Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

All Souls
November 1, 2007
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

“All Soul’s Day” by D.H. Lawrence

Be careful, then, and be gentle about death.
For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through
The door, even when it opens.
And the poor dead, when they have left the walled
And silvery city of the now hopeless body
Where are they to go? Oh where are they to go?

They linger in the shadow of the earth.
The earth’s long conical shadow is full of souls
That cannot find the way across the sea of change.
Be kind, Oh be kind to your dead
And give them a little encouragement
And help them to build their little ship of death.

For the soul has a long, long journey after death
To the sweet home of pure oblivion.
Each needs a little ship, a little ship
and the proper store of meal for the longest journey.
Oh, from out of your heart
Provide for your dead once more, equip them
Like departing mariners, lovingly.

I was speaking to someone last year after we used our black vestments for the first time on All Souls. The person was stating a strong point of view about using black this night. “We should not be using black” he said, “If anything, we should be using white as we remember those we love who have died. It’s just like at Easter or at a funeral. We should be using white, the color of resurrection, the color of victory over the grave.”

I have to admit that on one level what he said made sense. After all, the central Christian affirmation is that nothing, not even death itself, can separate us from God. And so why on All Souls should it be any different? Why when we remember all of the faithful departed should we don black vestments?

The idea, of course, comes from a distinction that was made at one point in the church’s life between the feast of All Saints and the prayers for the dead on All Souls. All Saints was to be a celebration of those living and dead who are knit into one body in Christ. All Souls was to be a time to remember especially and pray for those closest to us who had died, pray for their continued journey of growth in grace, not toward oblivion as Lawrence puts it in his poem, but toward union with God.

And so the tonality on All Saints is celebration, with Alleluias and baptisms, and the tonality on All Souls is both a kind of longing as we focus on the loss of those we love, and a kind of prayerful yearning that their little ship, as Lawrence calls it, takes them toward the peace and the joy of resting in God (which, of course is what the word “requiem” means—rest).

And so tonight on All Souls, with our sung requiem and our new black vestments, we’re giving ourselves the space to explore our experiences of loss, the strange and wonderful mixed blessing that the dead are for us, and our prayerful yearning for those who have died—a yearning that they may find wholeness and peace as they continue both to grow with us and in some ways, away from us.

All of this a great mystery.

And so to give flesh to some of this mystery, I want to tell you about a conversation I once had with Marta, a woman I knew when she was the primary caretaker for her husband Jeff during the last years of his life. Marta and Jeff were both in their 50’s when Jeff was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died within six months.

A few months after Jeff’s death and requiem mass, Marta came into my office. She looked tired. As she started to talk, her eyes filled with tears.

“I feel at such loose ends,” she said. “And I feel so many things—grief, regret, disorientation and guilt for what I didn’t do for Jeff.”

She stopped for moment, dabbed her eyes and then spoke again.

“Things got so difficult toward the end, and I was so focused on taking care of him that we didn’t have much real time together as a couple towards the end. I also think I resented how demanding the situation had become and how demanding he had become. And then sometimes I hear about other people who have lost children, and I get to thinking that their loss was worse than mine.”

“The other night I had a dream. In it, for the first time Jeff came to me. It was overwhelming to see him again. We talked, and I finally just asked him, ‘How can I go on without you?’”

“And what he said to me was this (I can hear it as clearly as if he were saying it to me today): ‘Love me in death,’” he said, “Love me in death.”

“Melissa, the only thing I can think that this might mean is that he knew that towards the end I had a hard time loving him in life. And so he’s telling me now that I can go ahead and love him. I can love him in death. Melissa, how do I love him in death?”

It was and is a hard question. Part of what I said to her had to do with going ahead and claiming her experience of grief, her specific experience of grief. In his book Life After Loss, Bob Dietz puts it this way: “The very worst kind of grief is yours,” that is, our losses are not to be compared to others as a way of minimizing them. The very worst kind of grief is ours.

Related to our claiming the specific kind of grief that is ours, is our realizing and acting on the fact that the only way to recover from grief is not to get over it, to get around it or to wait it out. We have to go through it, to approach it as holy work that we do as part of the love we have for those who have died.

But there’s more, of course, than just claiming our grief and grieving it as the way we love out dead. Especially on All Souls, we love our departed through our prayers for them, prayers that move them and us along. We believe our prayers for them and their answering prayers for us, has an effect on them and us. This is because we are bound together in God and together are traveling toward a greater wholeness of life.

And so at our Eucharist tonight during the offertory, as the elements are brought to the altar, I invite you to offer special prayers of intention for those you love who have died. Ask yourself what prayer of the heart they need from you which, as Lawrence says, will be a meal to sustain them in their little ship as it makes it way more fully toward God. And then at the altar rail, I invite you to share a meal of reunion with all those living and dead whom you love. It is a meal we will share tonight but it is not the last. It is a taste of another day, another meal, an ultimate reunion we have been promised.

For on that day “the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples, a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
And he will destroy… the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces…It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.