Sermon “Remembering”

Rev. Rali Weaver

March 25, 2008

First Church and Parish Dedham

I might be a peace loving passivist, and I may have issues with war in general but I am a the same time whole heartedly thankful to the men and women who have given their lives for freedom. Memorial day takes on new meaning in times of war because the ones we remember tomorrow are not distant war heroes, neither are they the simple numbers or statistics that the newscasters find it easy to report. Instead they are real people who lost their lives serving our country.

And that brings me to the question I hope we might try to answer. How do we remember our losses? How do we remember those who have gone before us?

Remembering our losses is what Memorial Day has always been about. At the close of the Civil War General John A. Logan Declared

“The 30th of May, 1868 be designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country ... In this observance no form or ceremony (was) prescribed, but posts and comrades would in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.”

So what makes a fitting service or testimonial? When I was a kid, our town, like most others had a big parade. As Girl Scouts my sisters and I would always have to dress in uniform and march in the Parade down Main Street to the Town Hall where there would be a big speech. Afterwards the Presbyterian Church would have a big country Fair where we would get to eat Ice Cream and play games and have our faces painted.

This celebration was quite a contrast to the grave decoration my grandmother had done when she was a girl. And now I wonder--which is a more appropriate remembrance? The somber quiet commemoration or the loud, cotton candy filled celebration?

On Memorial Day do we celebrate life or death and can we celebrate both? Is Memorial Day reserved for remembering only those who have died in war? Or can it also be a time for remembering all of our losses?

What complicates this for me is that seventeen years ago this week my mother passed away on the Friday before Memorial Day Weekend. My Mother was not a soldier and she did not give her life protecting our country in Battle- but she did battle cancer and she did protect me.

Losses like many of you have experienced, and like the loss of my mother, are not impersonal statistics. Quite the contrary, loosing someone or something that you love whether to illness or accident or war is quite personal. Those soldiers and civilians who have died in all wars, those lives that we are celebrating tomorrow were also real people like my mom and each of them had people, like you, loving them and missing them as individuals.

In Ecclesiastes 3, the author seems to point to all the facets of human experience to remind us that a time for being born and a time for dying are all a part of life. From my own experience I know that grief is a kind of individual suffering. Even in that private grief it is clear that Ecclesiastes is saying that sorrow and loss are part of a much more universal experience of living.

When we suffer a loss of a dear one it is not as easy as flipping a switch to turn back to dancing or laughing at our own choosing. If that were true life would be more like a Kaleidoscope reflecting back beauty to every difficulty we experience.

I wish I could have been in charge of when it was a time to weep and when it was a time to dance. I wish I could have looked past my grief to the beauty of live but that is not the way it works. When my mother died and for some time afterward and sometimes even now I seem to have little control over the proper time to grieve.

When I was twenty-five years old and my mother died, despite the fact that friends and family surrounded me, I felt utterly alone. I was with her as life slipped from her body. I was with her body when the morticians came and picked it up. I was with her at the funeral and when we placed the casket with her body in the earth I knew that it wasn’t my entire mother we buried but only her body. This is because like all of us my mother had a spirit that was uniquely hers. A spirit that was housed in her body that I believe was also bigger than her body.

My mother wasn’t perfect but she was fully herself. If she was sad or mad you knew it and when she was happy she radiated like a thousand-watt bulb.

In the four or five years before her death my mother worked as the Senior Citizen director at the local retirement community. In her job there she would organize a wide variety of activities from dancing to movies to field trips and Crafts. My favorite was always the Bingo. The weekly bingo night would find my mother in a rainbow visor telling jokes and calling out letters and numbers to an enthusiastic crowd. Her sense of humor and her love of people held the audience’s attention for hours.

And that was it. It was her sparkle and shine that made her special to me. It was her caring for others right up until the day she died at 55 of breast cancer that helped me see my own responsibility to care for others.

It is almost impossible to do justice to this love I still feel for my mother 17 years after her death. It is both sad and full of joy. While my mother’s body is dead her love for me and my love for her live on.

