This talk is about death.
I have changed it several times, right up until yesterday, because current events have brought death into the spotlight in ways I didn’t anticipate. The conflict in Gaza, Otis slamming into Acapulco as an unforecast category five hurricane, the mass murder in Maine – death has been in the news this week a lot. And yet, death is a difficult topic.
If hearing the word “death” made you squirm in your seat a little, that’s okay. Note if your body’s responding to what your mind is denying: Death makes you uncomfortable. Death makes me uncomfortable, so much so that even though I volunteered to do this service I spent three weeks distracting myself from its creation. I finally sat down with a party sized bag of potato chips for company and made myself finish it. We all have ways to comfort ourselves, right?
But back to death. We have lots of ways to avoid that word, death. Others don’t die. They pass away, transition, are with god now, are in a better place. The news people talk about loss of life, fatalities. Death slips into abstraction. We don’t even like to admit someone is dying. They are fighting for their life, hanging on, fully living their last days, receiving palliative care. As if dying and living are two separate things to do.
What’s wild is I didn’t set out to write a talk about death, per se, but I found I couldn’t explore the history and meaning of All Souls Day without bumping up against our western attitudes about the idea of death and how they are keeping us only acknowledging the interconnected web of existence in our seventh principle and not really being a part of it like we claim. As I move on, I’ll let you contemplate an idea: That you become part of the web of existence, of life, when you accept that death is unavoidable, even for you.
So how did I end up at our seventh principle? Well, let me get to my original intention – studying how my ancestors honored their ancestors and developing an understanding of what All Souls Day was and is. I’m not Catholic nor a religious scholar, and I’m sure there’s more to this, but I got enough to think about. Anyway, according to my research, All Souls Day has roots in ancestral worship and community days of grieving. In the early church there were various dates for those days: during the Easter season, in early October, or in December. In the tenth century, Catholic Saint Odilo of Cluny standardized the date to November 2nd and called it the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed. The good people of the church were told to attend mass, to pray, to remember their loved ones, to give alms to the poor, and to visit graves. Just to remember the dead? Oh no, there was an important purpose. Your poor departed family members were probably doing time in purgatory, and you had to do your part to help them get to heaven.
Yeah, the belief was that, unlike the saints who had been purified enough to directly communicate with god and were therefore in heaven, those who were baptized but had, during their lives, committed some lesser sins were stuck in purgatory being punished for them until they had been made good enough for heaven.
What’s a lesser sin? As I understand it, a lesser sin is something forgivable, that doesn’t break your relationship with god, just injures it a little. Examples I found were fighting, stealing something small, lustful thoughts, gossiping, drinking too much, not praying regularly, and sarcasm. Basically, you broke the moral law but not in some grave way, or you did it without really knowing it was a sin. The seven mortal sins, but the lite version. While you’re alive, you confess your lesser sins and do penance for them. After you die, you end up in purgatory where you do time for penance left undone. One story I read said someone came to see Odilo reporting a mystic vision of the horror of purgatory and that’s what prompted him to start All Souls Days. Maybe that’s what happened.
Odilo figured a soul could get through purgatory faster with help from the living faithful. By attending mass and giving alms and the others, you were giving the dead some penance points. Bells were wrung and candles lit to ease the purification process, too.
In some places, children would go around offering songs and prayers for the dead. They were given a soul cake in return for their prayers, probably needed food. The tradition expanded to “going souling,” which might include acting as a representative of the dead who needed some help in purgatory.
Later, in Scotland and Ireland, the children started dressing in disguises and threatened mischief if they didn’t get their treats. Do you see where this is going?
Souling came to America with Irish, Scottish, and English immigrants in the early 1900s. It became “trick or treating” first in central Canada, then spread into the United States in the 1930s, and still happens today, but the kids who knock on your door are not likely to be saying prayers in exchange for a full sized Snickers.
But I’ve digressed. What about all those souls? When millions of soldiers died during World War One, the Anglicans and Protestants shifted All Souls Day back to a day of remembrance, blended it with All Saints Day, and dropped the whole purgatory thing. While I don’t believe in heaven, hell, or purgatory and appreciate the day of remembrance, there is a belief about death that underlies the history of All Souls Day and, no matter what we do with the day, it is still very much prevalent in western society – the belief that we don’t die.
Now you are probably sitting there thinking, “Of course we die. We have cemeteries full of dead people.” But remember all those things we say to avoid saying the word death? They all imply we are going somewhere else. Yeah, our bodies die, but we go on, to some other place. We love the idea of immortality. So we don’t say the word death and we imagine our loved ones in heaven or purgatory or appearing as a butterfly or maybe haunting us. But they’re never gone.
Even the most secular, science-minded imagine immortality. After my father passed away, I became obsessed with the idea of leaving a legacy. I saw all the things my dad had built, all the people who remembered him and appreciated the work he had done while he was alive, and I shifted much of my focus to doing things that people would remember. I wanted to leave my mark on the world the way my dad had so that I, too, would live on.
