I hope that everyone had a happy Halloween. We can celebrate that we survived another one. The ghouls and goblins didn’t get us this year.
Did you know that for many years, children have identified Halloween as their #1 favorite holiday? For years I looked at this data as proof that children love to wear costumes. I said of course they love Halloween. Every young child loves – to play make believe, and most love to play dress up.
“I’ll bet living in a nudist colony takes all the fun out of Halloween.” So says Charles S. Swartz. Costumes are fun, but I laugh at myself downplaying and overlooking the role that sugar plays in this holiday. Duh! Candy. I hope that all you kids got your fill of chocolate or the sweet of your choice.
Rober Brault said “I don’t know that there are real ghosts and goblins, but there are always more trick-or-treaters than neighborhood kids”
Whatever else it is, Halloween is way humans play with our fear of death. For a long time, I claimed not to understand why people would pay good money to watch horror movies. If I’m honest, I’ll admit that at summer camp, I picked the counselor that was the best teller of scary stories.
Scary movies and literature, the Halloween holiday is a way to bring out, and feel our fears within a structured framework and format. Scary movies are story-time for slightly older children. Scary entertainment provides us with a manageable way to experience fear. Movies have a beginning and an end. When the scary movie ends, our lives remain completely in tack. We choose it again and again. As Morticia Adams said in the Adams Family movie: “You frightened me. Do it again!”
Like Halloween, this service was designed to be a way we could play and intentionally choose to entertain ourselves by putting a spotlight on funny and strange things about death and dying. I hope this playful approach supports our capacity to hold the fear, hurt, confusion, aversion, dread, grief, sadness and maybe even excitement about death.
Throughout the ages, religion has provided the soundtrack or rap that tells people death is nothing to be afraid of. Everything is all right. G*d has this all under control.
We often support a search for truth and meaning in a different way. Rather than persuading our folk that its all right, or tell them what it means, we create space for people to raise questions, express doubts, and today to say “isn’t that odd?!” and “how in the world to you make sense of that?
Coming up with ways to cope with death has always been a central part of religion. Religion provides a way to put the fragmented pieces of human experience together into an integrated whole. I imagine it is one of the primary reasons that human cultures have created religion, to provide a salve for the sting of death, to protect and nurture the human capacity to experience life with awe and wonder.
We UUs also value finding a way to integrate life’s fragmented experiences. We provide freedom and support to explore and wonder, discuss, reflect, play and joke.
Culture provides a set of values, and a way of living based on these values. It would be impossible to give a quality explanation or expression of the fullness of living without addressing death, just as its impossible to talk about death without talking about living. Like every religion, ours also addresses the Great Mystery of Death. Hopefully I will offer something useful for this process. However, I place even more faith that as members and friends share their experience, their funny thing about death stories, that it will nurture us all to heal in the wisdom.
To any knew to our UU tradition, to any who are perplexed about what we are all about here, about what is our religion, rest assured or be challenged by the fact that ours is a religious endeavor. We exist for some of same reasons that any other religious traditions exist. We just do religion differently than what most people expect.
Some of us find meaning in Christian or Jewish narratives. Others have found Eastern religion and philosophy enlightening. Still others are skeptical of ancient stories and find more comfort in the revelations of modern science.
My favorite cliché is that this is not a place you go to get all your questions answered. It’s a place to get all your answers questioned. It’s a place of curiosity and wonder and play and fellowship. Today is not different. Like so many other religious people we set aside to mourn and honor our dead during this time of year when leaves are falling to the ground, and dying is in spectacular view. We reflect on life and death, and how these fit together.
There are some differences here in how we do this. UUs come to expect that fellow congregants have a wide array of beliefs. We cherish the diversity, and, in our sharing, we all grow.
Today’s service with its intention to reflect on “funny thing about death,” might differ in degree from more somber or solemn remembering of loved ones of years past. Only after several of you expressed willingness to play it this way, did I decide to give it a try. The members stories shared earlier may have resonated a funny chord or may have encouraged a willingness to consider aspects of death that don’t easily meet fit with our understanding of how things work on Earth.
I think the dominant pattern of the world’s religious traditions in relation to death is to offer assurance, provide a sense of order, and to allay human fears of death with story and explanation. Our way especially today is to raise questions, to look at life and death with the common task of suggesting that there is often something funny about it.
I hope that more of you will be willing to share some of your “funny thing about death stories.” I’ve found that some of the most difficult or drawn-out times of dying are punctuated with humor that helps us make it through with a degree of grace. Many of you have stories of synchronicity or strange occurrences. Many of you have experienced things you might be tempted to call really bizarre.
During a death and dying class in seminary, a hospice priest was a guest speaker. A high point for me came when he shared research of families who had members in hospice. Over half of people who had a family member die reported some type of visitation from the deceased. Seeming shocked and bewildered by this one of my classmates asked the priest “how do you explain that?” “I don’t” replied the priest. The student persisted for an explanation. “I mean, do you believe that these people were reporting reality? Were these delusions or hallucinations?” The priest replied “My job is to serve and tend to the family of the deceased, not to judge or diagnose the experiences they share. I seek to be with them in their time of grief, to provide a living experience of Christ’s love and comfort.”
Whether we are UUs freely following Jesus or whatever our background and orientation is, I believe that this congregation shares a similar ministry. We walk through the hills and the valleys together. We share our thoughts, our feelings our experience, the things that inspire and challenge us, and we learn together.
My hope not just for today but for always is that being part of this congregation helps each of us to find meaning and purpose, the ability to look with awe, to practice curiosity, as well as respect and courage in the face of death and life. My hope is that is the kind congregation where supportive relationship get made, the kind that inspire us to be willing to share the crazy things that happened to us, the ones that are so wonderful we can’t fathom and the experiences that seem meaningful even if we can explain them.
My challenge to you, when hearing stories and with your own experiences that maybe sometimes let the mystery be. Maybe know that you don’t have to explain away the extraordinary and unexplainable.
I will share a story from my family. In 1984, my youngest older brother, Stephen was killed in an auto accident. I was 24 and he was 33. To me my brothers were like gods. It seemed impossible that it could be true. At the funeral my older brother said that it was a tear in the fabric of reality. I understood. However, I had experienced something very strange that changed my reality in a different way. Have you ever watched a movie again after years have passed? You’re watching without remembering how it ends, and then suddenly it’s like “Oh yeah this is how it ends.” Well, it was something like that. I got chills as I remembered “oh yeah, this is how it ends.” It seemed to me that somehow this crazy event did not come out of nowhere. My new perspective left me in a paradox. I had two thoughts that didn’t fit together. One was that it couldn’t be. The other was that I had long ago known what would be the end of the awesome journey of this life of my brother Stephen.
This in no way kept me from needing to grieve. I experienced terribly painful grief and my mourning was also profound. However, I had been blessed with knowing that I couldn’t really explain and didn’t fully understand. The experience revealed a peace inside me. It gave me a knowledge and experience that our lives are woven in ways beyond what we perceive or understand.
I know that we have many different experiences. I would like it if we are able to have several share. What you share doesn’t need to seem profound or supernatural, although they are welcome too. So too are ones that seem funny, irreverent, trivial or just strange. If there are people who have something very short to share, let’s have you go first.
(This was followed by “Congregation Responds.”)
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