Side by Side: Holding Grief and Hope

Reverend Janet Parsons

Gloucester UU Church

November 1, 2020

 

Tomorrow is the Feast of All Souls, that day each year when people remember and mourn the deaths of loved ones everywhere.  We typically commemorate All Souls, at least briefly.  After all, honoring all our dead, not just the saints, is such a Universalist thing to do.  But this year, here in 2020, a year of unprecedented loss due to the Covid-19 virus, the holiday takes on new meaning, new urgency.  This year, we are surrounded daily by grief; practically submerged by it.  We cannot escape it.  Our country has lost over 230,000 people.  The only way we can imagine this is to think of Worcester, or Springfield, along with some of their surrounding towns, empty. 

 

For much of this time, we have tried to minimize what is happening, just so that we can continue on with our own lives, to struggle to maintain a sense of normalcy, to wear our masks but otherwise push the losses to the back of our minds.  The effort it takes to comprehend what is happening here, and everywhere all over the world, is so hard to bear.

 

There have been so many other losses besides death.  There is the anguish of knowing that so many people have died alone. Their families have had to mourn alone, without friends and family to support them. We also feel the grief of lost time with family and friends, the lack of celebrations that add joy and meaning to our lives. We have lost so much this year.  The collective grief is growing within us, even as we try to keep moving through it, try to push it aside.

 

And so today we hold our losses close, we name them, we allow ourselves to feel them.  Our theme for November is Healing, and in order to heal, we must first open ourselves to sadness, to acknowledge it, to own it. If we cannot allow ourselves to feel the pain and the grief, we will be much slower to heal. 

 

And yet, even in the midst of our sorrow, we are also invited to hope.  Unitarian Universalism is a hopeful religion.  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 God, or Creation, or Christ, and 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, we grow and expand it throughout our lives, through our relationships and our contributions to communities and congregations, and we return to it when we die.  Our faith tells us that love never dies.

 

Our reading this morning reminded us that

 

“(Our loved ones) are with us still.
The lives they lived hold us steady.

Their words remind us and call us back to ourselves.
Their courage and love evoke our own.

We, the living, carry them with us:
we are their voices, their hands and their hearts…”   (“They Are With Us Still, Kathleen McTigue, Singing the Living Tradition, #721.)

As we are asked to hold our sorrow closely to us in this year of catastrophic loss, so too are we called to hold hope close as well: the hope, and the faith, that love is eternal, and that we are a part of that love. Grief and hope, side by side. We are asked to hold so much right now.

Today, of course, we are also trying to hold on to hope for something else as well: hope for our country.  With the presidential election looming in just two days, we are hoping for our future.  Here’s a vision of the future I hope for:  a country that cares for our planet, that welcomes people of all skin colors and religions, a country where gender and gender identity do not create barriers for leading full and happy lives, where all people are encouraged to live into the fullness of their potential.

A great deal is being asked of us here today: to both mourn our dead, and to hold onto hope for our future, for our children, and their children, and for all the children of the world. No wonder we are struggling to grasp all of this.  We are called to balance between sorrow and hope.  The poet John O’Donohue put it this way:

“We have become converts
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress…”     (John O’Donohue, For Citizenship, in To Bless the Space Between Us)

To help us hold onto hope, our first reading reminds us:

“Those who lived before us,
who ­struggled for justice and suffered injustice before us,
have not melted into the dust,
and have not disappeared.”  (ibid.)

Reading those words, and thinking of all the losses we have witnessed this year, one death in particular stood out for me – that of Congressman John Lewis.  I think back over his long life; from his childhood as the third of 10 children of sharecroppers, to his response to the call of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his growing involvement in the civil rights movement, to a lifetime of protest and speaking up for the oppressed and the marginalized. I can think of no one who embodied hope and faith more than John Lewis; hope for a future with justice for all, and faith that ultimately this country would live into its promise of offering that justice.  His was a life of courage, conviction, faith, and hope.  Here on the eve of the election, we do well to remember his hope, and to carry it forward with us into the future.

“They are with us still.  The lives they lived hold us steady.”  (ibid.)

John Lewis is with us still, in his spoken and written words, and in the many memories of his actions.  Shortly before he died on July 17, he wrote one last essay to the American people, which included these words:

“When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.”  (John Lewis’ Last Words, July 30, 2020.) https://www.ajc.com/john-lewis/john-lewis-last-words/GGQ6MKJTIBHGHJ7RQXZVLQFHUA/)

 

John Lewis never stopped hoping.  His essay was published on the day of his funeral, so that even after he died he still offered us a path forward, a way to create the Beloved Community. Today, as we face our losses and honor our dead, let us also remember a man who lived with that much hope and that much conviction that our human lives make a difference. Let us carry his memory into this election week, brave, committed, and full of hope.

 

“We, the living, carry them with us:
we are their voices, their hands and their hearts.

We take them with us,
and with them choose the deeper path of living.” (ibid.)

My friends, in these fall days, as the days shorten and the leaves fall, may you pause and remember all those you miss, all those who inspired you, who showed you the way. In our remembering we keep them alive.  And may you face these days ahead with hope and courage, and may you choose the deeper path of living.  Keep memories, and hope alive.

Blessed Be.

Amen.