by Rev. Robert Schaibly, Guest Preacher

A sermon given October 28, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

I like the poem by Billy Collins, “My Number,” which asks, “Is death miles away from this house or is he stepping from a car parked at the dark end of the lane?”  A 20^th century psychoanalyst, Ernst Becker wrote a book called The Denial of Death.  In it he said that self-love leads us to deny death all along the way; and as an extension of that self-preservation, talking seriously about death just makes us feel very sorry for the fellow sitting next to us.  Sometimes you will hear a person say something with the phrase in it, “If I die…”, but you will not win any friends by saying, “Whaddya mean, IF you die—It’s a sure thing, buddy!”  We want distance from death!  And there is so much space—breathing space—that humanity creates for us, it’s amusing; but ultimately, it evokes compassion in us.

We probably first become aware of this denial when hearing euphemisms for dying.  So many of the expressions for death put it at arm’s length and at the same time treat the dead tenderly.  You have heard some of these:  he passed away; he’s in the bosom of Abraham; he’s with Jesus; he succumbed, he departed; he’s six feet under; he’s pushing up daisies; he’s pushing the clouds around.  More poetically, he’s joined the majority.  More clinically, the patient expired, sort of the way his magazine subscription will.  “Whatever happened to Joe Blackwell?”  “Oh, goodness, he laid down his knife and fork about ten years ago.”

This is what love can do to death:  cushion it, make it tolerable, help us give a wry laugh, and make it tolerable.  It draws upon human creativity to do this.

My partner, Steven, and I moved here from Houston.  Houston is the nation’s fourth largest city with a population the same size as Oregon’s.  On a freeway it is possible to drive 60 miles an hour for more than an hour and still be in Houston.  Houston was the first city in the United States in which Anglos became the minority.  While I was minister of First Church Houston we celebrated the Mexican holiday, Cinco de Mayo, which is increasingly celebrated in Oregon.  The Fifth of May, Cinco de Mayo is a celebration not unlike le Quatorze Juillet, the Fourteenth of July, Bastille Day, in France.  It commemorates the Mexican defeat of French forces in Mexico.  And in Houston we also observed El Dia de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.  One can buy candy skulls and skeletons made of cake, little hearses made of chocolate, and coffins made of candy.  More than three dozen countries observe some part of Day of the Dead, All Saints Day on November 1st, and All Souls Day on the 2nd.

Back in Mexico the Day of the Dead would be a day to go to the cemetery with flowers and food for a party—the cemetery for a party?  Oh yes!  And I was invited to such a party in Houston on the tenth anniversary of the death of one of the church secretaries, a person named Susan, a wonderfully entertaining church member.  We went on a Sunday after church; we sat on the ground at the gravesite and drank champagne and ate fine chocolates and cake and reminisced about Susan and about her dying.  Ten years earlier we had been together around her hospital bed singing campfire songs:  “Tell me why the stars do shine, tell me why the ivy twines, tell me why the sky’s so blue, and I will tell you just why I love you.”  And lullabies:  “Like a ship in the harbor, like a mother and child, come sit here beside me, I’ll hold you a while.”

And late that night Susan died.  May we all be sung to sleep.

I think we had the idea for that party simply because we lived among so many Hispanic people.  We Unitarian Universalists are eclectic.  Though most of us do not believe in the Virgin Birth or the divinity of Jesus, we have no hesitation about celebrating Christmas Eve.  If you are a visitor here today, this is the freedom our religion offers.  (And there are two Christmas Eve candlelight services, an early one especially to include youngsters, and the later one for us older kids!)  And so it is with Easter, and though only some of us have a Jewish background, most of us relate to Passover because it is a celebration of human liberation.  Literally, the Hebrews leave Egypt, but figuratively, it means the liberation of all oppressed people from what stifles and smothers us.

And, as well as newcomers, there may be church members present who have never been to a Unitarian memorial service.  This is our very own example of what love can do to death.  It is distinctive to our religion, though other traditions are expanding in this direction.  Our religion is personal in that you decide what you believe and as time passes you are entitled to change your mind.  The memorial service tries to honor the wishes of the deceased person insofar as those are known.  People come forward and reminisce and often there is laughter as stories about the deceased person are remembered.  There is at least a table with a photograph and flowers, but that has expanded to include photos of all the meaningful events in the person’s life, their medals, their ribbons, their musical instrument, a couple of golf balls, and once, three of the dozens of quilts she had made.  Susan insisted there be a party after her memorial service and dictated the brand of the chocolates and the champagne she loved.  You may do this, too; we’ll all come; just leave the money to fund it!  Often after such services people from outside the church say it’s the most meaningful memorial service they ever attended.

What love can do to death is create art, in the broadest sense.  There have been a number of recent bicycle accidents in Portland.  We were on our way to the theater when we came upon the first spontaneous gathering, and since then I have seen another.  A shrine is created by what people have brought:  flowers—often attached to a bike that has been painted white—a photo, a sign about what happened here, some stuffed toys.  It’s very touching.

