First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Day of the Dead

Greetings and Announcements

Introit: Autumn Chant

Chalice Lighting

Words of Gathering Jan Devor

Hymn: I Cannot Think of Them As Dead (insert)

Ritual of Remembrance

Naming our shared dead

Personal tributes

Reflection: The Wisdom of the Tender Heart

Offertory

Meditation in Music: Requiem

Gerald Ford

Boris Yeltsin

Saddam Hussein

Lady Bird Johnson (Claudia)

Yolanda King

Wally Schirra

Jerry Falwell

Kurt Vonnegut

Marcel Marceau

Beverly Sills

Luciano Pavarotti

Staff Sergeant Kevin Witte, 27

Darfur

Washoe the chimp

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Greetings and Announcements

Introit: Autumn Chant

Chalice Lighting

Welcome, to this celebration of community;

that reaches beyond ourselves, the living,

To embrace those to whom we owe our very existence;

The dead.

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.

We begin, as always, with the lighting of the flaming chalice,

the enduring symbol of our heritage,

Affirming our conviction that every faith and culture has some wisdom to teach us,

and some gift to share.

Words of Gathering Jan Devor

Hymn: I Cannot Think of Them As Dead (insert)

Ritual of Remembrance

To be human is to be mortal, and to live in a world of loss. Perhaps the first act that signaled the emerging humanity of our primitive ancestors was their honoring and remembering of the dead. With that remembrance began to dawn the recognition that those who no longer live and breathe and have their being in this world are nevertheless with us still through the legacy of love and memory. There is a sacred alchemy in the crucible of the heart by which time and faith transform the raw grief of losing those we love into an imperishable connection to a larger human community over time that nurtures and sustains us. Thus the beloved dead are gathered into a cloud of witnesses to whom we are accountable, whose felt presence renews our loyalty to the highest ideals and aspirations of humanity. It is ancient and universal custom to honor those we mourn by setting aside time to call them once again to mind, and to dedicate works of compassion and charity to their memory.

Occasions such as this remind us that the work of grief is not completed in a day or a month, but cycles through our lives in various ways forever. Here in the community of memory and promise, we hold the beloved dead in our hearts, and speak again our commitment to remember them.

In a similar spirit, we observe the customs of the Day of the Dead celebration, from the culture of our neighbors to the south, in Mexico. Upon this altar of light and flowers, we place photographs of some of those whose lives have touched us all, and have ended since our last celebration. They include people good and evil, wise and foolish, most, like us, a mixture of both. They were leaders who shaped the world, such as former president Gerald Ford, and Boris Yeltsin, former Prime minister of the Soviet Union. They were women who changed our culture, like Lady Bird Johnson, wife of president Lyndon Johnson, who used her position as first lady to raise awareness of poverty and conservation. Or Yolanda King, eldest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., who followed her father’s legacy as an activist for racial justice. They include men like Wally Schirra whose courage as a pioneering astronaut took the human race into outer space, as well as the tyrant Saddam Hussein, whose brutal rule displayed the depths of our capacity for corruption and cruelty. They include musicians whose songs touched our hearts, like Beverly Sills, and Luciano Pavorotti, and artists like Marcel Marceau, the mime performer who taught us how eloquent silence could be. We remember the writer Kurt Vonnegut, whose creativity, humor and moral outrage called us to examine our society with new eyes, as well as the chimp, Washoe, first of her kind to use human sign language to make a bridge of communication between our species. We remember Baptist pastor the Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose ministry changed the religious climate of this country.

With great sadness, once more we add a photograph of a Minnesota soldier killed in Iraq; this year Staff Sergeant Kevin Witte, who was 27 years old, reminding us of all who have died before their time because of our inability to end the human scourge of war. For that same cause, we also place a photograph of a young boy whose name is unknown to us; a child soldier from the continuing genocidal crisis in Darfur. The chances are that he has perished since this picture was taken, from starvation or sickness with no medical care, from an overdose of the drugs that such children are given to make them fight, or from the weapons of war. In any case, his childhood, like those of thousands of others in that tragic place, is dead.

Young and old, renowned and unknown, painfully frail or full of promise, they are gone from us here in the world of life and breath. Yet our world is different because of them, and they will be with us always in the most sacred shrines within our hearts, and in our shared aspirations for a more compassionate world and more abundant life. Now may we each hold in honored remembrance not only our own loved ones, but all who have perished in the shifting forces of a restless planet, at the hands of ignorance and tyranny, or in the service of freedom, justice, and peace.

