All my memories of love
hang upon high stars.
and the sky above the tree
whether wet or bright
is my ease
and my comforting, my good news and light.
The dead are not under the earth,
they are in the rustling trees.
Until at last by life released
our spirits shine like stars
our spirits shine
like
stars.
I have a friend who is an anthropologist.
She studies culture -
how do cultures make sense of life, and the world,
what are their rituals, their beliefs,
how to they understand themselves and the meaning of everything.
Her name is Alexandra, or Lex for short.
Lex is about my age, plus or minus 8 years,
and she’s been thinking a lot recently about death.
As an anthropologist.
She’s been thinking about death, and memory,
and the way that memory can offer healing and solace to people after death.
She and I were talking about this just the other day,
and you all know this is a mostly true story, right?
You know, “mostly true?”
Anyway, recently, once upon a time,
I was talking with her,
and we were talking about stories and memory and the healing and connecting power
of storytelling.
I told her that one of the great privileges of my work
is when I gather the family after someone has died,
and ask them to tell me the persons story.
Every family reports it to be an experience that heals,
that honors and helps them process their grief.
Lex was interviewing me about how people remember the dead.
She’s been on sabbatical, you see, from the university,
and she has been traveling across the United States
to study death and memory.
She is curious, indeed, fascinated, by the world,
and the people in it.
Throughout her sabbatical, she’s been posting updates
from what she’s seen and I’ve been following along.
She posted pictures from a farmhouse she visited in southern minnesota,
along with a suburban ranch house in Omaha and a condo in Columbus,
in all three places there was a wall, or a shelf, the top of a dresser,
where folks had put out black and white pictures of their ancestors.
There they were on their wedding day, in a regular suit and a practical dress -
you could’t afford to wear something only once in 1931,
the ancestors smiled standing in front of homes
or looked serious in immigration photos,
there were candid shots of children playing,
children who had seen grown up, and had grandchildren of their own,
some who had died long ago.
These simple altars — unnamed as such, but altars nonetheless,
were invitations for story-telling —
who is that, we would inevitability ask,
and the story would reveal so much - about how we connect, how we belong.
The University did not have the budget for Alexandra to travel aboard,
and she wanted to confine her study to the United States anyway,
but Lex did make a trip to Chinatown in Seattle, Washington —
there were plenty to choose from, but she had a friend there —
and asked about how ancestor veneration,
a sacred duty in Chinese folk traditions, including Taoism and Confucian practice,
was happening in everyday life.
She shared a little video of one household -
a small area was set aside in the living room,
there was a tablet, and an inscence holder.
Each morning, the father would light the inscence,
and say a short prayer to the ancestors, that they might bless their living,
and stay at peace.
On a festival day, the family would place more things on that altar -
spirit money,
a small glass of drink and a little food -
an offering of devotion.
It was, Lex said, not a macabre ritual in the slightest,
but a way of staying connected to one’s identity, to one’s history and the spirits which continue to shape reality.
Lex also spent some time with some neo-pagans in Wisconsin.
There are neo-pagans everywhere, of course,
but the ones in Wisconsin have good cheese.
The group she spent time with celebrated the eight turnings of the year,
the equinoxes, the solstices, and the quarter-turnings, halfway between them.
Samhaim, halfway from the fall equinox to the winter solstice,
was when, according to their customs,
the veil between the world’s would lift,
and the dead would be present to the living,
when we might might,
as the poet wrote,
“move our hand and feel a touch
move with me, and when I brush
my own mind across another,
I am with my mother’s mother.”
On that night, the ancient celts wore costumes,
so the dead, visiting, would not identify their loved ones and steal them away,
and they left out sweets -
for, from Egypt to Japan, from Argentina to Ireland,
all seem agreed: the dead love sugar.
Alexandra is well-trained anthropologist.
She’s not some amateur, and she makes no false universality.
She knows that these rituals and habits
from a variety of cultures are not the same,
and that each culture has its integrity and own logic.
What she’s interested in is the human feeling -
the sense that memory has power,
that the memory of the departed, kept alive,
can be a beauty, a salve, an anchor in the stormy sea,
that it isn’t “a lot of time wasted time collecting the names of the dead”
or the “narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores”
but is a way of orienting ourselves in the world,
of knowing where we belong.
One day, Lex wrote about how she had visited
her aunt, her mother’s older sister,
a woman with progressive dementia,
who lived just south of Portland Oregon.
Lex hadn’t seen her auth in some years,
and, as expected, she wasn’t remembered.
But Lex, an expert in memory, brought some artifacts -
like a warm egg and a football,
talismans -
a picture of when Lex’s mom and aunt were young,
and the aunt told stories of ages ago,
and she smiled.
We remember some things, and forget others,
whoever we are;
and sometimes our memories are not accurate.
I once had a professor who said that History isn’t what happened,
it is the discussion about the story we tell about what happened.
Memory is that way too.
Honoring our ancestors is that way.
Lex drove away from her aunts thinking about what stories
her family told over and over again,
and what gaps those stories left.
How she knew so much about her father’s mom,
but almost nothing about her father’s dad.
She thought about that surprising genealogy test she took -
she thought they were one thing,
but it seems that the story is a lot more complicated.
She thought about what it means to create an identity
though genealogy -
she had listened to the book “To Rise Again at a Decent Hour”
as she was driving,
and was fascinated by it — how, in this work of fiction,
a fictional identity could be so compelling,
how our ancestors, like a secret code, might be used to reveal
our life’s true purpose.
She recognized, though, that this could be a cautionary tale:
the narrator of the novel, and others in it,
might be suckers for a con,
it might all be fake.
