Day of the Dead/All Souls.
Oct. 31st, 2004 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaOur church always has a service remembering the dead on the Sunday closest to Halloween and All Souls' Day. This year they added powerful new elements to the service, I think in the hopes of establishing a ritual for future years. I hope so. I was deeply moved.
People were encouraged to come early - starting at 10:30 for an 11:00 service. Scribes standing at the doors to the church asked those coming in if there was anyone they wanted remembered, and recorded their names. We were also encouraged to bring photos or other mementoes - I saw someone bringing forward a sewing bobbin; I wonder what the story is behind that - and place them at the front of the church, before the pulpit.
Details of the order of service had been altered to emphasize the special, ritual quality of the service. "Greeting our neighbors," for example, a boisterous interlude that often takes five minutes or more, was postponed until after church in the parish hall. Announcments were kept to a minimum. We sang only one hymn - the UU version of "For All the Saints" - but the choir had prepared special music, including a solo of Faure's Pie Jesu and an a capella quartet performing Sweet Honey in the Rock's Breaths. Interspersed with the anthems were short readings.
We had been encouraged to bring canned or packaged foods that reminded us of the people we were remembering, and during the service the food was collected "as an offering from the dead to the living," to be donated to the local food pantry.
The sermon was about preparing for death. Not about preparing for or coping with a loved one's death - which is what I was expecting - but about readying yourself for becoming old or sick and dying. The minister pointed out that in many other religions, funerals are a time when mourners are encouraged to contemplate their own prospective death. Unitarian funerals tend to be celebrations of the life of the deceased - which is not a bad thing, but does mean that we don't talk much about how to die. Her main thesis was that, from birth, we learn that the things that make us valuable and important are our accomplishments. And then, as we get old or infirm and begin to die, our accomplishments are stripped away. We have to learn to value ourselves, for ourselves - to believe that we have worth and dignity just from being, not from anything we do or have. We have to learn that dependence and inaction do not negate the value of our lives, if we are to accept ourselves at the end.
Finally, the ministers read the lists of names to be remembered. After each five names, the congregation sang a simple chant: "What is remembered, lives. What is remembered, lives." It was simple and profound, and I found myself moved to tears.
One of the things I love about my church is that it recognizes that you don't have to give up ritual when you give up orthodoxy.
People were encouraged to come early - starting at 10:30 for an 11:00 service. Scribes standing at the doors to the church asked those coming in if there was anyone they wanted remembered, and recorded their names. We were also encouraged to bring photos or other mementoes - I saw someone bringing forward a sewing bobbin; I wonder what the story is behind that - and place them at the front of the church, before the pulpit.
Details of the order of service had been altered to emphasize the special, ritual quality of the service. "Greeting our neighbors," for example, a boisterous interlude that often takes five minutes or more, was postponed until after church in the parish hall. Announcments were kept to a minimum. We sang only one hymn - the UU version of "For All the Saints" - but the choir had prepared special music, including a solo of Faure's Pie Jesu and an a capella quartet performing Sweet Honey in the Rock's Breaths. Interspersed with the anthems were short readings.
We had been encouraged to bring canned or packaged foods that reminded us of the people we were remembering, and during the service the food was collected "as an offering from the dead to the living," to be donated to the local food pantry.
The sermon was about preparing for death. Not about preparing for or coping with a loved one's death - which is what I was expecting - but about readying yourself for becoming old or sick and dying. The minister pointed out that in many other religions, funerals are a time when mourners are encouraged to contemplate their own prospective death. Unitarian funerals tend to be celebrations of the life of the deceased - which is not a bad thing, but does mean that we don't talk much about how to die. Her main thesis was that, from birth, we learn that the things that make us valuable and important are our accomplishments. And then, as we get old or infirm and begin to die, our accomplishments are stripped away. We have to learn to value ourselves, for ourselves - to believe that we have worth and dignity just from being, not from anything we do or have. We have to learn that dependence and inaction do not negate the value of our lives, if we are to accept ourselves at the end.
Finally, the ministers read the lists of names to be remembered. After each five names, the congregation sang a simple chant: "What is remembered, lives. What is remembered, lives." It was simple and profound, and I found myself moved to tears.
One of the things I love about my church is that it recognizes that you don't have to give up ritual when you give up orthodoxy.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-31 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-31 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-31 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-01 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-01 08:27 am (UTC)One thing I like about 17th-century literature is that acceptance of death as a fact of life allowed people to really know it, think about it, in a way we seem almost squeamish to do now. Mind, I don't want the death rate back, just that kind of contemplation. I also think that squeamishness about death, and its isolation from the main culture, makes people crazy about bodily perfection, so they can pretend they won't die at all.
I used to have a high-tech momento mori--a holographic sticker of a skull above my desk. It seems to have fallen down somewhere. I probably need a replacement.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-01 09:29 am (UTC)Our minister remarked that she hadn't been sure how many people would show up at church, given our cultural discomfort with death. (In fact, it was an average turnout - about 120 people.)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-01 10:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-01 02:37 pm (UTC)THomas Campbell: The River of Life (http://www.livejournal.com/users/green_knight/55683.htm)