We Have a Soul at Times

  • Print
Details
Created on Sunday, 02 November 2008 00:00
Written by Gary E. Smith

{player 2008-11-02-11am-sermon.mp3}

It is Sunday morning, November 2nd.  I returned on Friday afternoon from a ten-day trip to Israel, an interfaith trip with eighteen clergy, mostly from the Lexington faith communities.  I am so grateful for the opportunity, for the hospitality of Temple Isaiah in Lexington and its rabbi Howard Jaffe, and for the opportunity to be a part of that opening line of so many jokes: “A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walked into a bar…” And yes, I am a wee bit jet lagged, but filled with good memories and not a few sermons.

It is Sunday, November 2nd, and we are two days away from an election, a date that will mark the ending of an election campaign that has stretched back nearly two years and left us all fatigued with its name calling and negativity.  Joe the Plumber didn’t even have a plumbing license!  What can we believe any more?  Please vote.  I’m not allowed to tell you how and I wouldn’t anyway and you wouldn’t listen anyway, but vote.  Please.  Voting is a spiritual act.  It is an embodiment of our hopes.

It is Sunday, November 2nd, and we have special guests here this morning.  Yes, you, if you are visiting for the first time today, but also a good number of my colleagues from around the continent of North America who are here in Concord this weekend, taking a close look at how large churches operate.  When I invited them, of course, I had imagined we would actually be able to host them, but they are here in this building, here in the warm embrace of our Jewish home.  Tonight they will meet at the Holy Family Roman Catholic Church.  Tomorrow they will be at Trinitarian Congregational Church.  Welcome.  They are here, and I am thinking this sermon better be good, jet lag or not.

It is Sunday, November 2nd, and it is All Souls’ Day somewhere, primarily in the Roman Catholic churches, I am told, though I think it is a big day for Universalists, too, now leaning on our last name.  We have celebrated All Saints’ Day before here at First Parish; really we have often celebrated some weird hybrid of Halloween (October 31), All Saints’ Day (November 1), and All Souls’ Day (November 2).  Mix that in with the fact that growing up in a Congregational Church, the last Sunday of October was Reformation Sunday, reminding our members that they were not Catholic.

Here at First Parish, we have remembered the dead during these days of late October and early November, remembered the dead, saints or not, in the belief that, in this season, the veil between the living and the dead is very thin.  We have built altars, our children have come forward to light candles and to name someone they have known who has died; we have almost always made something of the day, part of our First Parish liturgy, here between Divali and Thanksgiving.

It is Sunday, November 2nd, it is All Souls’ Day, and I have said I think this should be a big day for the Universalist side of our family.  Take a look at the names of our Unitarian Universalist congregations around the country, and more than a few are named All Souls’.  All Souls’ in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the largest congregation in our association, comes to mind; All Souls’ in New York City, the upper east side, long served by Forrest Church; and then there is All Souls’ Universalist Church in Oakland, Maine, now with thirty three members, once my maternal grandmother’s church and where I was first introduced to a religion that tipped away from the vertical (up to God) and more to the horizontal (the love of Jesus, a universal love).  Over the Oakland pulpit hung a banner with a likeness of the globe, all people, an embracing love of acceptance, a God of all; not “my God is better than your God,” but one God, or some here might say, “at most, one God.”  

Tulsa, New York City, Oakland, Maine, white collar and blue collar, highly educated and life lesson educated, saints and sinners, but all souls nevertheless, all with souls, all souls, no allowance for big houses and fast cars, all souls together.  And so, I remember my grandmother today, and, just in case, I sometimes say, just in case the veil is thin and they are near, I remember all who have died.  This most often happens to me in my dreams, I have told you this.  The dream of this same grandmother, her face, her blue eyes; “it’s all magic, Gary,” she said once to me in a dream, and then the light of her face grew and disappeared, and I awoke.  

“No matter how prosaic, practical and ploddingly unimaginative we may be,” Frederick Buechner says, “we have dreams like everybody else.  All of us do.  In them even the most down-to-earth and pedestrian of us leave earth behind and go flying, not walking, through the air like pelicans.  Even the most respectable go strolling along crowded pavements naked as truth.  Even the confirmed disbelievers in an afterlife hold converse with the dead just as the most dyed-in-the-wool debunkers of the supernatural have adventures to make (our) hair stand on end.”  

I dream sometimes of my parents.  I often dream of parishioners here, those who have died, and I know in my dream they have died, and I scramble to ask how they are.  Lucille Needham: soon after she died, I saw her in a bright red dress, and she looked radiant.  Peter Harwood, years ago, in the days after he died, I dreamed I received an envelope from him and I frantically went right to the return address to see where he was!  He was in Maine, of course!

