First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Hallowed Evening

Greetings and Announcements Judy Fox

Words of Gathering:

Welcome, to this our celebration of community;

A community that reaches beyond ourselves, the living,

To embrace those to whom we owe our very existence;

The dead.

Let's begin with the lighting of the flaming chalice, the enduring symbol of our heritage,

Affirming that every faith and culture has some wisdom to teach us, and some gift to share.

Chalice lighting

Introduction to Procession:

El dia de los muertos is an important festival in Mexican society.

It has roots in the ancient celebrations of the Aztec culture,

Filtered now through centuries of Roman Catholic theology and practice.

The day of the dead is not, as in North American society,

A time of either fear or sadness. It is not meant to be scary or morbid.

Instead, it is supposed to celebrate the on going connections that we all have

With those who are members of our families or loved ones who have died,

As well as the great, universal joke that death waits to play on all of us.

Families create festive altars of remembrance in their homes or yards,

Decorated to please the honored dead.

They make up special foods for a picnic,

-- Including candy and breads that are only prepared at this time of year --

And take them to the cemetery, where they clean and paint the grave markers and the tombs,

And adorn them with flowers and candles.

They bring chairs and blankets and musical instruments,

And stay up all night visiting with relatives and neighbors.

They tell stories and remember the people who have died.

Sometimes the path to the gravesites are strewn with bright flower petals,

To guide the spirits on their journey to visit their old homes.

Although food and other treats are offered to the dead,

This is a ritual, like leaving cookies and milk for Santa.

El Dia de los Muertos is a joyful time, of giving thanks for the wonderful people we have known,

And remembering what made them special.

It is an affirmation of the cycle of life and the essential role of death;

And a reminder that since each of us will die some day,

We should appreciate the good things of life while we are here with the people we love.

Today the children will bring in the offerings to decorate our own altar,

with pictures to help us remember some of the people we may all know who have died this year, including:

Former president Ronald Reagan, who this year lost a very public decade-long struggle with Alzheimer's disease.

Jazz musician Ray Charles, who overcame blindness to transform the world of American music.

Julia Child, the entertaining chef who made French cuisine accessible to average cooks, and educated the American palate for fine food.

Bob Keeshan, better known to generations of children as Captain Kangaroo, who nurtured a gentle world of wonder and friendship on television.

Pat Tillman, rising football star with the Arizona Cardinals who gave up a lucrative NFL contract to join the Army Rangers, and was killed in Afghanistan.

Christopher Reeve, actor and activist, who brought the comic book character of Superman alive on the movie screen, and who became a persistent advocate for the disabled after a broken back from a riding accident left him a quadriplegic.

Our altar also holds a mirror, as a reminder that each of us will one day be included among the pictures of the dead, whose influence shapes the world as life goes on.

Favorite foods and drink, including special breads and sweets, as well as flowers and candles, are presented on the altars as ofrenda de muertos, offerings to the dead. While the children process and arrange our altar, we shall present our own ofrendas; our offerings in support of the work of this society will now be recieved.

(Children enter, arrange altar, then leave for their own celebration)

Sermon:

They call her la pelona, la flaca, la huesada; "baldy", "skinny one", "bony"; Lady Death. Our days are a dance with her, such a breathless whirl that we forget whose hard white fingers are clasped in ours, whose toothless grin reflects our own. La calaca, the skeleton of bones, lives within everyone we meet, patiently awaiting her moment, which comes surely and without possibility of escape. But she is not grim, or horrible; rather she is funny; life's last great practical joke on the hubris of humanity - so our neighbors to the south in Mexico would tell us. In ancient times, they celebrated death at the height of the harvest, all through what is now the month of August, in the lost cultures of the Aztec and Toltec and Mayan civilizations. The Catholic Spanish Conquistadors sought to Christianize these popular pagan rituals by connecting them with the feasts of All Saints and All Souls. Now, here in the northern hemisphere, with our western European heritage, this darkening moment of the year, as autumn dies around us, seems like the time when we are closest to an awareness of death, or perhaps less able to deny its daily presence than at other seasons of the year. And so we give ourselves over to the eeriness of things, for one evening pay sweet superstitious tribute to all that haunts us as ghosts and graveyards at the ambiguous interface between living and dying.

I have a question to ask, as a good humanist contemplating our mortality and the quality of our awareness - do you think that knowing that each of us is destined to die, along with the ability to hold in continuing memory those who have died, is merely an evolutionary by-product of our reasoning capacity, a kind of unforeseen consequence, if you will; or is it in fact an evolutionary development in its own right; is it an awareness that has some sort of necessary function in the struggle for our species' survival? It would appear that the other creatures of the earth meander along quite nicely without any evident consciousness of their individual finitude; from moment to moment they pretty much strive mightily to avoid dying, though in some cases they will embrace their own deaths in order to preserve their young or their colony, but they don't as far as I can see agonize about it, or seem to go to any effort to deny it. Neither do they build enduring memorial tributes, or pass along to future generations legends of valor and honor, or the debt of gratitude owed to forebears long since dust. Is the fact that we homo sapiens do these sorts of things an accident, a mis-application of an otherwise useful capacity to remember and instruct, or did we gain something, individually or collectively, by this ability, such that it made those who possessed it and their progeny more likely to survive?