I’ve studied with a Zen Buddhist Vietnamese teacher and Ancestor Festivals are important in Vietnamese culture.  The altar is decorated with a pyramid of oranges on one side, perhaps a pyramid of apples on the other side.  The favorite foods of the deceased are brought and placed on tables before the altar.  Through these rituals we express our gratitude to the ancestors for the gift of life, and our sense of awe before the great mystery of death.  Today we are invited after the service to share bread and cocoa and to admire the memorial wreathes the young people in the church school have made.

William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in English because he captures the layers of feelings in his works.  He can be sacred and gruesome at the same time, profound and funny.  In a scene in Hamlet, Hamlet stands watching as a gravedigger works, and says — (listen up now, Choir members, this will help you stay alert!) —Hamlet says, “This skull had a tongue in it and could sing once.”  The gravedigger brings up another skull and identifies it:  “This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the king’s jester.”  And Hamlet, the son of that same king, replies, “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, he hath borne me on his back a thousand times….”  It is the end of those we had fun with, we knew well, and loved.  And then he smells the skull and says, “Puh.”

What Shakespeare does with death is create art.  The human race creates Mozart and Bach, who provide a mass.  Other artists create sculpture, sometimes completely representational, sometimes something like the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC.  Of course no one has ever exceeded the ancient Egyptians in commemorating death, starting with the pyramids!

Then there are the portraits, the deceased lying in a coffin.  What I particularly love are the portraits by the Old Dutch masters, and we were just this year gifted with a Rembrandt show at the Museum of Art.  And there it was:  a self portrait of the old master himself, a bulbous nose, pock marks and scars, but a face he had earned, the face of a man who lived all of his life.

There are rituals:  mixing fragrant rosewater with which to wash the gravestones; I do not think it is farfetched to include the craft of baking a casserole for a family in grief as an art, too.  There have been places where the men in the extended family would immediately build the coffin for their loved one.

Theology and philosophy are also art forms created to console.  When we live the notion that heaven is our destination, what do you envision?  Pearly gates, streets of gold, everyone wearing robes walking about on clouds.  It isn’t plausible—well, that is, I speak for myself!—but when my father died, I grieved with a friend and said that as a rational person I could not imagine heaven yet I wished I could see my dad again.  And he said, “What would heaven be like if you were non-rational for a minute?”  And I said it would be all of the family together on a summer night, up late because there is no school, playing cards around the kitchen table, eating popcorn with butter on it.  My mother is at the kitchen stove making fudge.  We are laughing at one another’s bad luck and groaning at whoever is ahead.  The cards get more buttery as the night goes on.”  He is such a good friend.  He laughs and says, “It sounds great!”  And so do I create an idea that puts its arm around my shoulders and comforts me.

The most commonly heard concept of an afterlife these last few years is from Islam, the notion that inspires young men to become suicide bombers.  You recall that a suicide bomber is assured of heaven where he will have 70 virgins.  The prospect of this being heaven is absolutely ghastly, for there is so much to be said for sexual experience!  Seventy virgins would be hell!  In the Broadway musical The Music Man, there is a song with the lines, “No dewy eyed miss for me!  I prefer to take a chance on a more adult romance.  The sadder but wiser girl’s the girl for me!”  Well, to each his own, eh?

A spiritual teacher dies, and the obituary reads, “The Zen master, ABC, entered The Stillness on June 20^th.”  The words “The” and “Stillness” are capitalized.  He has entered The Stillness.  What does it mean?  It means to those who knew him he is still present, even available for consultation.  It is the same thing I have been told by a widow when she says, “I went shopping and everything I looked at, honestly, my husband was with me and I could hear him comment on how it looked and how much it cost!”  Many comment, “It was as though he was in the house with me as usual a few nights ago.”  About the Zen master the students ask, “What would Suzuki Roshi say to that?”  And they speculate with remarkable accuracy.

What love can do to death is create something artistic that inspires us to carry on.  When my father died his brother asked if he could have his eyeglasses.  He put the glasses near an easy chair on a small side table upside down, and they were there in their immediacy and intimacy as though my father had just taken them off to rub his eyes.  He said it helped him remember to be more like his brother.  What they did that we liked can become part of our behavioral repertoire.

When President John F. Kennedy was killed his wife gave one of his neckties to each of the men who had worked for him.  One man said he kept it there hanging with his other neckties in the closet to be looked at, never to be worn.  Many of us have a picture gallery at home and not just of those who are alive, but also of those who live in our hearts.  As an aunt of mine wrote at the close of each letter, “We think of you often and hold you in our hearts always.”

What love can do to death inspires us to go on loving life joyously, and sometimes defiantly, as Edna St. Vincent Millay does, beginning her poem, “I shall die, but that is all I shall do for death.”

The Death that puts others to sleep wakes us up and we recognize again that our priority is to support life.  In the words of George Herbert, living well is the best revenge.  A life well-lived lasts for generations.  Dylan Thomas captures it perfectly:

Though lovers be lost, love shall not,

And death shall have no dominion.

PRAYER

Come upon us Creator Spirit

And make us persons on whom nothing is lost.

Amen.

BENEDICTION

The benediction comes from a poem by Wendell Berry: Go your way and be joyful.  “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”

Amen, Yes, Amen.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Robert Schaibly.  All rights reserved.