A sermon given by Rev. Thomas Disrud

Sunday, Feb. 6, 2000

First Unitarian Church, Portland, OR

A week ago I received word that my Aunt Millie back in Wisconsin had died. It was not a surprise. She was going on 93 years old and she had been lived in a nursing home for a past seven years. She was not well her last few months. Her death was, as my relatives said, a blessing.

So this week the familiar rituals were played out. Last Tuesday was the visitation and the funeral at the church. Her sons and daughters, grandchildren and great grandchildren, the relatives and friends were there. The pastor spoke of her life and her faith and mentioned memories of her children and grandchildren. Old familiar hymns like "How Great Thou Art" were sung by the local baritone. After the funeral everyone drove to the cemetery, they huddled in the snow around the gravesite before the body was buried.

And with the formal service finished, they returned to the church for lunch donated by the Auxiliary of Lutheran Women. They had ham sandwiches and casseroles, jello salads and homemade rolls and of course, homemade pies for dessert. It was a time for people to sit and converse about what was happening in town, to remember Millie, to catch up with the folks they hadn’t seen for a while.

This is the image I carry of funerals in this town. They don’t vary all that much, except for the details of a person’s life. Millie lived a good life with children and grandchildren and friends. She was a quiet woman, ever patient. She worked hard on the farm she ran with her husband. She had her share to tragedy, losing a son in a car accident back in the early 1960s, losing a husband to cancer 25 years ago, and other losses I don’t know about or simply don’t remember.

I’ve been thinking of her a lot this week—remembering times we spent together. Going to her house and playing cards. Hearing stories of her children. And her death has also made me think of a generation that is almost gone. Of nine children in my father’s family, there is only one sibling left now, my aunt Helen. All the others have gone.

It seems that this week I have been just a little bit more aware of my own mortality.

As losses go, aunt Millie’s death has felt somewhat routine. She had a good passing, it was not unexpected. She was in her 90s, and, I expect, was ready to go. It seems to fit into the scheme of things. It is something we know will happen.

Deaths, of course, are not always like that. Some catch us off guard, like when a plane crashes into the ocean and we see the faces of the victims in the newspaper. Then it doesn’t seem routine at all. We have a sense that someone has died before their time and we try to make sense of it. They didn’t make it into their 90s, but died much sooner. That is harder to understand.

Death, like life, is rarely smooth and easy. More often than not it is messy. At whatever age someone has died, it may be that their business just doesn’t seem finished. Maybe there were some things in our relationship that just didn’t get said. Maybe they couldn’t say it. Maybe we couldn’t say it. And now it is too late. We are left. It may be that a relationship doesn’t have time to heal. Death can come in many forms—some large, some small. A relationship can end without a person dying. It may be that we are leaving a place.

Along with the grief we feel, there may be all kinds of other emotions. We may be angry at them for leaving. How dare they do this to us. We may, on some level feel a sense of relief that they’re gone. Maybe we are glad to not feel the sense of responsibility we have felt. We have other things we would like to do with our time. And it may be we are filled with regret—that we didn’t do the things we hoped to do with them. On top of everything else, we have feel guilty for the emotions we are having.

When a person is gone, all kinds of emotions come up. At first we may simply feel numb. We try to just get through.

And as the days go by, we slowly come to have a better perspective on what is happening. Our perspective on the world changes. Things are not as they appeared before.

When a parent dies, our sense of the past dies too. Our world has included our parents, and now they are no longer here. We have to carry on. When a spouse dies, the present disappears. The familiar routines, the companionship, the physical connection—it is gone. And when a child dies, they take a parent’s future with them. The rest of our lives no longer looks the way it did before. It won’t play out the way we imagined that it would.

When we experience loss, we are forced to see our lives differently. Who we are in relation to everything around us changes. We see the world through a new set on lenses. And that can take some getting used to.

When my mother died, I was in my first year of seminary. This is usually an angst-filled time anyway, and losing a parent certainly doesn’t help that. My mother had had some health problems but she seemed to be doing OK. But then she took a turn and suddenly died during spring break. I returned to school after being gone for a week. I was there physically but not really emotionally. I remember being in a fog.

