A sermon for Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton & Florence
Samhain . Halloween . All Souls . Day of the Dead
November 2, 2003
By F. Jay Deacon
It is just past Halloween, and Samhain, and All Souls, and the Mexican Day of the Dead, and the notion persists around the world, many cultures, that around this time of year the souls of the dead come close to us, return to their homes; the custom persists, you set out some food and drink for them; and, if there's no treat, the ghostly visitors will be displeased, and evil spells will befall.
Where have they been? The ghostly visitors — so the Babylonians and Assyrians said, anyway, had gone away to a semi-material ghost-existence, a shade, a double of the person, that survives the death of the body and has descended to the underworld, a place of gloomy colors, a pit, a land of no return, a house of darkness, a place where dust is their bread, a place infested with demons.
Look in the Bible. In the most ancient of the Hebrew scriptures. Job's life is ebbing away, and he's talking about descending into the place called Sheol, the shadowland.
These holidays, holy days — these are days of skeletons, skulls, ghosts — but those are just the signs of the visitors. And the visitors signify the ongoing-ness of individual lives. The veil between the worlds is thin and you can sense the presence of the departed ones. They come back and visit, appear in dreams, seem not to be really gone.
What our ghost costumes nervously make fun of is both fear and awe. The scarey part comes first.
One day, the fact of mortality — my own — changes from academic knowledge to existential reality. Out of the blue sky, there had been a diagnosis that shows me exposed, dependent on the continuing supply of insulin and other paraphernalia. About General Assembly time, already several months beyond the possibility of health without these alien saviours, I had undergone a couple of samplings of the breakdown of normality that had been prevented all these years, until last winter, by a bodily capacity now lost to me, a breakdown whose onset remains only a few missed or mistaken dosages away. At General Assembly I sat with an old friend, Bob Schaibly, a colleague from the west coast, and asked him about his two brushes with death, and how he'd felt — was he shaken, afraid, what? In reply he spoke of his practice of meditation, his weeks with Tich Naht Hanh, and some fundamentals of Zen, which amount to being sure that, at the end of the day, you've lived a life worth dying for.
Three years ago my father lay dying in New Jersey. Driving from Chicago, I had a call on my cell phone: my brother was calling to tell me Dad had just now passed away. I drove on, across the Walt Whitman bridge from Philadelphia into South Jersey, across old Route 70 toward Toms River. A sign read "Pemberton." Dad's hometown, and his father's, and his sister's, all of them gone. Generations now gone, which meant I was next!
Mom moved in with my sister and her husband, a mile away from the old house in Island Heights, which has been sold. We — mostly Pat and Al — had to empty it.
Mom and Dad bought that house 57 years ago. We should have known every inch. But while picking through rooms crammed with 56 years of living, attic, basement, garage, all stuffed — Pat and Al found a stash of photographs and a family Bible. Nobody knows who maintained them or put them there.
There were hundreds of photographs. There were some I knew, and some I'd never met, and many I never knew of. There was my grandmother's mother — as a child! There were ladies in enormous hats, dour gentlemen, going back to the 1890s, and mixed in, pictures of myself at various stages of life. Time telescoped, collapsed. Here we all were. This is my family.
In the Bible, there was a register of births, and deaths, and marriages, going all the way back to 1786 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, before they crossed the Atlantic.
I followed the names in each list. Sometimes the year of birth was also the year of death; sometimes it was two, five, ten years after. Some lived long lives but for each there was a death date.
Farther back I found the most extraordinary thing that my grandfather had added to the Bible: an
registered with the Eugenics Record Office on Long Island. I knew this had been a kind of fad, the purpose of which was to assure the fitness of all proposed marriage partners who might enter the family, so as to assure healthy, effective offspring.
There were tables of things you had to fill out. I learned that Dr. Leon Goble, my great-grandfather, was of phlegmatic temperament, whereas my grandfather was of nervo-phlegmatic temperament. Under "Special gifts or peculiarities of mind and body" I learned that Henrietta Goble "thinks she is sick all the time" and that James J. Goble, born in 1799, was a "tobacco fiend" and died of dropsy of the heart. Several were described as "narrow minded." I learned that Beula Lamb was cheerful and was paralyzed at 36.
All these — certified eugenically fit — all these had lived and loved and worked and wept and died and I had never heard most of their names.
Nevertheless I was aware of this fact: It was because they were where they were and did what they did when they did that I am here, and had it been otherwise, I would not be.