There’s a lot in this about the way humans grieve and I’m not qualified nor do I desire to go there. After all, I wanted to know how my ancestors honored their ancestors. It helps me learn about myself and the stuff that is passed down, often unconsciously, in my complicated and problematic white European ancestral line. I find that going back allows me to uncover the wisdom that I can honor but also reveals generational traumas that need to be healed. It’s a lot of work and I don’t expect to finish it before I’m dead.
From that perspective, imagine what I felt when I curiously looked into the origins of All Souls Day for a ritual of ancestral honoring that wasn’t borrowed from another culture and found out that they were complicating the process of grief by making the living responsible for getting their beloved dead into heaven! So your sweet grandpa was a good man but he didn’t remember to say his prayers and now you have to work twice as hard so grandpa gets to heaven, on top of securing your own place. That doesn’t feel very honoring and it doesn’t feel like a particularly supportive grief ritual. I’m glad it has shifted to more of a collective remembrance thing, because I believe we need more public, community rituals of grieving our dead.
Our community is important, isn’t it? We come into this space every Sunday with a variety of beliefs and backgrounds and we listen to the talks and we resonate with some and tune others out. Maybe you’ll hear something that changes your perspective or that you’ll chew on for the next few hours or days. But we sit together in any case. And we have these seven principles we mostly agree on that thankfully have nothing to do with deadly sins but do say a lot about what kind of people we are trying to be and what kind of community we want to have.
So let’s circle back to the seventh principle. I’d like to take it apart a bit, because I believe it gives us a way to learn death. It is short and sweet: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Let’s start with “existence.” I like that we have to play with the word existence, because we aren’t limited to life. Just from a physical standpoint, does my living body exist? Yes. Does my dead body also exist? Yes. What happens when the dead body starts to decompose? Does it cease to exist? No. Something else takes up the fragments of matter and they become part of a living body again.
Really, we are just made up of fragments of matter. What makes life, as Andreas Weber says in Matter and Desire, is a striving to keep all those individual fragments together, to maintain wholeness. Those fragments, themselves, have their own independent existences made out of complex structures that stay together through the sheer desire to be alive, the same force that keeps life life-ing from single-celled organisms to blue whales.
So here’s the thing: how does that desire to live exist unless it knows of death? Would there be an urge to stay alive without the fight against death?
French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote: “…to understand the world is to understand in the innermost core of one’s own existence that death is waiting within life. What is left to us, if we accept the reality of life, if we wish to be enlivened, is nothing other than the conscious choice to abide in the face of terror.” What is terror, after all, but facing the possibility of death?
Take a breath with that. It’s a lot.
Now let’s look at another word, interdependent. As a student of spiritual ecology, that word, interdependent, lights me up. What does it mean to be interdependent? One of the dictionary definitions is mutually dependent. Another is symbiosis. Going back to Andreas Weber, “The world is not populated by singular, autonomous, sovereign beings. It comprises a constantly oscillating network of dynamic interactions in which one thing changes through the change of another. The relationship counts, not the substance.” Ecology is about relationships. Spiritual ecology is the philosophy of those relationships. And it’s the relationship that is captured in that word interdependent.
And finally there’s the part of this principle that challenges us to accept death, “of which we are a part.” Seeing yourself as a vulnerable organism within the interdependent web, one who’s not going to beat death but who is as impermanent as every other being, who doesn’t have to work on what comes next. Accepting your death expands your focus from your own needs to the suffering of other beings who are also dying, and compassion blooms. All of us, every being, exists in the tension between living and dying.
It’s in that tension that we are a part of the interdependent web of existence.
There’s one more word I want to look at, and leave you with. Respect. I don’t like it. I mean, it’s okay in general, but here it doesn’t fit. It creates a paradox, because it takes us back to looking from the outside at the web we just got ourselves into. And it’s not enough. Respect doesn’t ask us to do anything except nod our heads and say, “yeah, that web has some nice qualities I admire.” Respect doesn’t ask us to do anything.
Try accepting. Accepting the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. Accepting the tragedy and suffering and death implied in existence. And the aliveness, too. Accepting death doesn’t mean we don’t grieve. But it gives us permission to live now, and fully. In accepting death we are also accepting our desire to stay alive. And we recognize that desire in every other being, and support it. The last bit of the reading I shared was, “I can do what is necessary for you to live and for me to live. I can take on good will for your life, as I have for my own. I alone carry the responsibility for myself. For my courage. For my death.”
Breathe with that. In those words I hear that those who will grieve for me at my inevitable death don’t have to ensure I live on after. They already have because their living was created in relationship to my living. They will honor me in their desire for aliveness.
So what about All Souls Day? Unfortunately, I can’t know if my ancestors were saying prayers or giving alms to help one of my other ancestors get to heaven. Maybe there was one who saw through it and gave out soul cakes not to save her father’s soul or her own but because she knew about aliveness and felt compassion towards kids who also had the desire to stay alive.
As I let those possibilities swirl in my consciousness, I made a choice to honor the ancestor who learned death and lived knowing it, whose fragments of matter have died and lived and existed and still exist in this blessed biosphere. And I decided to face the tragedy, suffering, and death around me with a heart full of compassion, to respond to the needs of this world with shared aliveness, to let each moment die and live fully in the next, until I am the honored ancestor. That is my ritual.
I said this was a talk about death, but I was wrong. This talk was about life.