These progressive sermons are available as
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Roger
Ray, pastor I Samuel 28: 7-19
“Samhain,
All Saints Day, Día de Muertos, and Grief”
My week began with one of those
heartbreaking, sobbing, snotty, phone calls that dads sometimes get from adult
daughters. This time it wasn’t a break up with a boyfriend or yet another car
accident. This time it was because her cat, the cat she had when she was very
young, had died after a good, long life. Grief is the price you pay for loving
any living thing. The mortality rate is 100%; there are no exceptions.
Even when death comes in what we might
call “the fullness of time” it often still comes as the most unwanted guest.
Years ago I kept watch with a good friend at the bedside of her grandmother… a
true matriarch of a family that often hinged on her wisdom, strength, and
generosity and she was being eaten alive by cancer. Her death was slow and painful…
the sort that might make those who loved her grateful for the fact that it was
over, but my friend flatly said to me through her tears, “I wasn’t done with
grandma yet.”
I suspect that all of us could echo that
sentiment regarding old friends, a spouse, parents and grandparents. Even in
the short history of this little church, we have had to give up so many of our
founding members…. Some who succumbed to long illnesses and others who have
simply died suddenly, without enough warning to brace ourselves or to be able
to come back in the building and realize that Nelson, or Jim, or Ruth, or Nancy
is not going to be here that day or any other day to follow.
My daughter chatted with consoling pet
owner friends on Face Book, talking about how Noodles was in kitty heaven and
how they hoped that she was happy and among friends. In that moment you would
have to have an unnatural disdain for your own mortality to even act like you
do not also believe in kitty heaven.
Of course, that doesn’t stop the running
commentary inside my head, where I wondered if there was a fish, chicken, cow,
and pig heaven for all of the animals we have eaten in the last year…. Or if
there is a tree heaven for the firewood, lumber, and forest fires we witnessed.
These are not things that a father says to a grieving daughter and these are
not things that many ministers can say in public and expect to have a job when
the sun sets that day.
My daughter loved her cat and the loss she
felt at the news of his death was more than she wanted to feel, and so she
poured emotional anesthesia on that grief by telling herself that Noodles was
in kitty heaven and that is an emotional choice that all of us know all too
well.
A few years ago, just before our first
December snow and ice storm, my old friend, Bill Ringo, called to tell me that
his son, Billy, had died. He was 39, the divorced father of 3 elementary school
aged children, a Persian Gulf War veteran, and a crucial employee in their
family business.
Billy had health problems and we had known
for some time that he would not live to be an old man, but we did expect him to
outlive us.
I slipped and slid over 500 miles of road
between here and Louisville and arrived in time to conduct Billy’s funeral. Billy’s
mother, Donna, and I sat and wept together for a few minutes and then she said,
“When our parents die we are orphans. When our spouse dies we are a widow or a
widower.” “But,” she continued, “when your child dies, we don’t have a word for
that.”
I think, perhaps, we don’t have a word for
it because it is a pain too horrible to ever say. The mortality rate is 100%
but sometimes that fact is still so out of place, so out of time, so
horrifying, that it defies comprehension.
Death can rip a hole in the fabric of the
universe. Most marriages do not survive the death of a child because that void
changes the shape of reality so much that they don’t know what to do with it…
there are arguments, blaming, guilt, affairs, alcoholism, and abandonment. A
parent who loses a child experiences a pain that has nowhere to go, no logical
release, no resolution.
The ancient Hebrew faith did not try to
assuage these feelings with promises of heaven and the rare references they
made to the house of the dead was not a thing of reward or comfort. They spoke
of the dead being “gathered unto their ancestors,” which meant that their bones
were buried with the bones of preceding generations.
During the 5th century BCE
captivity of the Jews in Babylon, they were introduced to the Zoroastrian belief
in an afterlife that could be a place of reward, a place where the wrongs and
injustices of this world were made right.
That hope crept into Judaism and found
full expression in early Christianity.