And this extremely improbable existence of mine is also — precarious. Despite all the care they took to assure eugenic fitness, with the few exceptions of those born later in the twentieth century, they got sick, and died, are all gone, vanished.
How very extraordinary to be here! How improbable, how passing, how utterly astonishing!
But where did they all go?
Until the Persian prophet Zoroaster invented the resurrection of the dead, heaven, and hell — 500 years before the Common Era — the ancients looked forward only to a sad, dreary condition underground into which everybody descended. In the shadowy realm of what they called Sheol — where there's no there there. But sometimes they'd turn up here, a continuing part of the lives of the living. Gone to shadow-land and yet, you felt them near; it seemed they didn't really go away.
Is this weird? Yet didn't a great Unitarian — Albert Schweitzer, no less — famously write:
He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, he came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word . . . and sets us to the tasks that He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings that they shall pass through in his fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He Is.
The book is The Quest for the Historical Jesus. Maybe the most famous case of those who don't go away.
But Ira Progoff — it must be said, the late Ira Progoff — developed a technology for studying the way the lives of people who have died live on in us — the lives of loved ones, most of whom were never famous; and the lives of the revered and famous like Sojourner Truth or Gandhi or Emerson or Jesus or Margaret Fuller — how they have become a part of our very souls and how their lives are lived out still in ours.
And so, a century and a half ago, Rev. Samuel Johnson said:
Death, so far from removing our dear friends from us, brings them nearer to our souls, places them in our souls so that they cannot be lost . . .1
Life in death. Lives that cannot be lost to us; they live on in us. But there's a flip side: the realms of death in life, the shadowland. Death in life. No there there.
There are those who, in death, seem still to live, — there are also those in life who, living, do not live, whose lives are death in life.
In the shadowy realm of Sheol — well, there's no there there. And that is the problem. That is hell.
We, being human, get to wonder where they all — and we ourselves — go. Simpler animals are not bothered by anticipatory curiosity, or dread, or hope. We are the fruit of the precarious emergence and occasional triumph of consciousness. Out of the shadows and into consciousness. We live not only in the moment, but expand to yesterday, and our curiosity to centuries ago, our hopes to an eternity from now, our fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool. We know that we will die. Ernest Becker puts it like this:
It takes men of granite, who were automatically powerful, "secure in their drivenness" we might say, and it makes them tremble, makes them cry. . . .
With human consciousness, Nature has thrown caution to the wind, lent us the power of the gods, without the immortality. It has not protected us from the ecstasies and burden of consciousness.
In 1961 Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem as a court reporter for The New Yorker not because the magazine sent her but because she felt she personally had to attend the trial of the Nazi official Adolph Eichmann. She wanted to understand Eichmann's mind and, as she put it, "the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society."
What you would have expected to find was a demonic genius. She found a diligent bureaucrat. A man of insipid mediocrity. She wrote that he was like, quote, "a ghost in a spiritualist seance." A faceless bureaucrat of death. Once he had said he could never be a doctor because he couldn't stand the sight of blood, but he was untroubled by the slaughter of millions of people. She discovered the banality of evil.
There are those in life who, living, do not live, whose lives are death in life. Adolph Eichmann lived his life in the shadowy realm of Sheol where there is no there there. And that is hell.
We cannot afford not to be conscious. That is because we are not simpler animals, goats or sheep or cute kittens, but gods, with vast powers. We are gods, as Fritz Perls put it — well, I will have to soften his language — gods who, well, defecate. And life and history and destiny require that we be conscious.
Two millennia ago the Gnostics read the story of the Garden of Eden and saw a different meaning. They said the serpent was not Satan, no devil or even a deceiver but the giver of knowledge, the source of our moral understanding, a generous creature who liberated us from the darkness imposed by a tyrannical God. The serpent imparted to Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil, something Adolph Eichmann quite lacked.
Eichmann lived his entire life in the shadowy place where there is neither wisdom nor knowledge of good and evil. The devils are simply sleepwalking gods. And you and I are gods who — well, you remember what Fritz Perls said.
When William Lloyd Garrison was a young newspaper editor in Newburyport, Massachusetts, a neighbor, leading respectable citizen of means, was confronted — by Garrison, in fact — about evidence that one of the ships he owned was enhancing his fortune by transporting slaves for Southern slaveholders. The neighbor sloughed it off: what business of it was his where passengers on his ships were going, or why?