In the end, we have to decide to live our life,
not someone else’s -
to make our decisions,
to honor our ancestors but not be bound by their limitations or horizons.
Lex drove south from Oregon into California.
This was almost a year ago,
and she had been invited by a college friend of hers
to celebrate dia de losmuertos, the day of the dead.
A festive and joyous celebration, observed in Mexico and the Mexican diaspora.
A combination of indigenous Aztec traditions with some elements of All Souls and All Saints day thrown in -
there are offrendas, offerings to honor the dead with sugar skulls and
the favorite foods and drinks of the departed,
a day of pilgrimage and honor, parades and music and feasting.
A time of stories.
Lex wrote how honored she was to be invited,
and how the combination of the grand public celebration
and the private intimate family gathering resonated:
She said that it is one thing to visit the graveyard
or the sacred place
by yourself,
or with your sibling, your child,
to pay respect.
The quiet, the single family, the single person there.
But to make that visit on the same day as everyone else,
to see so many families gather and honor their loved ones,
to remember their ancestors,
had the power to remind her
how we all experience grief, loss, memory, honor,
how life is finite not just for some but for everyone,
how death is the end of a person but not of those who loved them.
Driving on the country roads the next night,
headed back to the Midwest,
Lex noticed the stars - the giant canopy of light.
Our spirits shine like stars.
All my memories of love hang upon high stars.
She pulled over, got out, and breathed in.
So much memory, so many ancestors.
When you felt them, they were everywhere.
The cloud of witnesses, who are not under the earth,
but in our breath, our tears, our laughter, our love, our skin.
She smiled,
she grinned, and she yelled out,
I love you too.
It seemed like the thing to say.
As part of her sabbatical, Lex also visited some haunted houses.
I mean, they are said to be haunted.
Lex doesn’t really believe in that kind of thing,
but that wasn’t the point,
she was trying to suss out how people think about memory and death.
Ghosts fascinate her, as a concept —
because, generally, the idea is that the spirit cannot do what it is supposed to do:
move on.
Go.
It’s a fine line for us who remember -
between letting go and remembering,
from not dwelling on it but not blocking it out.
Thinking about Jason’s testimony this morning,
I recalled one of Lex’s observations about death:
that, depending on the culture,
the dead would haunt you if you payed them too much attention
or if you payed them too little.
Remember, honor, celebrate,
but don’t obsess.
The fifth and last stage of grieving is acceptance -
to acknowledge the reality, to take the memory into your own being,
and then to live your own life.
Lex has spent a lot of time this year while she’s been on sabbatical
in places where the remains of those who have died are placed, or spread.
She stood on a cliffside with a family, who invited her to be with them,
while they let the ashes of their grandfather dance away in the wind.
She walked in cemeteries in New England with dates from the 17th century
and New Orleans, where the band plays the casket home,
and in church yards and crypts in small towns and big cities.
She thinks often about works from the poet Phillip Larkin,
who wrote of visiting a mostly abandoned church,
of wondering why he visits such places,
with their strange mysteries and obscure practices,
and concludes thus:
. . . someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
When Lex was here last week,
she and I walked out back.
Along the memorial trail,
behind this church,
where so many dead lie round.
I thought of the ashes I have spread in those woods, and amongst the prairie grass.
Lex loved that the trail was guided,
that you could, at each station,
learn about the plants and trees,
and about the history of this place, it’s people and it’s stories.
And we walked in silence for a while,
breathing in and feeling the loved ones gone brush up against us,
wishing us well,
and blessing us for our lives today.
From here, Lex was headed northwest.
Her sabbatical is almost over, but she’s got one more stop,
one more burial ground to visit:
it’s near the Missouri river,
in North Dakota,
but this will be no quiet visit to mounds or markers;
Lex is bringing her gas mask and her ACLU “know your rights” wallet card
to join the Standing Rock Sioux Water Protectors
as they fight to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline.
I’ve been reading the news,
and worried about her, but proud of her for going.
It is a burial ground, where the bulldozers have started plowing the earth,
so the world might burn more carbon for less money.
The ancestors of the Standing Rock are so very present with the tribe —
the camp Lex is headed to is called the 1851 treaty camp,
named for one of too many times their forbearers were betrayed.
She goes to honor the past and to serve the future.
I blessed her for the trip -
she’ll join many of my colleagues there,
many who will leave after church today and be there all week.
Parenting keeps me here, but I sent them some money to get there and bring supplies.
I told them to look out for my friend.
After Standing Rock, Lex heads home, and will start teaching again in January.
Life goes on.
That’s an important part of the story: life goes on.
Of, course, Lex will write a book about her experiences.
That’s what the University expects.
We were banding about titles when she was here,
and thought about
“They make us stronger.”
She didn’t like that,
she thought it needed to be
“They can make us stronger.”
It depends - we can’t cling, or deny,
but hold our ancestors and their spirits in tender love.
Welcome their visits when the veil lifts, but maybe not every day.
Visit their graves, but not live there.
But they can make us stronger.
They already have, with their gifts of love and service,
with the world they have built for us.
They made mistakes too, which we can try to correct, as best we are able.
Remembering them is a sacred task,
one that can bring us peace and perspective,
inspiration and hope.
It can remind us of the challenges they overcame,
and, on misty autumn nights when leaves love to let go,
or when the stars shine brightly in the heavens,
when the wind rustles in the right way,
we can be reminded of the love that lives in us all, and will not let us go,
we can give thanks for memory and be healed by its comfort,
and we can rise from what was
to make, together, what will be.
May it be so, this day, and every day.