We're approaching the point when the veil is thinnest between the worlds--Samhain, a.k.a. All Hallow's Eve, a.k.a. Hallowe'en; then All Saints's Day, and All Soul's Day, the Day of the Dead, Dia de Muertos, on November 2. When we can accept the invitation to look and listen for the ongoing presence in our lives of those who've passed over. When we can choose to reflect on the inevitability of our own eventual passing over, a reflection which, if we do it well, can open us to living our one wild and precious life more fully in the here and now.
A friend and I talked about all this a long while ago, when with the sometimes surprising directness I value in our conversations, she asked, "So, who are your saints?"
My grandmother, I told her without much hesitation. A woman whose mythical reputation lives on among her descendants, nearly fifty years after her death. A woman who carried a willow sapling over her shoulder the day she and her family moved to a new house a century ago, because it was the most important thing she could imagine taking with her. A woman who nursed fallen fledglings to maturity, and was given to standing on the doorstep laughing up into a livid sky filled with lightning and the crash of thunder in the midst of Indiana's prodigious thunderstorms, before she went back to cooking for a family of nine, plus any human strays who happened to show up.
And then, without much more hesitation, Matthew Shepard.
The ashes of the twenty-one-year-old gay man who was abducted, brutally beaten, and left to die tied to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming in 1998, were laid to rest in Washington's National Cathedral three years ago on September 26 in a ceremony that was lifestreamed on YouTube. Gene Robinson, the now-retired Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, who as an out gay man had to wear a bullet-proof vest to his consecration in 2003, gave the homily. (It starts at 1:13 of the very long recording of the full service.)
To watch the online recording of that ceremony is to be reminded that we don't so much live our lives, which then end, as that Life lives us--flowing around us, into us, through us, out of us to others, and back again.
"If you close your eyes and open your hearts, Matt is right here," Robinson told the congregants.
"I'm here partly to celebrate [Matthew's parents] Judy and Dennis Shepard," he later went on. "They could have so easily gone home and grieved privately. But by the grace of God they decided they were going to turn this horrendous event into something good....They could have just grieved privately, but they shared Matthew with us. And today, they are sharing Matthew with us one last time."
The remembrance of the Day of the Dead, like the remembrance of Christian Holy Communion--anamnesis in Greek--is the living experience that Life lives us, not the other way around. "It's to recall a past event so dramatically that you bring it into the present moment, and it becomes your event, not just stuff in the past," Robinson continued. "That's the kind of remembering I pray for today--transforming remembering."
The illusion that we're separate, that we can save our own lives, leads to our losing them sooner or later, continuously by slow degrees and inevitably at the end. The realization that our life is so much bigger than what goes on inside this skin is what has the power to save us: the understanding, as Thich Nhat Hanh observed, that we have to die countless times every day in order to let the present moment come into existence; the understanding, as therapist Hedi Scheiffer puts it, that we have to cross the bridge to the world of the other in order to find new life in the encounter.
Do you have practices by which you open yourself to this truth? What are they? And who comes to you as a result--from across great distances, from out of the past, across even the barrier of death?
My grandmother's life flows into mine, blessing me and sustaining me, as surely as it did when I stood by her side at the age of four. Matthew's life flows into mine, though we never met, and though he died fifteen hundred miles away. Hate crime legislation signed into law in 2007 bears his name. The suffering with which his life as an individual ended has turned into an outpouring of love and affirmation touching tens of thousands.The living and the dead live on together.
