A Time to Remember: A Memorial Day Reflection
Sermon by Steve Edington
May 28, 2006
For the past two or three years here we've had a Sunday service, in either late October or early November, in which we observe and celebrate "The Day of the Dead" - a holiday that has its origins in Mexico and other parts of Central America. As I came to educate myself about this holiday, I found the juxtaposition of celebration and festivity on the one hand with a remembrance of persons who had died on the other, as a little odd. But my quick follow-on thought is that that is no more odd than the mixed bag our home grown in America Memorial Day weekend has become. We largely use it to herald the arrival of summer, and the onset of a time when we can maybe downshift just a bit the pace of our lives. The picnics and cookouts and the long week-end trips - particularly here in New England - are a way of finally, and really and truly, making the end of winter's grip on us for another year. It has a real kick-back, have fun, joie de vivre flavor to it.
But then it is also a time when we are supposed to remember and honor persons who have died. It's origins in this country are in the Civil War - or the post-Civil War era as our country attempted to heal from the wounds of that horrible conflict, by setting aside a day to honor the lives that were lost on both sides. And since one of the tragedies of the human condition is that we have yet to wage a war to end all wars, the holiday has continued as a time to honor those lives lost in the wars we have fought since then. Over the years the scope of the holiday has expanded it has become a day of remembrance of all of those who touched and blessed our lives, and who have now passed on.
So as I thought about how the Day of the Dead is observed, and how our Memorial Day observances have evolved into all they have now become, I could see that for all of the differences in how these two holidays are celebrated there is a common theme in their paring of festivity in life while also paying heed to the very fragile and transitory nature of life. Indeed, these two holidays are but two expressions of a larger and universal human theme and need - which is to both savor life and acknowledge death. Perhaps it's not so odd that the two come together in a single holiday.
My earliest memories of this weekend combine those two aspects, actually. When I was a kid the school calendar was such that Memorial Day signaled the end of the school year - for which there is no greater cause for rejoicing when you are of a certain age. Until I was in my early teens it also meant for me that I got to go to my grandfather's farm in southern Ohio for the summer. On that much anticipated Sunday my parents and my three younger sisters would drive from our home near Charleston, WV out to a very rural area of that State where my father had grown up for a combination party, family reunion of several families, and general feast that was held on the lawn of a little country Baptist church off the side of a dirt road. There we would be met by my grandfather, aunt, and uncles from Ohio who would, when the day was over, take me to their small farm. There, as the only kid on the place, I would be shamelessly spoiled for three months. My younger sisters had to go back to Charleston - something the oldest of those three sisters has not let me forget to this day.
But, in keeping with the dual nature of this holiday, at some point you had to take a break from the festivities on the church lawn and take the flowers you'd brought with you up to a hillside cemetery about a mile away to decorate the graves of your family members and say a little prayer over them. The day was not really done, and not properly observed, until you had done that.
Over the many years since those days I've noticed a slight shift in mood on my part when it comes to Memorial Day. It has become a little more pensive than it used to be - must be part of the aging process. I still have a good time; and I still have some of that child-like anticipation of the summer that I guess I've never lost. But maybe it has to do with seeing, now and then, someone roughly in my own age range pass away. I'll be doing a service for Clark Hills next Saturday. It will be, as his family wishes, at a home in Dunstable. Clark and Jo moved north quite a few years ago to open a Bed and Breakfast Inn up in the Lakes Region, which means many of you did not know him. But Clark was a very cheerful, upbeat kind of guy, and on the occasional times when he would speak up during Joys and Concerns, it would be to give a positive account of his ongoing struggle with cancer, both when he'd lose his hair and when it would grow back. And now it is time to take the full measure of his life.
I don't mean to get morbid about all this, and I trust you're not taking it that way. It's just that I now find my Memorial Day musings going more in the direction of how one does take the measure of a life - particularly if it happens to be yours, or more specifically, mine. I don't do much speculating on any kind of an after-life, because that's all it can ever be - speculation. Maybe we do have some sort of continuing existence beyond our life on earth in some form or other, although I doubt it involves the kind of individual consciousness we have during our earthly lives. But, with all due respect to some of my more orthodox believer friends and some family members, I do not believe that the full and final meaning of this life is to get into the next one - whatever that next one may be. It is not as I see it where, if anywhere, we go but rather what we leave that gives our lives their meaning and their fulfillment. Will other lives - be they many or be they but a few - feel more blessed, more strengthened, more hopeful, and more fulfilled because of how your life touched theirs? And will this earth and world, even if it's in the smallest of ways, be a more blessed and hopeful place, for our having spent some time here? It is, I believe, how we answer these questions over the course of our lives that give our lives their deepest meaning. And if the ways in which we answers those questions are also a part of some greater overarching Purpose or Meaning for Life Itself, then we are fulfilling that Purpose as well.
