A man with tickets to the AFL Grand Final finds his seat and relaxes. As he sits down, a man comes down and asks if anyone is sitting in the seat next to him.
“No”, he says. “The seat is empty.”
“That’s incredible”, said the stranger. “Who in their right mind would have a seat like this for the AFL Grand Final and not use it?”
“Well, actually, the seat belongs to me. I was supposed to come with my wife, but she passed away. This is the first Grand Final we haven’t been to together since we got married in 1967.”
The stranger replies, “Oh…I’m sorry to hear that. That’s terrible. Couldn’t you find someone else – a friend or relative, or even a neighbor to take the seat?”
The man shakes his head. “No. They’re all at the funeral.”
I used that exact joke one year ago. That All Souls Day sermon was focused on continuing the legacy of someone who has died. I recommend that one and believe you can find it in the sermon archives on our website.
This year’s focus is the power of remembering. The joke points to the need to mourn, to acknowledge loss, to remember and honor our loved ones who have died.
Mourning will certainly be a big part of today’s All Souls Service of Remembrance. However, remembrance doesn’t confine us to sadness, solemnity or grief. Our remembrance has room for joy, laughter too.
After the sermon, I will invite you to participate in a guided memory exercise. Then members and friends will share stories, poems and reflections, maybe even a song. This will be a tailored to fit service, and you will be the tailors. There is no one size fits all 24/7/365 right way to remember our deceased loved ones. We might hear a heart wrenching story or two today. We may hear profound joy, laughter, humor… We might hear expressions of frustration, anger, resentment or conflict. We may hear reflections from people who have found or made profound peace. My hope, my prayer is that we as individuals and as a congregation decide to create space for all of it
My counsel to anyone in mourning is to practice radical self compassion. Allow ourselves to be where we are. Be aware of the ubiquitous cultural tendency to deny and go on as if nothing has changed. (Missing your wife’s funeral for a football game is a gross example.) While many find it useful to continue with some routines or find new ways to help engage their minds in present time activities, there comes a time to allow ourselves to tend to pain inside of us. In close proximity to our pain, we often find treasure buried inside of us. We can be proactive and find time to claim this treasure. We can discover the power of remembering.
Create space for your feelings, even the uncomfortable ones. Even the unbearable ones. Allow a partial exception to this: avoid dwelling on morbid or torturous aspects. My faith tells me that the notion of eternal damnation is just a horrific fantasy. We sometimes believe that nothing can be done to improve our situation. I’m convinced that this view is always the effect of trauma. Trauma can negatively skew our perception. It doesn’t tell the entire story. My faith tells me that what is possible is greater than we can imagine.
Remembering unleashes a very powerful force. Remembering is the opposite of dismembering. When we say we have lost a member of our family or of our community, it reflects a very strong aspect of reality. When we express the reality of loss, we may not want to hear platitudes that tell us this member is still with us. Denial of our experience of loss blocks empathy, compassion and connection.
Often, we need a lot of empathy before we become ready to see beyond our loss.
In time we may wish to assert a different reality; that loved and esteemed ones remain inside us forever. It can be powerful to assert this truth: we keep their memory alive. We continue to think of them and their influence upon us continues. Since I’ve served this congregation five members have died; Steve Galland, Gary Payne, Sandra Lane, Dave Kobe and Marie Brown. They have been missed, and in a very real way their presence is still felt.
Scientists has shown that each time we remember an event something changes in our brain. We never store it the same way we retrieve it. Until someone makes time travel possible, we can’t change the past. However, the past doesn’t live on inside us in a static way. How it sits, how we hold it, how we perceive it and how we remember it changes over time.
There is power in our choice of how we hold our memories. We can nurture a sweet sense of something precious. We can use memory to torture ourselves, or put ourselves down. We can nurture resentment that makes it harder to be present. Most of us have had someone use the past as a weapon to put us in a subordinate position. “Remember you bounced that check 30 years ago. Obviously, I need to control the checkbook.”
Guess what? We tend to do the same thing to ourselves. The good news is that we can always choose to learn. We can have a tea party, a declaration of independence and swear our allegiance to forces that will liberate us. We can commit ourselves to learning through compassion, curiosity, kindness, honesty, perseverance, and willingness to keep learning.
I believe that pain alerts us that there is something precious maybe priceless waiting to be claimed. We can armor and run from this pain, or we can become curious and move into greater clarity and deeper connection with something that once fed us, something important to us. We may be tempted to conclude that we will never have that quality again. We can also decide to retrieve and keep qualities alive. We can dedicate our noble efforts to the memory of those we love.
The Christian sacrament of communion is a ritual of a sacred story where Jesus asks his disciples to remember him. There is a song from the rock musical Godspell, that says “we can give up bitter and battered or we can build a beautiful city. Our religious tradition has always been committed to building that beautiful city. Many Christians have claimed Jesus as their possession and felt justified in torturing and killing those they perceived as heretics and infidels. In doing so they turned away from Jesus’s courageous love. Our tradition has understood Jesus’s teachings as asking followers to keep the faith, to build the beautiful city, to be partners with the Most High to usher in the kingdom of heaven, the beloved community where all of humanity shall know kinship and oneness.
There is power in how we choose to remember someone, what we remain faithful to, what we put our faith in. Unitarian Universalism reminds us that we have choice. Let’s become conscious so that we can choose more wisely.
People have loved us, nurtured us, fed us. Even when remembering those who have mistreated us, we can persist until we reconnect with what is most precious to us. Certainly, when we remember those that we have loved can we harvest fruits to sweeten our days and nourish us. What we received from them, we can give away so that we may expand it and have it more abundantly.
Brothers and sisters, make it be so!
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