My classmates offered comforting words, most of which I don’t really remember. But I do remember a conversation I had with a professor, who tended to say what was on his mind. He heard my story and quickly summed things up: "Well, you’re an orphan now." I have to say the word orphan hadn’t yet entered my consciousness quite yet. I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. Whether I was ready for it or not, it gave me a new sense of myself in the world.

Whether we’re ready for it or not, the process of grief happens. It is different for each person and for each loss. It is not something we can predict. Sometimes a loss or change will catch us off guard and we are surprised at all the dimensions.

Yes, there are the stages of grief we know about, the bargaining, the denial, the anger, the eventual sense of acceptance. Most of the time they happen, but it is not a linear thing. We may think we are through with one, but then it may pop up again. The process is more circular than linear. It is a process that goes on long after a memorial is held. It is private and we can’t predict it.

And it can be we can get stuck somewhere. We can’t seem to move on. We just can’t let go of something no matter how long it has been. It may be we are just not ready. It may be something is standing in the way. Something in the relationship is unresolved and we can’t seem to let it go.

It may be we need some help. Or it may be all we need is time.

One realization that is a part of grieving is that we are not in control of things, and this is not always an easy thing to take. We may have the world ordered just as we want it and a loss throws all of that into chaos. Our response may be to try to control all that we can, to carve out our niche. As we become aware of the precariousness of life, we decide we are going to build up our defenses as much as possible. We can, after all, try to control our little corner of the world.

Thomas Lynch, in his book "The Undertaker" tells about how it was to grow up as the son of a funeral director.

"My father saw peril in everything. Disaster was ever at hand. Some mayhem with our name on it lurked around the edges of our neighborhood waiting for a lapse of parental oversight to spirit us away. In the most innocent of enterprises he saw danger. In every football game he saw the ruptured spleen, the death by drowning in every backyard pool, leukemia in every bruise, broken necks on trampolines, the deadly pox or fever in every rash or bug bite.

"My father had seen, in the dead bodies of infants and children and young men and women, evidence that God lived by the laws of nature, and obeyed its statutes, however brutal."

If we are an undertaker or not, it is said that we are born with an awareness that we will die. And we live with an aversion to that. As we experience losses in our lives, this awareness is present and we are left trying to figure it out. We are shaped by our experiences and we live out of those experiences and those that we inherit form our parents. They, too, affect how it is we see the world. We live with the griefs in our lives, small and large.

We go though stages of bargaining and acceptance. And at some point with grief can come an awareness of something universal. Loss and grief become not something that afflicts us alone, but something that connects us with others. We come to know that it visits every household at one time or another. We can’t escape it.

There is a story about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He’s enjoying the wind and the fresh air—until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore.

"My god, this is terrible," the wave said. "Look what’s going to happen to me!"

"Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, "Why to you look so sad?"

"The first wave says, "You don’t understand! We’re all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?"

"The second wave says, "No, you don’t understand . You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.""

Loss comes to all of us eventually. It may be when we are young. It may be when we are older. Eventually we lose someone we love or a relationship breaks. We come to know we are all part of the common ocean.

And no matter how prepared we think we are. No matter how much we think we have experienced it before, we are affected and changed somehow. Our view of the world is reshaped and recast.

As a minister, I’m always amazed to see how we carry on at such times. There is something in us that moves forward. Even when people face an incredible loss, there is still a reaching out for life. At first they get by day by day. It is all they can do. But somehow most people do it. It is when we come to the end of our ropes that we are asked to step forward into the unknown and try to continue on with life. We take it slowly, and we don’t necessarily know the way, but something keeps moving us in that direction.

In deep grief, we are plunged into a well of despair and loss. We don’t know what we will do. It is at times like this that we become more aware of our fears and longings. When we are in despair, it seems to all be laid in front of us.

This time has been described as going into a cave that has not seen light for many many years and then lighting a match. The match provides enough illumination to keep us going. Eventually we come to a place where we are able to see a little more clearly. The darkness is illuminated. In the despair, it seems we are able to see something in ourselves we were not able to see before. We understand life in a different way.

The relationship changes.

The relationship goes from being something we have with another who is in front of us and talks with us to a relationship with someone who is inside of us. When they are not physically present, we hold the relationship inside of us. The love we once felt coming from outside of ourselves is now a love that fills us. We see the relationship in a different light.