Before my mother died she told everyone that she wanted balloons at her funeral. Well… she told everyone but my Dad. When we were ordering flowers he absolutely refused to order balloons. As he saw it Balloons were an inappropriate reminder of Joy when we were supposed to be sad. My Mother’s friends obviously did not feel the same way because when we arrived at the church for the memorial service the sanctuary was filled with more balloons than flowers. My father admitted later that balloons turned out to be a perfect way to celebrate the life of my mother who had spent her whole life even when she was dying, being fully alive. And for many years I would release a balloon in the air on the anniversary of my mother’s death and this ritual would bring me peace (that is until I realized it was bad for the environment).

Is there a proper way to remember our losses?

In the Native American Tradition the bereaved person’s spirit is tended to after the death of a loved one with ceremony and ritual and song. Some Chinese American’s remember those who have died by continuing to set a place at the table with food for up to a year after a death. In Spanish and Mexican culture the family left to grieve wear black or dark clothing and act in a subdued manner for a year or more after a death. And Muslim’s have short services that focus only upon their own mortality and show support for the family of the deceased by going to the place where death occurred.

All of these traditions not only honor the dead but also serve as a reminder and comfort for the loved one that is grieving. While we have funerals and burials and Memorial Day American Culture as a whole does not have a set way of honoring grief.

So how do we remember? Do we wear dark clothes or focus only on the light? Tomorrow in many ways we will be confronted with both. Parades and Speeches, Graves and Flowers. I would argue that while there is no right way to remember those that have died, and all the different ways of remembering can be useful --it is doing something that is important.

When I worked at King’s Chapel I was always disturbed by the fact that there were three boxes of ashes in the crypt sitting on a shelf over the microwave. Not only that but the Crypt was used for storage and sitting beside the tombs of revolutionary bodies were mops and pails and cleaning solutions. When I would ask about the mess and the boxes on the shelf over the microwave I was told that there was no storage in King’s Chapel and that was the best they could do, and also that the boxes of ashes had been lost for some time. In fact the boxes had been lost in a previous minister’s time, had been found among the Christmas Pageant Costumes just a year before I had arrived, and put on the shelf, which just happened to be over the microwave, so they would not be lost. These were plausible enough reasons and yet the presence of the ashes bothered me. Was this all we could do to mark these lives?

Whenever someone dies I want a “rock in distant hills to shudder… and small things recoil into silence” as Marge Piercy’s poem suggests and those boxes sitting over the microwave and the messy Crypt at King’s Chapel seem too ordinary, to blasé to memorialize a death appropriately. In my two years at King’s Chapel, I made countless suggestions of clean up days and what might be a better location for the ashes and yet those boxes to this day sit over the microwave and the crypt continues to store many unholy things.

I must admit I was felt quite a bit self righteous about this, I imagined that I would never allow a sacred space to become so disorganized, and I would never leave a box of ashes sitting around without a marker of some kind to recognize the death. That is until Fran Grilley died. Because right now I confess to you that sitting in my messy office are the ashes of Fran Grilley. As we are the only family Fran had at her death the church holds her remains in a sacred trust. The only problem of course is where do we lay her to rest? The box sits on my bookshelf much in the same way those anonymous ashes sit over the microwave at King’s Chapel. And the question still remains the same. How to we remember our losses? How do we mark a passing?

I wish I had an easy answer, if I did Fran’s ashes would not still be sitting on my shelf, but I think it has something to do with setting aside time and space as we did today with our candle lighting. Setting aside time and space to remember all of our losses is a vital part of memorializing a loss. What we do with that time, and that space is as unique as each of the souls who have come before. I hope we continue to regularly make space to honor our grief and loss together with this community of witness, and I hope that in the weeks and years ahead we may find a place to memorialize not only Frances Grilley but all those sacred spirits that are so much a part of this holy place.

Remembering loss is a kind of a season a time when we can open ourselves to what we no longer have. Marking what has passed is part of the same fabric of celebrating what is present. As we celebrate Memorial Day let us remember all of our losses, find what brings us comfort and connects us to the human experience so that ‘peace may bloom again”. Let this Memorial Day have personal meaning for each of us and may it dance in the true seasons of the human experience.