Opening Words    The Larger Circle, adapted from Wendell Berry

Read by Alex Larsen (youth)

We clasp the hands of those that go before us,

And the hands of those who come after us.

We enter the little circle of each other’s arms

And the larger circle of everyone who loves,

whose hands are joined in a dance,

And we enter the larger circle of all creatures,

Passing in and out of life.

All of us move in a dance,

To a music so gentle and so huge

That we only hear it … a few notes at a time.

 

Homily                 Gather the Spirits        

Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones

There is an old Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown and Linus are standing in front of a brand-new baby tree, a sapling only a few inches high. Charlie says, looking down at it, “It’s a beautiful little tree, isn’t it?” And Linus says back, “Yes, it is.” And then Charlie says, “It’s shame that we won’t be around to see it when it’s fully grown.” And Linus swivels his head toward him and says, “Why? Where are we going?” [1]

      Well, that is the question, isn’t it? Where are we going? Where are we going while we live, where are we going while we grow up and grow older, and where are we going when it comes our time to die?

      Forrest Church has suggested that if we could ask a baby, while she is still in the womb, still inside her mother, “What will Life on the outside be like?”—would she be able to predict all this color and noise and smell, all the people that we jostle up against every day, or the amazingly sharp pain of stubbing our little toe, or the incredible delight of laughing so hard we cry? Would she be able to imagine that? Wouldn’t it be more likely that this baby still in the womb would say, “Life? Oh, life … well, it’s like this, warm, dark, wet …”

      Just so, we may wonder what exactly is on the other side of death. Is it something as different from this life as this life is from that life before, inside our mother? Who knows? But we can’t help asking.

      That’s one of the things that I like about the story we heard earlier. Felipa can’t help wondering where her grandmother is now—mostly because she misses her, and she wants to talk to her the way she did before. So she feels a real urgency to find her, to get back that connection that was unique to this particular person, her grandmother, who would listen and listen to whatever Felipa wanted to tell her.

      How familiar this is to most of us, I’ll bet. It doesn’t happen with every loss, but sure enough there comes a time when life brings us one of these, and then, whether we “lose” someone because a relationship ended, or because one or the other of us moved away, or because this person died, what we want is to have them back, back in our presence, back in our arms, back to fight with us again, even, but mostly back to love us and to listen to us …

So Felipa wants to know—where is Abuelita? Did you notice how Felipa goes first to the animals? She must imagine that these nonhuman creatures have knowledge that we humans can only dream of. Sometimes, as we get older, we forget how close we all are—we human and nonhuman creatures—but children almost always remember.

      Even so, in the story, if the animals do have this secret knowledge, “they’re not telling”—not in a language we can understand, anyway. So then Felipa goes to her mother and demands: “Where is Abuelita’s soul? I can’t find it.” Which maybe is to say that she can’t feel it. All she feels is absence, all she feels is what is missing. I have to wonder whether Felipa’s mother is feeling the same thing, for what she offers her daughter is a kind of dream, of souls far, far away and high, high up, someplace where it is beautiful …

      But Felipa is determined to make things real; she’s not going to be satisfied with a dream or a vision or this far-off realm, this separation. So she walks as far as she can, until she’s too tired to go on, and that’s when company arrives, and a different understanding: that souls live everywhere, in everything that grows.

      This is the beauty of the Day of the Dead celebrations, I believe. For these celebrations proclaim, with songs and feasts and flowers and candlelight—they proclaim that we can stay connected.

“We clasp the hands of those that go before us,

And the hands of those who come after us.

We enter the little circle of each other’s arms

And the larger circle of … all creatures,

Passing in and out of life,”

writes Wendell Berry. The circle of life, which truly includes death.

      Barbara Hamilton-Holway tells this story: When her own mother was dying, her brother “imagined being seen by her and receiving a last blessing. He imagined,” she writes, “that Mother would reach out and hold his face in her hands, touch his forehead, and say, ‘You are my beloved; on you my favor rests.’ My brother says that actually, her last words to him were, ‘You have bad breath.’” [2]

      Isn’t that just like life? Isn’t that truly living into our dying?

      “I don’t know what happens when we die,” Barbara Hamilton-Holway goes on. “I do know when I am most alive. I know moments of feeling connected with all that is. I feel out of myself and most wholly myself…. Perhaps in those moments I experience what is true always. I am, you are, one with the holy, with the mystery, with creation and creativity…. What I want is to try for more and more moments. I want to take a moment to touch someone I love. Hold someone’s face in my hands. Look someone in the eyes. Kiss a forehead. Offer a blessing.”

      On All Souls Day, we have the chance to gather the spirits of all those we love, to speak of them, to speak to them, to clear away the chatter and the clutter so that we can hear their voices again, so that we can give them the blessing of our love and receive the blessing of theirs. On every day, we can know that they are present “in everything that grows,” and we can know that when we clasp the hands of those around us, we clasp the hands of those who have gone before us as well.

Amen.

[1] Adapted from Fredric John Muir’s retelling in Heretics’ Faith: Vocabulary for Religious Liberals (Annapolis, Md.: Fredric John Muir, 2001).

[2] Barbara Hamilton-Holway, Who Will Remember Me? A Daughter’s Memoir of Grief and Recovery (Boston: Skinner House, 2004).