Finally, our altar of remembrance holds a mirror, a reminder that each of us carries within us the inevitability of our own death.

Together in the spirit of shared meditation, let us lift up our thoughts to the great mysteries;

Death, and love; imperishable memory, and the life that maketh all things new.

During this time, if you have brought with you a picture or memento of a loved one,

I invite you come forward quietly, and place it among the tributes here.

Or if you wish to light a candle in silent memory of someone who in your heart today,

You may do that as well

Shared silence and reflection

The Islamic tradition teaches: One came and said to the Prophet: My mother has died, what shall I do for the good of her soul? The Prophet thought of the panting heat of the desert, and he replied: Dig a well, that the thirsty may have water to drink. The man dug the well and said: This have I done for my mother.

So may you who mourn go forward to hallow the names of those you have loved by living lives made sweeter and more noble because of their influence. Knowing the fragility of life, may you cherish the people around you, be generous to the unfortunate, and leave the world less vulnerable to error, evil, suffering and strife than when it was entrusted into your hands.

Anyone who has ever lost someone or something that they cared about knows that grieving is an organic process. No matter how clearly we understand the inevitability of death; no matter how much warning you may have that a loved one’s death is coming; no matter even if it comes welcome at the end of a full life, as release from suffering, still death touches those who love in a profoundly physical way. It interrupts the rhythms of eating and of sleep; it makes people forgetful and accident-prone; it weakens the immune system, leaving them vulnerable to infections and illness. Grief is mentally and physically exhausting; it disrupts thought and concentration, makes our reactions irrational and unpredictable. People have described it as a feeling of sleepwalking, or having their heads stuffed with cotton. We grieve, as we love, not just with our thoughts and feelings, but also with our bodies.

And as with other traumas, over time our bodies heal. If we will care for ourselves, and let others care for us, eventually it becomes possible once again to concentrate, to enjoy food, to laugh, to sleep in comfort, to envision the possibility of a future. It is important to remember that these are physical changes, as we heal through the process of grieving; the gradual return to wholeness does not mean the diminishment of love, and it need not mean abandoning the memories of those who have shaped our lives. Mourning is one of those dimensions of human experience in which a strict abstract rationality can mislead us; what is intellectually true may not always give us what our bodies, or our feelings, or ultimately our spirits, most need.

From time immemorial, various human cultures have tried to address the sense that our connections to the departed do not end with their deaths. One way of doing this is by supposing that there might still be something that they need or want from us, some way in which we can yet do them good. Some have thought of this in very material terms; that we could send food or money, or useful objects to the dead, by burying such things with them, or burning them or sacrificing them later on. Others have seen it as a question of merit, that we could supplement the good of a person’s own life through posthumous prayers or offerings on their behalf. There is something comforting about the sense that you can still be of benefit to a person you loved, even after they are no longer alive. Reason tells us, as humanists, that there is no ongoing personal existence beyond death, and thus no possibility of doing someone good once they are dead, which I accept. And yet I know that I think sometimes of what people I remember fondly would have liked or wanted, what would have pleased them, and in doing those things for their sake, I feel closer to them, and draw strength from the memory of their lives, and my love for them.

For what gives our days their meaning and dignity is found in the wisdom of our hearts as well as our minds, and those connections transcend time and death. Something happens to us when we grieve, when loss comes and we walk through the valley of the shadow of death and find that there can be light again on the other side. The heart that is made tender by grief becomes resilient and capacious, knows the world in a way that the mind alone, or the unbroken heart, never can. Intellectually, we can be aware that death is the end, but there is another truth, the truth of love, in which we continue to learn from and to be nourished by those who are gone. This requires no superstition, no morbid fascination, no elaborately imagined afterlife. It needs only that we be willing to let our bodies do their healing, and allow our recollections to ripen from the bitterness of immediate bereavement to the sweetness of a connection that can never be lost. Lux aeterna, the everlasting light, is not so much what we give to bless the dead, as what we receive from them; the eternal light of their presence in our memories.

Dia de los muertos understands the wisdom of the tender heart; that by celebrating our ongoing connections of memory, we grow stronger, more compassionate, more assured of our own place in the scheme of things, more trusting of life. In this spirit, and this hope, our chorus and orchestra offers another exquisite requiem. While they are taking their places, this morning’s offering in support of the work of this society will be gratefully received.

Music: Requiem