The Feast of All Souls, 2005
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
From TS Eliot's poem East Coker:
“O dark, dark…
They all go into the dark...
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees…all go into the dark…”
Tonight we have our own list of those who have gone into the dark. It’s not a list focusing on the accomplished and the powerful. It’s a list of people we have known and loved.
They all go into the dark… our fathers and our mothers, our brothers and our sisters, our sons and our daughters, our partners, our wives and our husbands, our grandparents and our dear friends.
They all go into the dark and leave us behind in our own kind of darkness.
Joan Didion’s much publicized memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, describes the darkness and disorientation that came into her life when her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died as they were sitting down to dinner on the night of December 30th, 2003. Her memoir begins with these words:
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
Many of you here know what this is about.
And so I find myself wanting to be very careful about what I say tonight. I don’t want it to sound too plucky or discounting of how serious loss can be. I don’t want to sound full of certainty about something that is a great mystery.
This is important to me because when my own daughter died at the age of five in a seminary community I heard some very unhelpful things from people who tried to console me by telling me where they believed by daughter was and how they hoped I would feel about her death.
And so here we are together on the Feast of All Souls, with the names of our dead in a book from which we will read in a moment. Here we are on a dark night in a dimly lit church connected to a memorial garden holding the ashes of many of your loved ones. Here we are, you and I, coming together not to deny the darkness of death, but to explore what we can place our hope on when someone’s life ends and our life, or a part of our life, seems to end right along with it.
Where does our hope lie?
First, I believe that hope lies in the mystery of our waiting. This is what our psalmist comes to as he cries to God from the depths. “I wait for the Lord, the psalmist says, “my soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.” The act of waiting is all about allowing for and trusting that more is at work in our loss, that more may emerge in our loss, than we can know or control.
Second, I believe that hope lies in remembering, remembering that doesn’t become nostalgia for a past we can’t return to or recapture, but remembering that looks in two directions—looks back in gratitude for what was given to us in our loved ones, and looks forward trusting that the God of our future will also be a giver of good gifts.
Finally, hope lies in the central assertion of our faith (and it is a great mystery) that through Christ, death is not the end: death, itself has been defeated Death is not the end for those who have died, and death is not the end for those of us left behind. At the center of this mystery is our Easter God who is forever about new beginnings that we did not count on, who forever is raising up what was cast down, and who is forever kindling light in our darkness.
I began with a poem and I want to end with a second one. The poet’s name is Robert Cooper, and the poem is from Terry Holmes’ book Ministry and Imagination. In the book, Terry, the dean of the seminary at the University of the South and my pastor during the illness and death of my daughter, makes the case that works of the imagination are essential in communicating the mysteries of our faith and in connecting us to the hope we need to live our lives as Christians.
Terry died quite suddenly in his early 50’s. This poem was read at his funeral.
It’s not a poem with a lot of religious language. It is a poem about death as a mysterious gentleness, as a surprising freshness, as an experience of thankfulness and as surrounded by “mother comfort.”
Softly Like an Early Snow
Say, when the thing is done—
my dying—
that I fell softly like an early snow
from an undetermined height.
I would have told you if I could
that the wind declining is a blow
suffered with pleasure,
that I awoke as a man does—
O, thankful!—from a dream of falling
Dream-sifted through reveries of other days
sleep-dropped through darkness of cool sheets,
and mother-comfort comes to hold you.
I would have told you if I could.
And let it not be said that he was one
howling like a whipped dog in the tunneled night,
limping cradling the broken bones he cannot mend,
that he ran off to lick new wounds by old light,
To nurse his raw life—his darkness—that doesn’t end.
I would have told you what I cannot know,
that I feel softly like an early snow.
Works Cited
T. S. Eliot, East Coker in The Four Quartets
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, Chapter 1.
“Softly Like an Early Snow” by Robert Cooper, quoted by Urban T. Holmes, III
in Ministry and Imagination, p. 144-145.