Having conducted the number of memorial services and funerals as I now have, I feel fortunate to have gained what I feel is a pretty good understanding of some of more common ways the measure of a life is taken, and of the marks of a full life. So for the remainder of my sermon for today I want to share some of what those measures are; and then I want to focus on the lives of two very fine members of this congregation who passed away over this past year and say a bit about what the were the marks of their lives.
I've spoken before on the topic of what kinds of things are most remembered in a person who has died, so I'll just briefly review it here. One thing I find striking, in preparing a Memorial Service with family and friends of the deceased, is how little attention is usually given to how a person earned their living or how much wealth they had - even though we devote a very substantial chunk of our lives to these endeavors. Their job or profession will be mentioned, and even affirmed. But it is the ways in which the person extended him or herself to others, whether on the job or in other settings, that gets the emphasis. It is how the person gave of him/herself to their family, friends, community, and religious community that is remembered far more than whatever they managed to acquire. Nobody's material worth has ever been belittled or demeaned, that I can remember, it just doesn't get top billing.
Closely related to this, it is the things you were most passionate about, and devoted to, that are best remembered. I recall doing a service for someone who had been instrumental in starting and promoting softball and tennis programs for children and young people here in Nashua, and the tournaments he'd gotten the city to host, and the teams he'd taken to out-of-town tournaments. This man's job was barely mentioned, but his passion for these sports was reounted at length. So, whatever you feel most passionate about, whether or not it has anything to do with your job, is going to show through; and it is one very significant way in which the measure of your life will be taken.
You will also be measured for the ways in which you made people laugh. I don't mean by that how good your jokes were; but for the joy you brought to people's lives, for how you lightened and lifted someone's spirits when they most needed it. You will also be measured for how "at home" you were with yourself - for how grounded you were, for how clear you were in your convictions, even as you allowed space for others of differing convictions than yours. How well you carried yourself with an inner confidence - not an inflated ego, but an inner confidence - is yet another often cited measure of a life.
You'll also be measured for how religious you were. This may sound a little strange, especially since I'm the minister in town who often gets called upon when a family wants a minister to officiate a service for a member who has passed away, and who - as the family often puts it - was "not very religious." But, they'll go on to say, we still want a minister to do his/her service. That's when the funeral director thinks, "Well, better call up the Unitarian Universalist guy."
So I get that call, and meet with the family. More often than not I'll hear about how the deceased person loved and savored life, savored living, respected the earth and its creatures, or cultivated a sense of awe and mystery and wonder at the Larger Life that surrounds us all; and I'll end up thinking (although I usually keep the thought to myself), "This person sounds pretty religious to me." Well, whether you care to call it religious or not, how well you embraced, loved, savored, and gave of yourself to life will be a very clear marker in taking the measure of your days.
With these kind of markers and measures in mind then, I'd like to turn our attention to two of our members whose lives can certainly be measured very well against them, and whom I know many of us still miss very much. They are Sheila Ferlan and Don Rowley.
We held a Service of Remembrance for Sheila back in early January following her death just before Christmas. I'm not going to replicate that service here other than to say that her ever cheerful nature was well remembered along with the smile she had for everyone no matter what her own feelings or situation was. We remembered her deep sense of devotion to her friends and relatives both nearby and in England. And we remembered her equally strong sense of love and devotion to her church, particularly the joy she took in hearing our choir sing.
The thing that has stayed with me the most over the months since Sheila's death, was the way in which she approached it, and how in concert it was with the way she lived her life. At first it looked like she was going to recover from a lung collapse, and then she had a severe relapse. At that point Sheila, in that very British matter-of-fact way of hers that undergirded her nearly always cheerful demeanor, stated two very matter-of-fact wishes: I do not wish to be treated for this lung collapse any longer; things will just have to take their course from here. And, the church can have the contents of my apartment to do with as it wishes. Then she just let it go. In a way quite consistent with the life she'd led, she knew who she was, she knew what she wanted, she knew how she wanted things to be done, and she didn't want to hear any differently. She had savored the life that had been hers to live, and she'd extended that life to so many others in ways we'll never fully know. Then she was ready to let it go. She felt there was no more worth savoring, and that she'd given all she had to give. I honor and bless her for the way in which she lived and for the manner in which she died.
Don Rowley lived just one floor below Sheila at the Hunt Community. In mid-March I invited him to come and be a part of the Friday night segment of the social justice workshop we were holding over the first weekend in April. This was the part where we did a time-line of our congregation's history of community outreach and social justice efforts. Since Don had been greatly instrumental in this kind of community outreach for nearly three decades I wanted him to be a part of the conversation. He agreed to come and was looking forward to it. Then he very suddenly passed away a few days before the workshop was held.
Most of you have seen, either in our May Newsletter or on our church's website, the very moving letter from Don's sons, Philip and Dana, explaining why they felt duty bound to honor their father's wish that no public memorial service for him be held. I know, from my conversations with them, that it was not an easy call for them to make; in fact it was one they agonized over. But they are at peace with the knowledge that they made the right call, and I respect their decision. As they said in their letter, they didn't always obey their father's wishes, but they wanted to this one last time. I also believe that Don would thank both them and me and all of us for respecting and honoring his wishes in the way that we have.
