"The Circle of Life"

Our faith tradition is full of imaginative, opinionated people with something to say about almost everything. From our earliest beginnings, doubting the divinity of Jesus and the reality of eternal damnation, we?ve always been able to come up with the questions to challenge conventional religious ideas. And our free-thinking approach has led us to reject most of them. In their place we have set forth plainspoken affirmations, which may keep us honest but have little to say about the questions other religions were created to answer.

Our tradition has little to say about death, for example. If you ask one of us what happens when we die, you?ll get a shrug and an "I don?t know," or perhaps - if the person you ask is a gardener - a reference to compost. It?s a humble attitude. But it is also an avoidance.

We are as conscious of death as anyone else, but we have chosen not to think or talk about it much, since there is so little we can actually know. And there isn?t really any way we can learn, at least not by using our standard methods of inquiry. So we are left without a way to talk about it, or to produce comforting images when we are anxious, afraid, or grieving.

Many of us think about death the way my father did. He was a staunch humanist with an intellectual approach to everything. When as a young child I asked him where we go when we die, he responded that he didn?t worry about such things.

Since he didn?t know what happened before he was born, my father reasoned, why wonder about what happened after death? Here we were, alive, cushioned safely between two vast unknowns, and all was well. That was all he needed to know.

Truthfully, the only thing that was comforting about my father?s response was his lack of anxiety. Not so comforting was the addition of another vast unknown - the one before I was born - that I had not yet factored into my thinking. The worry was not simply, "Where am I going?" It was also, "Where did I come from?" Am I just a speck, all alone, in between?

I remember an intriguing concept of death that came from one of our Coming of Age youth some years ago. She told me that what happens after we die is whatever we believe should happen. If you believe in heaven, you go to heaven. If you believe in reincarnation, you come back.

She was quite satisfied with her position, culled no doubt from many years of absorbing Unitarian Universalist individualism and reconciling so many views and opinions. And yet this approach ? impressive as it was for someone so young, reminded me of what I keep missing from our tradition. It validates individual belief but offers no common image from which to draw as a people of faith.

Our view of death is underdeveloped in this respect. What a contrast to the view of death we see in the Day of the Dead observance. Here we have a colorful and festive ritual, shared by everyone who grew up with it. Like all good rituals, the Day of the Dead is a layering of traditions, indigenous and Christian. It is nothing if not highly developed!

The tradition assumes that the dead can come back - at least for the couple of days the festival lasts - and in that way, they remain part of our lives. If you take a look at the altar up here on the chancel, you cannot help but be touched by the pictures and mementos of the loved ones we still miss. There is something about bringing the dead back to be in our presence once again that fills a need everyone has. The need is to let death be part of life.

When we look at death strictly as an individual event, it appears to be the opposite of life, not part of it. And that is why it is difficult to talk about it. There may be an error in our thinking, an error that comes from seeing everything in terms of our individual experience. What if death really were part of life ? not opposite, not separate, but just as knowable and familiar as life itself? What if death were part of a shared experience of life as it is for other traditions?

The Day of the Dead offers ritual and tradition. Other cultures offer equally rich lessons and wisdom. In the Wampanoag story we heard earlier in the service, the women tell the men that they want to keep bringing babies into the world. In order to have new life, however, the people must also have death. It?s the right choice, they decide, because new life will make the world a better place.

Death is not only part of the natural order, it also provides a moral dimension necessary to a good world. Making way for the next generation is how humanity evolves, and how we grow from what we have learned. When we look at death from a collective point of view, it is not a catastrophic personal demise. Rather, death has a rightful place in a larger dynamic; it is part of a whole that is real and life-giving; and we belong to it too. Religious practices that affirm this perspective have real comfort to offer people. When we were in Bali last year, David and I had the opportunity to attend a cremation ceremony. Balinese cremations are daylong affairs, which everyone in the village witnesses, and tourists are welcome. The cremation ceremony is a Hindu ritual, but it is distinctively Balinese, with local deities and mythology all part of the mix.

Everything about it is different from what we do. A funeral procession, which is more like a parade, moves the mourners from the village to the cremation site. Everyone is dressed in bright colors and as they walk they are talking and smoking, accompanied by ice cream vendors, children and dogs. The deceased is carried high in a bamboo tower built for that purpose - and later moved into an animal-shaped structure to be burned.

People do not appear to be grieving. They believe that death allows the soul to continue its journey towards eternal life. The cremation ceremony sets the soul free of the body. It is a happy day. Observing the Balinese cremation festivities, I concluded that it was the shared ritual that provided comfort as much as the beliefs themselves. Death is an intensely communal experience there. Hundreds, even thousands of people come together to enact rites that have served them for hundreds of years. The weight of time and the press of humanity provide a larger than life drama in which the participants, even the tourists, know what to do.

When a community acknowledges death as part of its collective experience, it is affirming that death is part of life. What we can learn from the rituals and customs of other cultures is how important it is to express that vital truth. We owe it especially to our children, who need to know what we believe.

What we think about death is probably not going to change. The shrug, the "I don?t know," the compost image, express honestly and humbly how we feel. We are not given to speculations or complex belief systems. We have our rituals, but they are simple and customized to each individual circumstance.

We do not need to think differently about death, however. I doubt if we could even if we wanted to. Rather, we need to think differently about life. Our concept of life is too personal, too limited to connect us meaningfully to a larger whole. We need to cultivate our sense of connection, not only to each other through our community, but to the larger world, to all of creation, to time and space. Out of this connection we can create images, find ways to talk to each other about death and life.

The other day, while walking the dog, I played a little mental game with myself. I tried to concentrate on the present - not each fleeting moment, which is how I usually experience time - but the actual present moment. I was also thinking about death, and about my father, who died just over a year ago. I tried to imagine him in one of the vast unknowns he was so sure were all around us. But I could not do that. When I think of my father, I think of him, not nothingness. And as I thought of him, I thought about all the ways in which people keep the dead alive, through remembrance and ritual.

The dead are still with us because we are all part of life - of eternity - together. Awareness of each present moment of life teaches us that eternity is not before us or after us. It is with us now, along with all that we have ever loved or known in the lives that we live together.