I was taught a faith that told me to deny
my grief, to pretend that I was happy for a friend or loved one who had “gone
on to their reward.” I have probably presided over four or five hundred
funerals over the past 37 years and now and then, here and there, those
funerals have been sincerely joyful. But most of the time, almost all the time,
despite assertions of hope, promises of life in heaven, the events are marked
with tears and pain.
Priests, pastors, and ministers often have
made the horrifying mistake of trying to give a plausible answer when someone
asks them “Why?” They speak of God’s will, a divine plan, the unknowable
mystery, when they should have the courage to say, “I don’t know.” Or more
realistically, “There is no why.”
There are things that are just sad. And
some are even more sad because they are also wrong. I think that religious
people make a terrible mistake in trying to deny obvious and sincere emotions.
No one said to my daughter, “I’m glad your cat died so that he could be in
kitty heaven.” They said, “I’m sorry your cat died.” No matter what kind of
mythic denial may play around the edges of your mind, the truth is that the cat
is dead and that is sad and you should let yourself be sad about it.
If you hear me speak at very many funerals
you will surely have heard me quote Edna St Vincent Milay’s poem, “A Dirge
without Music”:
I
am not resigned to the shutting away
of
loving hearts in the hard ground.
So
it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into
the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With
lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers
and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be
one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A
fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A
formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The
answers quick and keen, the honest look,
the
laughter, the love,—
They
are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is
the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom.
I know. But I do not approve.
More
precious was the light in your eyes
than
all the roses in the world.
Down,
down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently
they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly
they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I
know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Let me remind you that in a
liberal church you are entirely free to believe whatever you want to believe,
whatever you are persuaded is real and true and worthy of your convictions and
you don’t need my agreement, approval, or imprimatur. But my own belief is that
life is temporary and death is permanent. And as such, we are right to grieve,
to hurt, to mourn. I don’t have much sympathy with denial that says that you
shouldn’t hurt, or grieve, or mourn, that you should have faith in an unseen,
unknown, and probably imaginary world of eternity. Not denial, but defiance… as
the poem says,
I know that the mortality
rate is 100% but I do not approve. I
know that some people die young in accidents, wars, senseless violence,
addiction, suicide, and illness. I know that the wise, the talented, the
artistic, the loving, will one day grow weak and their days will come to an
end, but I do not approve and I am not resigned.
There may be some form of
immortality for people, for cats and dogs, for horses and parrots, as well as
chickens, pigs, cows, and fish, maybe even spring flowers and ficus trees… I
don’t see any reason to believe that there is but such things end up in the
category of personal preference.
What I realize is that my
daughter’s nearly inconsolable grief over the death of her cat is a precursor
to the fact that one day she will have to deal with my death. I hope that when
that happens that she has a husband and children with whom she can distribute
both her love and her grief so that my passing will be to her both an
inescapable reason to grieve and a source of reassuring memory.
No one can tell you how long
or even how to grieve. It is a strange path with a lot of deep pot holes in it.
Pastorally, I only get worried about someone if it isn’t getting better over
time but no one can say what the right pace is.
Somewhere between forgetting and obsessing there is a holy place of
remembering.
Beyond all of the scary
masks and ghosts of the Halloween, the Day of the Dead, there is a beautiful tradition
of Memorial Day, of All Saints Day, and the more loving and compassionate
observances that take shape in almost all cultures, that are a time to simply
stop and remember what was noble, what was laudable, what was sacred in the
lives of those whom we have known and have had to let go back into the mystery
of the universe.
I am not eager for death but
I refuse to allow the fear of it to rob my days of life of the potential for
joy and meaning that we have in life. There are those who believe that there is
some kind of life after death. I do not not share in that belief but whether
you do or you don’t, I encourage you to treasure the life you have now… tell
the people you love that you love them. Tell them now. Carve out big spaces in
your work and home life for friendships, for meaningful conversations, and frivolous
entertainment. Live life for its quality and not for its quantity. Lovingly
remember those who have preceded us in death.
And if, when we die, it
turns out that we do have some kind of meeting on a distant shore on the other
side of mortality, you can look forward to being able to say to me for what
will probably be the first time: Boy you
sure were wrong about this one.
