The dead are never dead...

Hear the fire's voice,
Hear the voice of water.
Hear, in the wind, the sobbing of the trees.
It is the breath of the ancestors.

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