When we have this inside of us, our capacity to love and understand grows. We see our sense of self in relation to others grow. With our sorrow comes a different sense of love.

We would not choose it, but there is a grace present that seems to call us forward.

Grief is a lifelong journey. It is a process that does not end. It has a defined beginning, but there is not destination. At first we crawl and then as we stand up, we stumble along a path that may not look very familiar. And one day our footing starts to feel a little stronger.

The relationships in our lives don’t go away, but they carry on in us and in those who go after us. We come to understand those relationships in a different way. In grief, we are opened up to life, whether we want to be or not.

In our grieving, Kahlil Gibran says, there is a well in us that is hollowed out by our tears. Eventually, that space can be opened up and filled with life and the capacity both to feel sorrow and joy. It is all part of the whole.

Poet May Sarton writes:

Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,

Mother and child, lover and lover mated,

Are wound and bound together and enflowing.

What has been plaited cannot be unplaited—

Only the strands grow richer with each loss

And memory makes kings and queens of us.

Grief is a lifelong journey. It is full of ups and downs. Memory grows richer with each loss. It connects us with some mystery at the center of life. We don’t always know when we will be done with it or where it will lead us. We are asked to be open to what the future may hold.

As I prepared to be a minister, there was a question that was always floating around in the back of my mind: I wondered, what would my parents think about what I’m doing? My father died when I was a child and my mother died early in my time in seminary. They were staunch Lutherans and certainly would have been pleased about my becoming a Lutheran minister. But this path was different. My mother and I had had some conversations about it, but it was my mother’s nature to reserve judgment. In our conversations about my going off to California to study for the Unitarian Universalist ministry, she was always a little skeptical. I suspect she thought I would eventually get over it or do the thing that was right. Before she died I never really heard the answer and I always wondered what she and my father would really think of this. At the worst times, I had visions of them turning over in their graves. It was, I thought, a mystery I would just have to live with.

Well, fast forward a few years. It is the day before I am to see the Ministerial Fellowship Committee—the 21-member body in our denomination that credentials ministers. It is a major event in the life of a minister. You preach to this group and you are asked questions about a wide range of subjects and anything about your life and your preparation for ministry. So, it is the day before this and needless to say, I was feeling a little nervous and anxious. I’m puttering around the cottage I live in, listening to music and trying to calm myself down.

I sit down on the couch in my living room. I close my eyes and try to focus. Suddenly I’m filled with a sense that my parents are with me. Not that they are physically in the room, but that their presenses are very much there. I’m filled with a sense of warmth and love and affirmation. It is as if they have come to bless me on the journey. One message comes through loud and clear for me: Everything will be OK.

I didn’t expect this, but when it was over I knew that my interview the next day would be fine. I knew that I was ready. I knew that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I received what it was I needed. If anything, the next day, things felt a little anti-climactic.

It was an unexpected moment of grace and healing.

The poet Rumi wrote:

The way of love is not

a subtle argument.

The door there is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles

of their freedom.

How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,

they’re given wings.

Loss is not something we choose in life. It is simply what happens in life.

However tremendous the losses we face, we are changed by them. They call forth strength and wisdom in us that we may not know we have. Alongside the pain is an opening for joy.

With this freedom, we can make great sky-circles of our freedom.

When we are falling, may we find wings to lift us up.

May it be so. Amen.

Prayer

Let us pray: God of mystery and wonder, we ask your presence in our lives. Be with us, particularly in times of despair. Help us to know we are not alone. Help us to have faith in life, and trust where we will land. When we are falling, give us wings of hope. Help us to live our lives, in gratitude for what we have been given. Amen.

Benediction

As you live life in all its dimensions, may roots hold you close, and may wings set you free. Go now this day in love and go in peace. Amen.

Call to worship

Come into this house of memory and hope,

this house of fellowship and love.

Let us hold those who suffer in the light,

and let us find joy, even when the way grows dim.

Let us be called to our highest selves here,

and let us be of service to something larger than ourselves.

Let us come here to serve you, spirit of life.

Come, and let us worship together.

Copyright 2000, by Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.