By: Reverend Richard Beal
The changing colors of the leaves, beautiful as they are, are the herald's of the leave's death. It's not accidental that All Soul's and the Day of the Dead, which we'll observe next week, are set in the autumn. These holidays were preceded by more ancient pagan linkages of autumn and dying, a time called by the ancient Celts Samhain.
Most of paganism had no concept of the kind of afterlife as we have come to be familiar with. There were Valhallas and Elysian Fields, but they were only for heroes and the beautiful people to whom the gods were attracted. There was no heaven or hell for ordinary people, the shepherds, goatherds, peasants and slaves whose lives did not leave them beautiful for long. There was only a grey shadowland in which the dead existed but did not live. Some pagan thought linked death witha kind of resurrection. Not the resurrection of an individual personality, but a resurrection into life being itself, being in potentially many billions of forms. The dead, like the decayed leaves, would feed the roots of a flower, a bush ora tree. The flower would then byeaten by a grazing herbivore and then passed on to a running stream ... which would pool in some wetland, pond, or lake ... to be absorbed into the body of a fish or mollusk, which in turn would be fed by an eagle to it's young. And on and on through other forms and kinds of being, but always part of the great harmony of life and death and being, the great cycle of being Itself.
The Samhain and Day of the Dead create a familiarity with the Dead and with Death, which much of Protestant culture has found frightening rather than reassuring. Americans, raised in an Anglo dominated world view tend to be uncomfortable with death, and psychologically to deny it, until it too suddenly presents itself, along with the feeling of helplessness that comes from its having remained too much a mystery, too separate from life rather than a part of it. But cultures with some form of a day of the dead which teach them to see death as one part of life, as something always present and familiar are not uncomfortable with death. They miss those who die as much as anyone else, they grieve, they mourn, they are distraught. But they are not left as alone as many of us feel we are when we are not surrounded by a community that knows death and the reactions and feelings which accompany it.
There is a poem by Robinson Jeffers that I frequently read at memorial and funeral services because, especially for those who have not yet made up their hearts and minds as to what they do believe about death, it can be a comfort as much by what it doesn't say as for what it does. I quote:
I am not dead, I have only become inhuman;
That is to say,
Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities,
But not as a [person]
Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete
Stripping for the race.
The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer of certain fictions
Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain and expand with pleasure;
Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope:
That's gone, it is true:
...But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free.
I admired the beauty while I was human. Now I am part of the beauty.
I wander in the air, Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean;
Touch you and Asia
At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises
And the glow of this grass.
I leave my ashes to the earth
For a love token.
This poem is for me as much about autumn as it is about death, or whoever's ashes were lying beneath the gravestone this epitaph would be carved on. Like autumn, the person is not dead, only in a state of transformation. The particulars of autumn, the fallen leaves and nuts, the preparation for winter as the nuts and seeds and grains are stored away ... these are like the particulars of the person's life, such things as the fictions that make us contract with pain and expand with pleasure. Both the person and the season are absorbed into something far vaster than the immediate life they've had. They wander in the air being mostly gas and water, flow in the ocean, have a hand in the sunrises. A different part, but still a part of the whole great universe of Being Itself.
Autumn is beautiful, sometimes when the light is right, incredibly, overwhelmingly beautiful. All the colors of nature are to be found in the palette of the season. And the process of transformation autumn is a part of - life to death to life again - is beautiful. So is the transformation of the human body and spirit into a return to a universal nature which will craft it again and again as long as the universe exists, galaxies coalesce into birth, and stars explode.
It's because of this form nature's immortality that I find Autumn calming and restful as well beautiful, a reassurance of the existence of the only kind of immortality I feel I need. I pray it affects you in some such way as well.
There are many very earthy explanations of the cycle of the seasons, each one becoming what follows it in a great natural and astronomical procession that to us, short-lived as we are, seems endless, eternal. But what speaks to me as loudly and persuasively as the beauty of the autumn, is the philosophical, and theological implications of these cycles in the interdependent web of which we are a part. For if this web of which we are a part is cycling, then we are cycling also, cycling with it. And thus there is no "final rest” but the far greater privilege of being part of a continuing self-creation.
So may it be. Blessed be. Amen.