If our awareness of la calaca always beneath the surface of things has some evolutionary function, then we could evaluate our cultural attitudes toward death and the dead on the basis of how well they fulfill that function. On the other hand, if there isn't really any good reason for it, then why not put up the best bulwark of denial that we can manufacture, and try to forget Lady Death with her empty-eyed grin for as long as possible? This has been the typical answer of America's inventive, progressive, achievement-oriented culture; we have learned to defeat death in many of her ancient guises, and yet there she is, old baldy, still always waiting for us one way or another in the end. We have done our best to close our eyes to her, to run from her bony embrace, to dance so fast that she would lose her grip on us; and sometimes if the music is loud enough and the tempo is frantic enough, you might think for a few moments that you have done it - have seized life without death in the other hand. That's when dia de los muertos comes in the twilight of the year to trip you up, bringing candles and flowers to the cities of the dead, feeding you bread in the shape of bones, and little candy skulls with your name scrawled in hot pink frosting across the sugary forehead. What then? Do we cringe and bluster, stand upon our precarious dignity, and retreat from the graveyard as fast as possible, whistling? Or, do we laugh? Do we clap La Flaca rattlingly on the shoulder, and say "Old skinny friend, you'll have me soon enough! In the meantime, a drink, and some music. Our worlds are interwoven; my death is certain, and the lives of those who are now your citizens cannot be unlived. What a fine irony it is!"

I don't know why our human minds have made the intellectual connections that recognize death and preserve memory. What I do know is that spiritual health and maturity lies in being able to live with that expectation; to laugh at it and to honor it at the same time. The Hallowed Evening and dia de los muertos both invite us to that place of wisdom, to that reflective balance that accepts your own mortality with wry humor, and grants the dead a role to play in the ongoing drama of life. G.K Chesterton once wrote about the influence of tradition:

"The small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." Dia de los muertos will have none of it. We shall not forget that we as human beings are a cumulative undertaking; if not for what our ancestors learned and created and discovered and built, we would be something completely other than what we are. "We shall have the dead at our councils" - and if only once a year, we shall seek them out, reminding ourselves that we still profit from their gifts, their wisdom, their love.

Ought I to be talking about the impending election this morning? Understand me; I am. What we need is one of those colorful little Mexican clay dioramas depicting a presidential debate conducted and attended entirely by tiny skeletons. The folk artists who create these traditional scenes take the most profound and the most trivial moments of human experience - weddings, bull fights, musical performances, Christian nativity scenes - and render them both absurd and poignant by depicting them with calacas, cheerful skeletons. It is as if they used a kind of x-ray vision to strip away the arbitrary flesh, leaving only the essential and somehow ridiculous literal bones of the situation. Both John Kerry and George Bush are merely skeletons in the making; the mortality that they have in common with each other and with all of us so far transcends their momentary self-importance that if it were truly seen, it could only make us laugh. The president I want is the one who knows he is just a bag of bones, breathing for a little while; who understands the necessity of having the dead at our councils, and honors the cumulative nature of the human enterprise.

The world as we know it is not given to us out of nothing; it is the handiwork of those who came before us, both the great ones and the little, the remembered and the forgotten. This hallowed evening summons us to recognize not only that we ourselves are future members of the community of the dead, but also that we owe an ongoing debt to its citizens, for without them, we could not have come to be. Properly observed, this is not a horrible thought, but a reassuring one; that our capacity for connection transcends the veil between life and death, and as it is often said, to live in hearts that love is not to die. If you think that because you have no use for the idea of a personal, self-conscious god, the word sacred is meaningless, then you have never stood in the room when one partner in a 53 year marriage said a final goodbye to what was no longer their beloved. Such love cannot be ended by something as arbitrary as death; it is transposed into another key, of memory, honor, and gratitude, but it does not cease, or leave us indifferent. In truth, all our evenings and days are hallowed -- by the connections that bind us to the dead; by the awareness that love does not die, but we shall; and that we stand upon the shoulders of the giants who came before us, and we carry their recollection into our own future, just as we ourselves will one day be carried forward in the hearts and minds of those whose love shall transcend even our death. The hallowed evening is any moment when we pause to acknowledge with wry courtesy the hand of Lady Death that is always upon us, and with humility the great cloud of witnesses to whom we owe allegiance and thanks. But lest we miss the lesson, or the joke, here in the season of fading light the designated hallowed evening comes, reminding us of the sacredness of death, and dia de los muertos, reveling in the mortal absurdity of it all.

Part of the observance, especially in the cities of Mexico, includes offering and attending performances of the great classical requiems, music such as the choir and the orchestra have prepared to give us this morning, that speaks to both the terror and the peace that are part of the range of human experience with death. But first let us share together the opportunity formally to recognize the grieving process of those whose lives have recently been touched by a loved one's death in our ritual of remembrance.