All Souls | Rev. T. J. Fitzgerald | 10.29.23
In Rev. T. J.’s sermon for All Souls, we are reminded that in times of pain and loss, hope and comfort can still be found through the enduring strength of community and the boundless power of love.
Sermon Transcript
I’ve heard it said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.” The writer, Mark Twain said that. But since he also said, “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” Let’s assume he was passing on some knowledge that someone else gave him. I thought about history rhyming this week. A friend said that though their dad had died a few years ago, they’re having a lot of tears this year at this time, the time of the anniversary of his death. They talked about baseball and other reminders of this time of year that made them think of their dad. And it goes like that sometimes, right? Anniversaries of events collide, coincide with these other parts of the greater world around us and we’re drawn back into remembering or maybe reminded that we’d been forgetting more and more. And then the rhyme, a crack of the bat, a color on our wall that they suggested, the smell of chicory or something. Something rhymes and echoes of someone we miss. The experience is the same and entirely different because someone we love is not there to experience it with us.
Helen Keller and Mark Twain
I didn’t know how much we share until something happened and you weren’t there. Touching this pain of loss like this is hard. In our reading, Helen Keller talks about how she understood Mark Twain. Keller’s hearing and sight were lost in her infancy after a bout with scarlet fever as an infant. And with the help of her educator, she learned to communicate by placing her hands on the people who were speaking. If they could sign, she would feel their hands, but if they could not sign, she would feel their mouths in their throats to understand what words were forming. It’s intimate, but it was what Keller needed in order to understand. I find it amazing what the average person will do if they realize that’s what you need.
In the reading by Keller, I always chuckle a little at the image of her needing to touch Twain’s face to understand him and her sharing that Twain would unleash, “Holy hell,” a cussing at mice that are in his house. The image of her following him around, holding onto his face while he’s chasing a mouse, hollering obscenities that would make a sailor blush is just too funny to me. The mustache and everything. These are the kinds of times that rhyme. The silly times, the surprising times when we remember and then we can’t text or call the person to tell them what just popped into our heads.
Coping with Grief and Pain
But there are other times too, we know not all our memories are fun and lovely like this. There are those times we fear that our grief will break us. When the rising waves of pain will overtake us. When grief overwhelms the shores of our lives through our eyes and the flood feels like it’ll never recede like an everflowing stream. I find at some of these times, some of Twain’s resplendent vocabulary directed heavenward or elsewhere is helpful. Loss can feel like a force of nature and it’s only because it is. When someone we love dies, when a companion that depended on us and gave their tender devotion can labor no further, when at last those who give our lives meaning seem gone, we’re like children again.
Reaching, grasping, holding on to what’s real, what is familiar, what rhymes, trying to make meaning from senselessness, trying to make words out of silence, trying to make the familiar from what’s strange and ever more distant. And yet nothing is more familiar than death. Even though it hurts to touch sometimes, doing it always is the honor that we give to those we love.
Embracing the Time of Remembrance
We’re in one of those thin places now, the orbit of eons swings around on us today. My most ancient ancestors would call the approaching time Samhain. Maybe yours would call it Dia De Los Muertos or All Saints or the harvest time, All Souls or the World Series of Life.
Whatever it is you and your ancestors call this time of year, it’s when we’re invited to touch again the faces, the particular features and foibles of those we love. We remember them cussing at house mouses and as readily as we remember the warmth of a smile or their hug. The memories of these particular things are not small though, they’re enormous. We place here only the tiniest suggestion of the presence of a person alongside these others. It’s like the collection of these particular moments for our ancestors and for those who will come after us in these particular moments, we find the universal experience of being alive and having to die. The universal experience of thinking we might escape the pain. The universal experience of realizing we too will not be spared. And this universal experience teaches us so much.
It is in this way we learn to feel for a wider hurting world, in this way that we soften and wrap our hearts around the breaking, cracking places in the world. Those who have loved and lost know that every one of us is a universe. Every one of us is a multitude. Every one of us is too great a presence to hold onto in any one way forever. When we hold each other in life, we hold a star, we hold a galaxy, a heaven that outshines time’s gleaming arrow and breaks through into our life. The weight of that loss, the singularity of it might, could, does cut through the fabric and space of time and grips us in our waking, our sleeping, our very being in ways we can’t fully guess until it is all we know and fear it’s all we may ever know. Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
Aeschylus wrote that a long time ago, but he got it. There’s something of grace to thousands of years separating words that name what we still feel truly today. I didn’t know how much we share until something happened and you weren’t there. We are in the thin space now and in this thin space, this material that we think we know mingles more freely with what cannot be seen so easily or touched by the hand. Here we call this time All Souls. Of course, the more we learn of this material we think we know so well, the less it seems like material at all.
The Science of Immortality
In a now famous speech by Aaron Freeman entitled, “You Want a Physicist to Speak at Your Funeral.” Freeman says this, “You’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith. Indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy is still around. According to the law of conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone, you’re just less orderly.”
Your thermodynamism…That’s me now. Your thermodynamism or how your energy moves to and from you, it’s the stuff of immortality, friends. All souls ride and reside for a time on the star stuff in these bodies and move at last to other forms according to the best known of our immutable physical laws. But as very true as all that may be, it doesn’t help at times. It doesn’t fix all of how much we miss people, how much we mourn the time that just won’t rhyme.
Finding Comfort in Community
Helen Keller also said this to those who mourn. “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 heavyhearted into which our grief has given us entrance and inevitably, we will feel about us, their arms, their sympathy, their understanding. Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another’s pain, life is not in vain.”
She rhymed there at the end. A little comfort may be the instruction to attend to another’s pain when you yourself are hurting. A little comfort may be the idea that some veil is lifted today to gaze through at the thin places as they scrape along other places. A little comfort may be a promise of eternal or universal communion. But still we touch, we feel, we hold and know the silent speech that is true and that is full of grace for us. That we, all we souls, stretch our love beyond what we know. And they, all the souls departed, stretch still their love too in ways we can’t fully know. And together we build an arch toward what calls us to our best selves. In the echo and the soft tones of our own voices soothing someone else in pain, in the ways that we fumble and search for how to hold on to one another through this incredibly hard life and still not be hardened by it.
For there, only there, in the soft and aching heart of love that arcs across time rests our finest hope, rests are true and final home, rests our best chance at last for peace for every soul and indeed for all souls. May it ever be so. Bless you all. And amen.
