All Our Memories of Love
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
November 4, 2018
I had a big surprise one time years ago while talking to one of my former ministers. I was telling her about my dad and how he died. We were quiet for a bit, and then she asked me, “Does he come back to visit you?”
I wasn’t sure quite how to respond. I was fairly new to Unitarian Universalism at the time, and did not expect a UU minister to have any interest in those kinds of stories. I didn’t think there was any room for the supernatural. After all, we were supposed to be a religion with three main tenets – freedom, reason, and tolerance. That’s right – freedom, reason, and tolerance. Note the absence of convictions about love. Or mystery. Or holiness. Or faith.
So I told Mary, “No.” I had never experienced my dad’s presence, and in fact I have not yet. And I asked her if any of her loved ones had ever visited her, and she told me a story of how she once felt her late mother’s presence so strongly that she was absolutely certain that her mother was right there inside of her.
In the years since then, I have heard many, many stories of how people felt the presence of loved ones who had died. And while this has never happened to me, I believe them.
I do believe them, but I don’t pretend to understand, or to have an explanation. I have learned that all these memories of love, this sense of connection, of continued relationship, is not based in fact. Not everything in our experience over the course of our lives can be explained by facts. That can be a difficult message for those of us who found our way to this religious tradition because we had rejected the miraculous beliefs from our childhood religions.
When we are taught about the process of dying, we are told that very often patients begin to see people from their past. About a week before she died, my mother commented to me, very matter-of-factly, “My mother came to visit me last night.” And I understood that for what it was: that my mother was preparing to die, in ways that we simply do not have words for. She was seeing and sensing things that I could not. At this time of the year, as life and growth diminish, and retreat for a time, we often say that the veil between this world and another one has grown thin, allowing presences to be sensed, to connect. The veil can be thought of as something of a shield between what can be seen and known, and what cannot. Earth-centered religions celebrate this thinning of the veil, by commemorating the ancient holiday of Samhain at this time. The holiday was passed down in Christian practice as All Souls Day – a time to commemorate and remember our departed loved ones. But as so many people can tell you, the drawing aside of the veil can take place during any transitional time.
This reflection is meant to leave you with questions, not with nice, tidy answers. I would not pretend to offer any kind of scientific explanation for what takes place between people once someone has died. What I do offer you this morning is simply faith: faith that relationships do not die. They change, but they do not come to an end.
Our faith tradition, Unitarian Universalism, can be described as a belief that there is one great Love from which we all emerge, and when our lives end, we all return to that Love. One Love, or force, or God, or Creation, or Christ. One destiny for all souls. We are part of that eternal love, that life force, from the beginning of time. We emerge from that Love, we nurture it and expand it throughout our lives, through our relationships, and we return to it when we die.
We say ancient words at funerals: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The words remind us that we are part of the creation, part of the eternal rock and the stardust. But we are more than ashes and earth. We are more than stardust. We are energy, part of the living creation, or God, that brought us into being. And so, when we die, do we ever really leave?
For all those left behind, yearning for a touch, to hear a beloved voice, our faith can tell us that love never dies, that people who have loved one another will love each other forever. The poet May Sarton put it this way:
“What has been once so interwoven cannot be raveled, nor the gift ungiven.
Now the dead move through us still glowing.
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited –
and the strands grow richer with each loss
and memory makes kings and queens of us.” (May Sarton, “All Souls”)
May it be so.
Amen.
