Both Sides Now:  On the Border of Life and Death

A Sermon by

Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 1 November 2009

All morning long, I’ve been asking the children of the church what they dressed up as last night, who they went as for Halloween.  But I know some of the adults probably dressed up and went out to a Halloween part last night.  Raise your hand if you were at a Halloween party.  All right, very good, very good.  I was on the Metro last night and it’s really fun to be on the Metro on Halloween night, looking at everyone in their costumes.  There was this one guy across the subway car who had a big wig on with his hair standing up and then he had his tie done with a wire so that it looked like his tie was blowing back in the wind.  And I was with some friends and I said, “Hey, look at that guy with the tie and the hair . . .”  And the guy gets up out of his seat and he comes walking toward me and I thought to myself  “I hope I didn’t offend him by pointing him out.”  And he comes up to me and he puts out his hand and he says, “Hi Reverend Hardies, I’m a member of All Souls.”  [Laughter]  So I know some of you were out last night.

Our reading this morning is from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.  It’s one of his sonnets written to the Greek mythological figure, Orpheus.  I want to talk about Orpheus later in the sermon, but for now it’s important to know that Orpheus in Greek mythology is one of the few characters who actually is able to cross over the border from life into death, and then back again, to live to tell about it.  So this is Rilke’s sonnet to Orpheus.

Only the man who has raised his strings among the dark ghosts also

     can feel his way toward the endless praise.

Only he who has eaten poppy with the dead from their poppy

     will never lose even his most delicate sound.

Even though images in the pool seem so blurry,

     grasp the main thing.

Only in the double kingdom,

     there alone will voices become undying and tender.

Every year on All Souls Day I’m reminded of something that the great Unitarian minister and transcendentalist, James Freeman Clark, once said about the sermon.  The sermon, this particular form of communication that I am now engaged in with you.  Clark said “A sermon is an appeal from a dying man to dying men and women,” which is a sobering thought.  “An appeal from a dying man to dying men and women.” 

Now I think what he was trying to get at with this phrase was that we need to see ourselves as we truly are, which is to say mortal.  And that a sermon, or for that matter any attempt to illuminate and make meaning of life must always take into account the fundamental reality of our mortality.  We can’t speak truth about life unless we speak of it in the context of death.  And therefore, every sermon is an appeal from a dying man or woman to dying men and women.

Every year All Souls Day affords us the opportunity to remember the dead and to remember also that one day we will join them, that one day people will sit in this very sanctuary or perhaps another, and call out our names.  Our names on the role of the dead.  “Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name.”

So what does this mean for us?  If the true meaning and purpose of life are discovered only on the border of life and death, at the intersection of the two, then what is the lesson of this border?  Now, I use the word “border” intentionally here because at All Souls we talk a lot about what it means to be a “border” person.  A border person is someone who is comfortable living on the border, la frontera, where different nations, people of different races or cultures or creeds bump up against one another, where they meet and mingle.  You know, when we think of the border we often think of the border between nations.  Reverend Greene is taking a bunch of folks from All Souls this very week to the border between Mexico and the United States to study the peril and the promise of that location.

But if we’re honest about it, the border is everywhere.  In a diverse church like All Souls, this is a border place.  A multicultural neighborhood like Columbia Heights is a border place.  The whole world, ever shrinking, ever more dependent and interconnected is a border place.  And we need to be border people, people comfortable negotiating difference and building relationship and discovering new and creative life on this place called the border.  We need to be border people.

Just last week, I met a really unique and special border person, a guy named Del McFadden.  Del works here in Columbia Heights and he’s seen some of the borders in Columbia Heights that we don’t see because his job is to broker truces between the different gangs of this neighborhood.  He sees borders that we don’t even see.  He knows, for instance, that for some people to cross from one side of 16^th Street to the other is to take one’s life in one’s hands, to walk from one end of the 1400 block of Girard Street to the other end of that block is to take one’s life in one’s hands for certain people.  Del’s a border person; he brings people together across those fault lines.  We got to know Del because when things go bad, we’re the place he comes for money and space for a memorial service.  But we’re also trying to work with him to prevent those memorial services from happening.  Border people.

At this point, some of you may be saying, “Okay now Rob, you started off this sermon talking about death and dying and now you’re over here talking about border people and being bridge builders, and what’s the connection between the two?”    For me the connection is this:  In order to be the kind of person who is comfortable negotiating the border spaces of our world, we must first be comfortable with the borders that run down the centers of our very beings.  You know, our complicated and multiple identities.  All those contradictions in our soul, our capacity for both good and for evil.  And the must fundamental fault line that runs through our soul is this border between life and death, is our mortality.  What I’m trying to say to us this morning is that unless and until we really grapple with and come to terms with our mortality, we will be less able to negotiate the other kinds of borders that we encounter in our lives.

So let’s see if we can figure out a little bit better how this works exactly.  And to do that I’d like to lift up this story of the Greek mythological figure, Orpheus.  As I said before, he is a unique character; he’s one of the few folks who actually gets to go back and forth between life and death.  Let me tell you a little bit about Orpheus.  Orpheus was kind of the pied piper of ancient Greece.  He was a poet and a musician and he used to travel the countryside with his lyre, charming birds and fishes and wild beasts.  It’s said that his words could coax the trees and the rocks to dance and that his music could even divert the course of rivers and streams.  He was an ancient Saint Francis.