What do we mean when we say “soul”?  Count the number of people in this room, and there are that many answers.  But don’t plan on me today to parse the word.  It is middle English, it dates before the 12th Century.  The Greeks had plenty to say about the soul: Plato and Aristotle and all the rest; my undergraduate major in philosophy was filled with this discussion.  If the topic interests you, there is plenty to Google, there are blogs on the topic, oh my.  I find myself in the scholastic tradition, there with Aquinas, in believing that body and soul together make me who I am, make you who you are, the “soul” or “spirit” being that which makes my body alive, the essence of which keeps me alive after I die.

“Spirit of Life, come unto me,” we sing, we pray.  Buechner says that the word “spirit” came from the word “breath,” “the aliveness and power of your life,” he says.  What are the idioms we hear?  “To bare one’s soul,” “to keep body and soul together,” “to have a kindred spirit,” these all suggest an animation, more than going through the motions.

This is what the reading suggests, too, the poem Angela read, by Wislawa Symborska.  “We have a soul at times,” she says, “sometimes… in childhood’s fears and raptures… sometimes only in astonishment that we are old… Joy and sorrow aren’t two different feelings for it.  It attends us only when the two are joined.”  “We have a soul at times,” she says, and I remember Carolyn McDade again, “Spirit of Life, come unto me,” and it is just now that I realize the soul, the spirit, the Spirit of Life, is not with me all the time.  “Come unto me,” she says, which is to say it is not always with me, not always with you.

“The only thing of value is the active soul,” Emerson said.  What keeps it inactive, what keeps it away, the poet wonders?  “Uphill tasks, like moving furniture, or lifting luggage, or going miles in shoes that pinch… or whenever meat needs chopping or forms have to be filled… It doesn’t like seeing us in crowds… hustling for a dubious advantage… creaky machinations.”   What brings it close?  “It prefers silence,” she says.  “We can count on it when we’re sure of nothing and curious about everything… It favors clocks with pendulums and mirrors…(things that) keep on working when no one is looking.”  It is just now I realize that my soul, the Spirit of Life, is not with me always, that I am called upon to be mindful and silent and curious and humble; I am called upon to avoid self-centeredness, that I might know that there are things that keep on working when I am not looking.

“I think continually of those who were truly great,” writes Stephen Spender, “who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history through corridors of light where the hours are suns, endless and singing.”  It is Sunday, November 2nd, All Souls’ Day.  Why not remember the dead?  Why not remember “the names of those who in their lives fought for life, who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.”

We remember today, in our speaking and in our silence, in our singing and in our praying, we remember the dead, who are as close as the flash of a memory, some handwriting, the ring of the telephone, a photograph, a dream.  We remember the famous and the forgotten, the named and the nameless.  Death is a great democracy, and lest the turmoil of the economic markets be nothing but distress and despair, the threat to our material possessions reminds us of how much more we are. “Spirit of Life, come unto me,” we sing, we pray.  COME UNTO ME.  It is Sunday, November 2nd; it is All Souls’ Day, a day to remember the souls of all those who have died, a day to call to mind our own soul, too.  

Max Gaebler wrote this beautiful piece many years ago.  

“In this season of the year’s dying, when we turn our thoughts to the remembering of our own dead, we are all of us the representatives of that all-embracing love which encompasses our human ways. In this feast of All Souls there is at the very center a great democracy, which leaves none out. We call first to mind our own dead, those whom we have loved and lost, but who still live in the twin immensities of our own hearts, our Love and our Memory. 

“But we reach out to others as well, to all whose names live within our memories, whose lives formed the world of our childhood and who have preceded us on life’s last journey. Finally we welcome into our loving remembrance those countless men and women and little children who have walked the earth and breathed its air, who have enjoyed the gift of life and known its anxieties, all on every continent and in every time whose individuality has like that of the builders of Stonehenge — long since disappeared, gathered up in the vast treasury of human life upon this planet.

“For all — all have their places on the silent roll of the dead. From this our celebration of All Souls let none be excluded, none forgotten. For every death is in truth a death in the family, in our family, in the great human family in which we are all irrevocably bound up with one another.

“Death in this past year has taken many whose faces still rejoice our memory’s eye, who live still through us who loved them, has bound them indeed more closely to us. So has it always been in every year. So will it be next year and in the next — 'till finally it visits us too.

“But life itself will remain. As we reflect, in these days of the year’s dying, on our own beloved dead, so will others remember us in days to come, on to the last days of humankind upon the earth. And even when memory ceases, the substance of our living will still remain, an ineradicable part of what has happened in this corner of the Milky Way.”

A Few Words on the Soul

by Wislawa Szymborska

translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.