Awhile ago I heard an interview with a dealer of huge, fuel-guzzling vehicles. He said, "Global warming? Nobody cares about that except a few fanatics. When was the last time you went to a cocktail party and anybody was talking about global warming?" And Thursday, the Senate voted 55-to-43 to defeat a very modest bill to curb vehicle emissions, fund scientific research on climate change, and create economic incentives and curbs to prod industry into reducing their greenhouse gases over several years. Even though violent climate change has already created 25 million refugees and will, soon enough, create far, far more. Even while our nation's current energy policies will increase greenhouse emissions 25% by 2010. Those policies are weapons of mass destruction and we are sleepwalking into hell.
Instead of struggling with our fear itself, writes Ernest Becker, we struggle
with the stock market, with fast cars, with nuclear missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. . . Hence, the complicated and second-hand quality of our entire drivenness. . . . It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.2
We have always done this. We had to do it as infants and children in order to live in this world at all. A child cannot take it all in. This universe is a scary place in which to live, and we are afraid. With the force of the terror we are suppressing we make ourselves sleepwalk.
And yet the goal of the world's great spiritual wisdom is to be conscious and awake to life.
I grew up — maybe you did — with a religious tradition that provided a very nice solution to this dying problem. I wish I could dispense such comforting certainties now, but it wouldn't work anyway, not here.
What lies within our power to do, here, is to look into each others' eyes acknowledging all the inexplicable perversity of life along with the ravishing glory of it, the terrors with the ecstasy, stand in solidarity with each other struggling with the whole inexplicable condition of life, not leave us each all alone in the face of it — to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, and live, all of us, live lives worth dying for.
Who has ever been fully awake, fully conscious? We couldn't take it in. It is a world full of dangers and terrors, as well as exquisite ravishing beauty and the miracle of being here at all.
To face all this can be an experience of rebirth, to die and be reborn, and every authentic rebirth is a real ejection from a false paradise of limited consciousness. It is a difficult, and an adult, human experience. It achieves the very result that as children we worked so painfully to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of human existence an impossibility. It is to bear a burden, no longer able to say we didn't know.
But it is to bear also the awareness of a majesty greater than our fear; a vision of beauty more sweeping than the burden we bear, to know e live within a vast Mystery, to act in this world as agents of Life Itself. In the tumult of the world it is the ability to be thrilled by a solemn silence.
It means going through this world with our eyes open to all lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything; with our eyes open to all this; yet with the pores of our souls open to the divine wind. It is to live in the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow.
This stupendous mystery occupies the mind with a bewildering strength. It may sweep through our being as a gentle tide or it may overcome us with ecstasy. It may come as a hushed, trembling speechless humility. It is the sense of a mystery all inexpressible; a kind of fear that has nothing to do with being afraid, but is the consciousness of holiness, with awe.
In the mysterious way in which life is given to us, Becker says,
it pushes in the direction of its own expansion. . . . Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead or what use it will make of our anguished searching? The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something — an object or ourselves — and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, [to the Immensity of Life Itself].3
At this season of All Souls, there are those departed whose presence we yearn once more to feel — who lived with authenticity, fully awake to life.
May we so live — so that, in the end, our lives may have been worth dying for.
Annie Dillard
Holy the Firm, 43f
So this is where we are. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. How could I have forgotten? . . . Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisome days? . . . And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 270f
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, . . . growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.
Pablo Neruda
"I Will Come Back"
Some time, man or woman, traveller,
afterwards, when I am not alive,
look here, look for me here
between the stones and the ocean,
in the light storming
in the foam.
Look here, look for me here,
for here is where I shall come, saying nothing,
no voice, no mouth, pure,
here I shall be again the movement
of the water, of
its wild heart,
here I shall be both lost and found —
here I shall be perhaps both stone and silence.
Henry Thoreau
Walden, Ch. II
Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. . . . The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake . . .
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
We come to present our offerings to Life: the works of our hands and minds, the care and good hope our our hearts. The days somehow require us, and we come seeking clarity of sight and purpose. But we come hungering and thirsting, not for bread alone. We come weary and lonely. Within there is a roiling sea of passion and we come in search of peace.
We come grateful for ravishing beauty, for surpassing joy, for love that heals and expands our hearts. We come longing for a glimpse of transcendence, to hear silent music.
In this quietness may our eyes and ears and the pores of our being be found open wide to the Divine Wind which rushes within and beyond and through all that is, unspent and full, lifting us, renewing us, binding our wounds, making us free, in this silence.