Don was also a fierce defender and devotee of the free pulpit - a freedom he exercised on this very spot with integrety and great thoughtfulness for 29 years. I have no doubt that he would regard it well within the free pulpit prerogative I now have if I were to offer a brief tribute to him as a part of my Memorial Day sermon in this year of his passing.
For all of his low-key, keep-in-the-background kinds of ways, Don also carried a steady pride within him. And I saw these two attributes of his come together back in May of 2000 when he was presented with the Nashua Charitable Foundation's Humanitarian Award for that year. John Sias delivered the citation for Don, recounting the many ways in which Don, in the course of his ministry here, greatly enhanced the quality of life and raised the level of social justice in Nashua. John spoke of Don's helping to found the Mental Health Committee which gave rise to our Community Council - and his serving a term as President of their Board. This was at a time when mental heath services were largely available only to those who could afford them. John recounted how Don organized the Nashua Family Planning Association to make birth control more widely available at a time when that issue was still quite controversial; and how he helped start the Nashua Fair Housing Practices Committee to advocate for available housing in our community across racial lines when that too was a controversial matter. And on and on it went - from Don's efforts on behalf of Harbor Homes and Big Brother/Big Sister and the Community Hospice and the Adult Leaning Center. Each citation and notation did call out to be mentioned because of Don's devotion to it.
Then Don got his chance to speak. Completely in character, the first words out of his mouth were: "I'm not sure I'm deserving of this award..." But then he went on to say, "But I believe the generation I represent is..." And he took it from there. For all of his low-key and low demeanor ways, Don was proud, very rightly proud, of the service that he and all his fellow servicemen and women in uniform gave to this country in the Second World War. He was also proud of the ways in which so many of them, like him, came home to serve their communities, and to serve the greater good of responding to human need. For Don, and many of his fellow veterans, fighting for freedom and democracy - in a struggle that really was for freedom and democracy and justice - and then coming home to work on the still unfinished tasks of freedom and democracy and justice here in this country, were all a piece of the same cloth.
In later years - the late 60s and early 70s - it was Don's service in the Army and his risking of his life in the 103rd infantry in France and Germany, that gave his public opposition to the War in Vietnam all that much more depth and integrety and validity. For Don his stance was an expression of the very same patriotism and very same devotion to duty he'd shown over 20 years prior when he put on the uniform of his country and took up arms on its behalf.
For all of his public life beyond these walls and beyond this religious community, Don is most remembered for how he quietly and compassionately went about the work of ministry here with the congregation he loved. There are more stories of how his caring presence was experienced than can ever be told. His challenging and deeply thought-provoking (and sometimes just plan provoking) sermons still have their effect. He and I were close in our thinking in a number of ways, while our religious and spiritual orientation differed in others. Such is the beauty, I feel, of our UU ministry in that each minister is given the freedom to speak and live out the truth as she or he sees it, and each of our congregations are then challenged to respond to it.
In one of the first conversations he and I had as I began my ministry here, Don offered
me the only piece of advice I ever can remember him giving me. We were talking about how you make an impact, and how you exercise any kind of influence, on both the congregation you serve and the community in which your congregation is located. At one point Don said, "Well, it's a good idea to make sure you have some influence before you decide to throw it around." Good point. Don knew how to gather and accumulate his influence, and he didn't just throw it around. He knew how to use it where it would count the most, and he did just that for the near three decades he served this church and this community.
One more thing, on a very personal level, which I feel I need to say above all else I've said: Don was model par excellance of what it meant to graciously hand off a ministry to a successor minister. When it was time to let it go, he let it go. He knew that influence of his, to which I just spoke, would well outlast his called ministry with this church. But he was determined that such influence would not in any way hinder the ministry of whoever would come after him. It actually took a little convincing on my part to get him to accept the designation as our Minister Emeritus. He was very proud to be so honored; but he also wanted to be assured that honoring him in such a way would not be any kind of a stumbling block to me. I didn't see how it could - but I offered him that assurance nonetheless. That's just the kind of person, and minister, Don was.
There will come a day - we're not there yet, but there will come a day - when I, too, will hand off this ministry to another. When that time comes I could not have had a better example of how to do it with grace and honor than the example Don has given me. I can only hope that I measure up to his marker. On this Memorial Day weekend I bless and honor and give thanks for Don Rowley's life and memory.
And on this Memorial Day weekend, even as we celebrate the arrival of summer, let us also bless and honor and give thanks for all the lives that have touched and blessed our own, and who have now moved to another realm. The late Rev. Robert Zoerheide, in a reading I sometimes use in Memorial Services, has written, "Death is what happens between where we are and where the universe is." Our lives, that is to say, are part of a larger and greater and continuing life of the universe that contains and enfolds us all. In the little piece of time that we are given, within the timelessness of the universe itself, let us live out our little piece of time in a way that others will be deeply thankful for our having done so when we hand off our earthly and time-bound life.
Stephen Edington
May 28, 2006
