First Parish Bedford UU

Meditation for Dia de los Muertos

It is fitting to pause in this dying time of year to honor our departed loved ones.  Friday was Samhain (sah-win), the pagan precedent for Halloween and also for All Saints Day yesterday and All Soul's Day today, in the Anglican and Catholic traditions respectively.

But, here at First Parish, today, we honor Dia de los Muertos, a Mexican and Mexican-American observance.  It is believed that the spirits of the dead return to earth on this day to party with their loved ones. To welcome them, people make altars, ofrendas, in their homes and gather in cemeteries to picnic, enjoying the favorite foods of the deceased, remembering, visiting, and partying.

I invite you now into a time of meditation.  Sit with your body relaxed, legs uncrossed, feet on the floor or a stool if you like.  Close your eyes if you wish. Feel your breath, breath of life, enter and then leave your body.  Listen to your breath passing through your body, in through your nose or mouth, feel it filling your lungs, then passing out through nose or mouth…Again. And again…

At this time of year, we are conscious of the passing of time, the passing of autumn.  Last night we turned back the clocks and gained time.  This weekend autumn passes before our eyes as golden leaves falling from the trees.  We are conscious of the passing of time, the passing of autumn, and the passing away of those we love.

And, so

These days, the autumn air is hazy; mist hangs over the fields in the morning and shrouds the streetlights at night.  And, have you seen yet the early morning frost? Winter etches the edges of the fallen oak leaves with a fine lacey trim, a brief hint of the white blankets to come.  

Autumn's hazy air reminds us of the thin veil between life and death.  How the presence of deceased loved ones can sometimes be felt in an empty room, or in the words of a song on the radio, or in an encounter with someone who bears a strong resemblance.  And then the feeling fades.

In the passing of time and the passing of autumn, something in the air reminds us of the ultimate passing.  How death can come momentarily without notice…or come ever so slowly over many months or even years. How it can come early in life or late in life…   Thoughts of our own mortality and that of those we love flicker in and out of our consciousness; loved ones now gone are missed.   Our sorrows and losses- past, current and future- resonate.

And, so, let us pause for the timeless tradition of honoring the ancestors.  Let us dwell in shared silence together, to celebrate the dead, to call upon our memories of loved ones, family and friends, mentors, heroes and heroines… pets as well as people…

In remembering those who dwell with us no more in mortal form, let our memories call to mind with good humor their qualities-desirable or not-that live on in us, we who still love them.

In keeping with Dia de los Muertos, as evidenced by our festive, even zany ofrenda, let this not be a time of mourning, but rather a time of festive celebrating the departed, the things and food they loved, their attributes-good and not so good-that are now a part of who we are, as well.

(silence)

Now I invite you to call their first names out into our shared silence. “Blackie our cat.” “Aunt Alice.” “My Grandpa Joe.”  When it seems there are no more names to be said, and the silence has gathered again, I will call out “Presente!” (Spanish for “present”) and you are invited to call out in response, “Presente!”

(silence)

“Presente!” “Presente!” AMEN!

During the offertory, there will be another opportunity to place a photograph, memento or favorite object of your loved one on the ofrenda or alternatively to light a candle in honor of a loved one if you don't have a memento. Also, anyone is welcome to write the name of the departed on the paper provided and place it in one of the baskets on the Ofrenda.  

 

Homily   “Not Far Away”

Before I became a minister, my family attended First Parish in Arlington, MA which is situated next to the town cemetery.  One Sunday, when my daughter was eleven or twelve, her Religious Education class went out into the cemetery.  She no longer recalls the purpose of the venture:  to read the gravestones, look for prominent names, make rubbings, or get the kids outdoors and wear off some energy?  

We all do remember that she came home that Sunday with an epitaph committed to memory.  It fascinated her.  She proceeded to copy it onto the piece of foam board.

Ever since, come Halloween, this gravestone is displayed near our front walk for the benefit of the trick-or-treaters who come to our door. Friday night was no exception -let me show it to you.  

Stop and look as you pass by

As you are now so once was I

As I am now so you will be

Prepare for death and follow me.

The parents of pre-schoolers are happy for some stimulation while they wait for their young ones to make it up our steps, ring the bell, get their treat, maybe say thank you, and negotiate the steps down again.  The younger readers are too focused on getting their candy to notice the gravestone.  

But, some of the middle-schoolers stop to read it aloud.

I like to listen for their responses.  “That's creepy!”  “That's weird.”  “I saw that epi… -how do you pronounce that word??- epitaph in Salem.”

This year one girl asked me, “What does that mean-follow me?”  

Once a teenager exclaimed to her friends, “I'm not ready to die.  What about eating all this candy?!!”  


Is it even possible to prepare for death?

