“The Great Company of the Bereaved”

A sermon by

The Reverend Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

4 November 2007

Our reading this morning is from the Harlem Renaissance poet, Esther Popel.  It’s called “October Prayer.”

Change me, oh God,  into a tree in autumn
And let my dying be a blaze of glory!

Drape me in a crimson, leafy gown,
And deck my soul in dancing flakes of gold!

And then when Death comes by, and with his hands
Strips off my rustling garment, let me stand

Before him, proud and naked, unashamed, uncaring,
All the strength in me revealed against the sky!

Oh, God
Make me an autumn tree
If I must die!

All Souls Day is the day we remember the ancestors.  Yet that word, “remember,” doesn’t quite seem to capture what All Souls Day is about; it’s really more about communing with our ancestors.  And there’s a difference between remembering and communing.  To remember is merely to recall, but to commune with someone means to spend some time with them, quality time, QT as they sometimes say.  On All Souls Day when the veil between life and death is said to be most permeable, we commune with those who’ve gone before us.

Lately, I’ve been spending some quality time with one of our Unitarian ancestors, the 19^th Century minister and theologian, James Freeman Clark, who was one of the leading preachers of his day.  Recently I came across his definition of a sermon which, when I read, I knew I wanted to share with you and I knew I wanted to share it with you today on All Souls Day.  “What is a sermon, really?” asked James Freeman Clark.  “A sermon,” he said, “is an appeal from a dying man to dying men [and women].”  A sermon is an appeal from a dying man to dying men and women.

Wow!  I hadn’t really thought about it like that before.  I get that in a literal sense, of course, we are all mortal.  I’m dying and so are you.  But I think Clark is driving at something more with this arresting line.  I think he’s trying to suggest to us that death, our mortality, is the context in which all our conversations about religion and spirituality take place.  Do you remember last spring, during my sabbatical, when Forrest Church preached here?  Church is the minister at All Souls Church in Manhattan, and I know that he shared with you during that sermon his recent bout with cancer.  And I know that he also shared with you that Sunday his definition of religion which I’ve always liked; Church said that religion is our human response to the dual reality of living and having to die.  Religion:  our human response to the dual reality of living and having to die.  Given that we will die, how then shall we live?  How shall we spend our days?

These are the central questions of religion and that is, in part, what James Freeman Clark means when he says that a sermon is an appeal of a dying man to dying men and women.  Now some of you are probably saying to yourselves right about now, “Gee, if I’d wanted to be bummed out this morning, I could have stayed home and read the Sunday papers.  Didn’t need to come to church and hear all of this talk about a dying man talking to dying people.”  Every year on All Souls Day I preach about death and every year I insist that there is good news to be found in our mortality, that there is comfort we can take from understanding ourselves as a community of mortals engaged in a search for life’s meaning.  What is that good news?

Well, the kids got a story this morning and now I have one that I want to share with you.  This is a classic story that comes from the Buddhist tradition.

Once there lived a woman named Gautami Tisa.  Gautami Tisa came from a country family and grew up poor and malnourished.  When she came of age, though, she married into a respectable family from the city but, because of her background, she was looked down upon by her husband’s family.  They scorned her and disrespected her, until the day that she bore a son.  On that day it seemed as though the stars finally aligned for Gautami Tisa; she loved her son very, very much and she finally won the respect of her family.  Not long after the birth, though, Gautami Tisa’s son fell ill and, soon after, he died.  Gautami Tisa was overcome with grief, so much so that she went out into the streets of her city, wandering from door to door, knocking on people’s doors saying “Please, friend, do you have anything, anything that can cure my son and bring him back to life?”  But there was nothing, and each household sent Gautami Tisa away, empty-handed.  Finally, in desperation, she went to the Buddha for help.  “Enlightened one,” she said, “please help me.  Is there not anything you can do to bring my son back to life?  Is there no medicine that can revive him?”  Rather than dismissing her as all the neighbors had, the Buddha offered her hope, offered her a possibility.  “My daughter,” he said, “go out into the city and bring me back a mustard seed from every house that has not known death.”  With the glimmer of possibility, Gautami Tisa went out again, this time in search of that mustard seed.  Again, she knocked on people’s doors and she said, “Friend, the Buddha has sent me in search of a mustard seed that may cure my son.  But it has to come from a house that has not known death.  Have you known death?”  “Gautami Tisa, don’t you remember that three years ago we lost a child too?”  “Oh yes,” she said.  They shared tears together at the front door.  And then Gautami Tisa went to another house and knocked on the door one more time and said, “Friend, I need a mustard seed from a house that has not known death.  Have you known death, friend?”  “Gautami Tisa, last year my wife died.”  Once again, they shared a moment of sorrow.  And on and on it went, Gautami Tisa going to each door and knocking and each time finding that every house had known death.  She came back to the Buddha empty-handed and the Buddha assured her that no, there was no cure that could bring her son back to life.  But she had found some comfort for her sorrow.

Now that story is a classic Buddhist teaching on suffering and compassion.  You know, here in the Judeo-Christian West, we have a particular understanding of compassion as a virtue, the empathic response of one person to another’s suffering.  And clearly in this story it is that empathic response that is the source of healing.  But one of the great insights of Buddhism is that compassion, which literally means “suffering with,” compassion, “suffering together,” the great insight of Buddhism is that compassion isn’t just a virtue; it is an ontological fact.  It defines who we are as human beings.  We are, deep down, the people who suffer together.  Not the people who suffer; the people who suffer together.  And that “together” makes all the difference.  We can discover a compassionate solidarity with one another and, in that compassionate solidarity, find comfort in our mortality and our grief.

I think that intellectually we all get that.  I think in our minds we know that, but this is one of those truths that, it doesn’t matter if you get it in your mind.  You’ve got to feel it; you have to experience it in your heart and know that it is true.  And I know that some of the times that I have felt it in my heart, and this happened just recently, was when I went down to the Vietnam Memorial wall on the Mall.  I know that some of you go down there as well. Recently I saw a gentleman approach that wall, and reach out to the wall to touch a name, to commune with a comrade that he had lost.  As he touched that well I saw the tears come down his face and it struck me that that wall is one of the few places in American society where a grown man is allowed to cry.  And then what I saw as I kept watching was another man, another veteran, walk up to this stranger, and put his arm around him and acknowledge him, not as a stranger, but as a brother.  What I realized there was that it shouldn’t take a war to remind us that we are not strangers, but brothers and sisters.  That’s something we should be able to feel with all the family of all souls.

The title of my sermon, “The Great Company of the Bereaved,” comes from Helen Keller.  She knew that the worst thing about grief is how lonely it can make you feel, how isolating it can be.  She once wrote these words:  “We bereaved are not alone.  We belong to the largest company in all the world, the company of those who have known suffering.  When it seems that our sorrow is too great to be borne, let us think of the great family of the heavy-hearted into which our grief has given us entrance,” she said, “and inevitably, we feel about us their arms, their sympathy, their understanding.  We are in the great company of the bereaved.”

Friends, on All Souls Day, when the veil between life and death is most permeable, we see things more clearly.  We call things by their true names.  We see more clearly what it means to say, “I am a living member of the great family of all souls.”  We see that, indeed, I am a dying man, appealing to you, who are dying men and women.  Living and dying all at the same time.  And we see that together we form the great company of the bereaved, people united by our mortality and our grief.  And we take comfort in knowing that that means we are not alone.  We are not alone.

Amen.