But there was a dark side to Orpheus’ story as well.  One day, his fiancé, the beautiful nymph Eurydice, steps on a serpent and dies from its bite.  Bereft, Orpheus descends into the Underworld, into the land of the dead, and he pleads with Hades, the lord of the Underworld to bring Eurydice back to life.  He plays for Hades a song on his lyre that was so beautiful, the story says, that Hades’ heart was moved and, for the first time ever, he agrees to release Eurydice from the underworld, but on one condition, that on their ascent back up to the land of the living Orpheus not look at Eurydice.  And so up and up they climb, Orpheus leading his bride behind him, holding hands, careful not to look at her.  But as they approach the gates of Hades and the light from the world begins to penetrate the darkness, Orpheus cannot help himself and he turns and looks at Eurydice.  And she’s lost to him forever. 

So Orpheus has crossed back and forth across the border of life and death.  And what is his message to us from that border?  I want to suggest that one lesson that he brings back from that border, and it is a poignant one, is that even our love cannot save those whom we love from the irrevocable sentence of death.  A death sentence is final.  But it’s also interesting, I think, that the one figure who has seen life and death so intimately is also the figure in Greek mythology who is known as the one who praises and celebrates this life more than any other character, who praises with his poetry and with his music.  And our poet this morning, Rainer Rilke, believed that these two things were linked, that Orpheus’ brush with death is what causes him to be able to praise this world so much.  Listen again to the words of the poem:

“Only the man who has raised his strings among the dark ghosts also can feel his way toward the endless praise. Only in the double kingdom,” – on the border if you will – “there alone will voices become undying and tender.”

Only one who has confronted death, honestly and forthrightly, can truly appreciate how precious life is and then celebrate this precious life with prayer and thanksgiving and praise.  That is the lesson of Orpheus.  Orpheus has a new perspective, a spiritual maturity that gives him a deeper appreciation of the gift of life.  And his close brush with Hades also gives him the knowledge that as human beings our common mortality unites us far more than any early difference can divide us.  He has seen us for who we truly are and he knows that all the differences that we pretend divide us on this earth really pale in comparison.

I think that’s what makes Orpheus a border person in the mythological story, the person who is able to go to the birds and the bees and the beasts and the fishes and to talk to them and commune with them.  Orpheus is a border person. 

And I think the same is true for us.  I think that unless and until we do the spiritual work, the difficult spiritual work of coming to terms with our own mortality, unless we recognize that vulnerability, unless we somehow become comfortable with that border space and fear it less, then any other border that we go into in our lives we will not be able to negotiate that either.  Because our vulnerability then will make us defensive, will make us protect ourselves and put up walls, which happens so often in the border spaces of our lives.

Unless and until we grapple with the reality of our own mortality, we will believe the truth that all these differences we see in this world really amount to something, instead of realizing the truth, that we are part of one human family, united by our mortality.  So it’s in the spiritual maturity of grappling with our own mortality that we develop the capacity, the largeness of spirit, to be a border person in the world.

I want to close with one final story that I think sums up what I’m trying to say this morning.  It’s a story told by a colleague of mine, the Reverend Carl Scovel who, for many years, was the pastor of King’s Chapel in Boston.  Carl was famous because he always loved to visit church graveyards.  King’s Chapel has its own famous graveyard in Boston.  Some of you may have visited it on the “Freedom Tour” of Boston.  But he’d even go to church graveyards when he was on vacation.  Wherever he went, he tried to seek out the church graveyards and go to them.  I’m not sure Fodor’s or Lonely Planet is anytime soon going to publish a guide to the church graveyards of the world, but if you believe that the contemplation of death gives us a greater appreciation for life, then maybe you can understand his desire.

Anyway, one summer when he was travelling to the British Isles, Reverend Scovel visited a small, seaside church called Lady St. Mary’s in the coastal town of Wareham.  Listen to a story that he tells of that Sunday morning visit to the church graveyard.

“I arrived at Lady St. Mary’s long before the service began.  A bright blue sky above with fluffs of clouds here and there, the chimes ringing noisily from the church tower and the rows of quiet gravestones about me.  I had a strange presentiment of the resurrection amidst those clanging bells, a momentary fantasy of the earth beginning to churn and billow like the sea around me, the gravestones rocking first, then toppling and, from the earth, the dead emerged, not as they were in burial or in life, but clothed with light and shining with a radiance far beyond anything this world could offer.  It was a strange, brief fantasy, but one filled with joy and with the sense that all of us, not one soul missing, were bound for glory.  But that wasn’t the end of it. 

I had been reading the names from the stones, old Saxon and Norman names from the ancient families of Wareham, for this was, after all, a parish church.  Then I came to a newer section and saw the names of Wareham’s sons who had died in the first Great War and then the second.  Soldiers, sailors, airmen, firefighters.  And there, among the English dead, I found strange names from other land.  Otto Possega, Hans Funk, Konrad Koehler, Rudolf Keubler, Klaus Thiessen,  Wolfgang Christoph.  And written beneath the names, in German, not in English, “Ein Deutscher soldat.”  These were German airman who had been bombing Wareham and London, burning homes and blasting schools and wharves and hospitals and markets. 

The people of Wareham had fetched their bodies from the fields and from the sea and given the corpses of their destroyers a place in their own small, precious churchyard.  Perhaps they did this because they knew in a way far beyond articulation that God’s love comprehends us all.  Their Christian compassion or their English decency or both made my fantasy of the resurrection seem all the more ecstatic and surreal. 

And perhaps you see now why I find cemeteries to be places of peace and of blessing.”

Friends, hear then this appeal from a dying man to dying men and women:  In death all borders are erased and our souls return to that one soul from which we all have come.  This is death’s lesson, that what unites us is far greater than what divides us.  And the great challenge for us is not to wait until death is knocking on our own door to discover this, but rather, like Orpheus, to see both sides now.  And with that clearer vision to praise the world and to live into the promise of the great family of all souls.

Amen.