Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

All Souls, 2006
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

My mother used to tell us the story of the first time she saw the body of someone who had died. My mother was a young girl, seven years old, and the body was that of her beloved uncle. As was the custom in the rural South, the coffin had been brought into the living room of the family home and had been opened so that all could have one last look. As she tells it, she remembers approaching the coffin, taking a peek inside, seeing her uncle with his hands folded and his eyes closed, and then bolting out of the house.

A week later while walking hand-in-hand with her father through town, she spied a man in a barbershop window, tipped back in the chair, hands folded and eyes closed, waiting to be shaved. With a shriek, she pulled away from her father and ran down the street.

Who knows what touched my mother or what was touched in my mother in those events. After all, she was just a rural Southern girl from a family that had probably done very little to prepare her for comprehending or for dealing with death.

This is what I thought, of course, until the first time I myself was in the presence of someone I loved who had died. No, I did not tear out of the room screaming, but I wanted to, wanted to do something that expressed how unnatural it felt to have someone I loved taken away from me.

And so tonight as we remember those we love who have died and remember them by name, we have to say straight out that loss is sometimes unbearable—enough to make you want to run from it.

But loss is not all there is to say about the dead—who they are to us, who we are to them and how we all, living and dead are connected in the mysterious and dynamic energy we call God. Loss is not all there is to say.

Recently I opened a book written by novelist Bernard Malamud’s daughter about his life and found these words by Proust on the inside page:

“one thing that love and death have in common…is that they make us question more deeply, for fear that its reality will slip away from us, the mystery of personality.”

And so besides the raw experience of loss, the dead usher us anew into an experience of mystery, the mystery of their personality, the mystery of their complexity, the mystery of their presence with us and our relationship with them given their physical absence from our day-to-day lives.

And what is the nature of this mystery and this presence?

Words fail, but for many of us the lives of the dead in all their flawed and sometimes unfinished particularity speak to us with a resonance and reverberation that the living sometimes cannot. We feel the claim of the dead upon us. And I’m not talking about being haunted. It’s a claim rooted in our connection to one another, a connection that takes place within God.

And so the fact that there will be no more words between us and those who have died can mean that we hear them more fully. The fact that we no longer see those who have died can mean that we see them more completely. The fact that we can no longer touch those who have died can mean that they have a mysterious power to touch us.

And even this isn’t right, for it isn’t dynamic enough. What our faith says is that we, the living and the dead, are in communion, are a part of a living organism together, are a body with a purpose—that is, we are going somewhere together. That somewhere is the completion of our full humanity and the fulfillment of God’s reign. And we need each other along this path.

And so within this understanding, we help the dead by completing what they did not or could not finish, by forgiving them what they could not redeem in themselves, by embodying what they were not allowed to be. We also help them through our prayers for their continual growth, prayers which support them in their own growth in grace.

And, of course, they help us too. For we have our memories of them, our stories about them, images of them that at times seem to come to us unbidden, images that encourage us or inspire us or warn us. We often think of these images as being self-generated or random. But are they really? Does our own progress come from us alone and from the living who surround us? Or could the dead and their progress, their prayers, be affecting us?

And to continue this kind of wondering in a way that is specific to St. Paul’s here tonight:

• Is our beloved musician’s ability to play tonight despite his chronic and grave illness connected to the prayers of two other beloved musicians whose lives were cut short and who know what it is to be on that bench? And is something that Gary is doing or Tom is doing or David is doing allowing those two other musicians now dead to grow in grace?

• Is Melissa’s (my own) interest in being in conversation with women in their 20’s and 30’s here at St. Paul’s related to the daughter who died over twenty years ago, the daughter who has been praying for her mother to complete with others what she could do with her own child? And is that daughter, herself, somehow assisted by her mother completing this action?

• After Steve Terrell’s death only a little over a week ago, was one of the reasons that Steve’s wife, Carol, thought of Mary, the mother of Jesus while standing in the presence of Steve’s body, was that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was thinking of her, was holding her on her heart in prayer?

• Is the life you are leading, the vocation you are exploring, the direction you are pursuing influenced or guided by the good prayers of the dead or the influence of their lives? And will your choices somehow assist them, free them, support them in their life in God?

At the end of my favorite Stephen Sondheim play, Into the Woods, the characters who are left alive after the mayhem of life in the woods come together to take care of each other and to go on with life. Among these are a husband who has lost his wife, a young man who has lost his mother, and even a play that has lost its narrator. In the last scene those still alive, those left behind sing a song of that is part exploration and part new realization about life together, sung even as they wonder how they will continue without those they love.

Their song they sing is entitled “No one is alone,” and it’s about the discovery they’ve made in the course of their adventures and losses that life is not lived individually but is shared with others at the deepest levels: life is shared with those we have loved and who have loved us, life is even shared with those who have seemed to oppose us. And through it all as Sondheim says, someone is and has been “on our side” for “no one is alone.”

Tonight is All Souls, the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed. Someone is on our side. We are not alone. They are not alone.

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Works Cited or Consulted

Quote from Proust’s Swann’s Way is from Janna Malamud Smith’s My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud

Stephen Sondheim’s “No One is Alone” from Into the Woods