Some years ago now, in the autumn, I had the honor and privilege to minister to a family as they prepared for a loved one's death.  They were new to me at the time. She was a life-long (80 year old) Unitarian in Hyde Park who had recently been moved to a nursing home in Canton, the town where I served. Her husband left a somewhat bashful phone message asking me, the Unitarian Universalist minister in town, to visit her if I had occasion to be at this nursing home anytime soon.  “Maybe you can say something of comfort to her, and to me.  If you come, I'll be there, always am,” he said.  

Of course, I would go. But, by the next day, she was moved to the hospital.  Not a week later, she died. In the intervening days, I visited the hospital several times and witnessed an extraordinarily loving, multi-generational family prepare for the death of their loved one.  

Two things struck me about this family.  They expressed so much love. It seemed to be deep and real, and very much reciprocated between them across and within the generations.  Though there were differences in temperaments, interests, religious beliefs, age, and status in life, their love bonded them.  With great care, they queried and listened to each other about the difficult decisions at hand:  treatment or palliative care?  Hospice at home, at the nursing home, or at a hospice house?  

The second outstanding thing about this family was their practice of “doing the right thing.”  They recounted to me and each other difficult decisions in the past ten years since a stroke left the woman unable to speak.  About each decision they said something like “we felt it was the right thing to do.”  

It was habit, with them, to ask, “what is the right thing to do?”  Not “what do I want?”  Not, what would be easiest?  Not, “well, last time we did something your way, and the time before we did it his way, so now I think we should do it my way.”  

They began to conclude:  she shouldn't have to suffer, the hospital is not the best place for her to die, at least one of us should be with her when she dies, and Dad's needs are the most important after Mom's.  Even her 18-year-old grandson spoke from the heart about what he felt was right for “Grammy.”  

If we can do anything to prepare for our deaths, or that of loved ones, it is to develop loving relationships with our kinfolk and to make a practice of doing the right thing all along.  

Theoretically, it's never too late to create love in our families.  We've seen it happen that a crisis like preparing for death brings love out where it wasn't expressed before.  

But, don't you think that it's far better to tend to the hurts, regrets, losses, angers, and fears that keep us apart from our families and friends before death brings us together?

It would be as difficult to start the practice of doing the right thing at the end, as it would be to start loving at the end. But, neither is impossible.

“As I am now so you will be, Prepare for death and follow me.”

Dia de los Muertos, with its Aztec roots and its adaptations to Catholicism, offers another, less serious, way to prepare for death.  The way of laughter.  Rather than fear death, this Mexican tradition teaches us to laugh at it, to have fun with it.  The skulls and skeletons on the ofrenda are meant to be zany and humorous, not to frighten, like on Halloween.  

During Day of the Dead festivities, when the calacas or grinning skeletons dance with the children, it's not about being led off by the Grim Reaper.  It's a fun and crazy dance, making fun of death, taunting it, saying that life itself is a dance with death.  

All our lives, we are courted by death-- death by accident, illness, random (or not) act of violence.  It's a crazy dance we do with death, all of our lives susceptible to it.

It's not that that laughing at death comes easily to me.  A good cry would suit me better.  Nearly twenty years ago, many a good cry, and the passage of time, helped me to come to peace with my own father's death from cancer.  

I don't recall laughing at death as his became imminent, not once.  Nothing then seemed at all laughable.  

But, after he died, later that day, my siblings and I took our children to the playground in Dad's car.  It was equipped with electronic verbal reminders, to our surprise, because a feature like that didn't seem at all Dad's style.  But, it delighted his grandkids.

Well, one of the reminders was “your door is ajar,” and there were peals of crazy, relief-making laughter from young and old alike as one of the kids demanded to know, in all innocence, as his cousins got out of the car, “how could a  jar be a door?”

In that laughter, the healing began.  Death became part of life.  His death became part of our lives, and we began to find that his love, and our love for him, lived on in us.  

Dia de los Muertos teaches many things, not least among them that death is a part of life, not life's opposite.  As the dead are now, so we will be.  

It also teaches that our loved ones are not gone from us completely. Its festivities bring them back to life, in a sense--in the imaginations of the living, in families coming together to share their fond memories and to enjoy the deceased's favorite foods, in singing and in laughing, in love.

We even find such a notion in our own tradition, from the Unitarian side of our Unitarian Universalist family tree, in the words attributed to the 19th century minister and theologian James Freeman Clarke. He published a catechism-yes, a Unitarian catechism!-in which (I'm told) one question was “Where do people go after they die?” The answer? “Not far away.”    

Trying to do the right thing in the present is the best of preparations for death.

And, love will, evermore, have the last word, outliving even death…

in this dance we call life.  Amen, and so may it me.