Chalice Reflection & Fear and Spirit

Chalice Reflection
Joan Kovach
October 26, 2008

Good morning!

Well, Friday is Halloween. Saturday is All Saints’ Day. And in the Catholic tradition, Sunday is for the rest of us who don’t reach the status of saints, All Souls’ Day.

Our Circle Ministry groups ponder fear. Jan’s sermon today is on fear and spirit. And our children wonder about what is scary and what is not.

So, what is this about, this juxtaposition of things scary and considering those of us who have already died?

As I prepare the house and yard for trick or treaters, I’m reminded of a time about 15 years ago when I fashioned a grim reaper from black plastic trash bags and propped him on the fence along my driveway. I felt terrible when a friend, very recently widowed, pulled in my driveway, greeted by this dark apparition.

Now that I’ve suffered some deaths in my own family, I think the grim reaper probably went unseen by her. When somebody you love dies, it isn’t about fear, but about the huge loss, the void of their absence.

Again I wonder about this: things scary and death. What’s the connection?

I honestly don’t know. And I think it’s some not knowing that is an essential element of our fear. And then I think, not knowing is also what allows us to experience awe and wonder, even surprise and delight.

When our group spoke about fear, it was fear of death or harm to our loved ones and ourselves that came up. Yet Annie Lamott calls death just “a major change of address.” An unknown, but not that scary.

I light the chalice today, our day of acknowledging spirits and fears, in the hopes that when we need it, we will all have the courage we need to explore the unknown, to face the scary, and to travel through fear to get to awe.

“Fear and Spirit”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
October 26, 2008

To nurture the spark of your precious life—
we hold you in our love as you go—

we sang just moments ago to our children, garbed in costumes enchanting, endearing and downright scary. What is it about the delight our youngsters take in donning different identities, REALLY different identities? Some fancy themselves fairy princesses; others aspire to be high-tech heroes. And there are always a few who opt to masquerade as villains and vampires so chilling that they’ll be sure to scare all the “little kids” half to death and maybe even send a chill down the spines of some of the “big kids” like us.

Halloween is a time when fear and spirit walk hand in hand, propelled by whimsy, imagination, and a fascination with fright! I became acutely attuned to this many years ago during my seminary field education at a church in New York City’s East Village. Part of my portfolio was teaching a 4th grade class. Sunday after Sunday these 11-year-olds resisted with amazing determination whatever conventional curriculum was on my agenda and for weeks upon end took up the topic of monsters. Were monsters real? Did ghosts really prowl about the churchyard just outside, that churchyard that served as a deceptive lid for what can only be described as catacombs? Beneath this churchyard, where these same 11-year-olds romped and ran during Sunday morning coffee hour, sprawled a labyrinthine cemetery where Peter Cooper himself was buried. It was a landmark graveyard and part and parcel of this historic church.

Perhaps through what Carl Jung termed the “collective unconscious” these children and our own pick up on the dual qualities of the demonic, death scary and death benign. They don’t run from their shadow side. They prepare or purchase costumes to lift their shadow side into the light of day and the amber lights of Halloween night. Our young put their monstrous dimensions on parade, processing down the aisles of this Meeting House, prancing about town and boldly knocking on doors with even bolder, “Trick or Treat’s!” This year on Halloween night, our First Parish children and youngsters from our wider community will grace our own Trueblood Hall, transformed into a Haunted House. Count this morning as a dress rehearsal!

What a peculiar time it is, this series of spirit days known as Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day. Light grows less in this part of the planet; we might say “light dies.” We can thank the Irish for the pagan harvest festival that gave rise to Halloween. Called Samhain—“Sowin” or “Sa-ven”—it means summer’s end. It marks the transition between the season of growth and the season of decay, the season of lush greens and vibrant pastels and the season of stark whites and somber greys. It’s exactly the right time for something to slip through a crack dividing those seasonal archetypes of life and death. Up through this crack come the dead, time for a quick visit.

Suspend your rationality; suspend your disbeliefs. Those Celts knew what was good for them. They honored their long-gone visitors with a festival and built huge bonfires to keep any evil spirits at a distance. The tradition continues with children carving grimaced smiles into vegetables like turnips and pumpkins and dressing up in the likes of what we witnessed this morning to keep the scarier spirits at bay. Children learn from their elders the difference between scary and scarier and as children will, opt for scarier!

Halloween is actually All Hallows’ Even, the evening before All Hallows’ Day, sometimes called All Saints’ Day. First established by the 7th century Pope Boniface IV as a festival honoring the Virgin Mary and all Christian martyrs, it was moved a century later to November 1 so that Pope Gregory III might tap its fierce mysteries for the dedication of All Saints Chapel in Rome. An even later pope made November 1 the standard for celebrating All Saints’ Day throughout Christendom. A crescendo of possibility reaches into All Souls’ Day. Celebrated on November 2, the legend spread that living souls can intercede for the dead souls stuck in that worrisome waiting room known as purgatory and help them on to Heaven.

A crack in time, a slant of light separating the seasons, the human obsession with that ultimate uncertainty called death, the human penchant for taking all possible precautions to pave the way for those already on the other side and our own inevitable journey in that direction! ‘tis best to make friends with villains and vampires, ghosts and goblins!

Like jack-o-lanterns carved from turnips and pumpkins, like costumed children dancing through the streets, knocking on doors, striking bargains with neighbors willing to play along, we play along and retreat a few degrees into our own pagan origins. I do not use “pagan” pejoratively but rather to call up the beliefs and rituals that have risen from people past and present living attuned to the cycles of nature.

Like a haunted house in Trueblood Hall, like munchkin projections of our own restless spirits processing costumed down the aisle of this Meeting House, we do what we can to make our peace with fear and spirit. We do what we can—mindfully, imaginatively, whimsically, and yes religiously—to keep hope alive through these festivals of seasonal transition bound in our deep knowledge that we are mortal creatures. We do what we can.

We even build immense cathedrals with plumbing devices fashioned of stone-hewn visages known as gargoyles. Gargoyles, fantastical in appearance, hold form and function. Crafted with open mouths, they serve as downspouts for rainwater to run down from and out from the sanctum that is the cathedral itself. And they multi-task. While protecting cathedral walls from the sure and steady erosion of rainwater, their demonic faces scare away “real demons,” as real as our religious imaginations can muster.

While we hold our own little goblins in our love “as they go, as they go,” we might also pay tribute to the vigilance of the macabre stone-souls known as gargoyles. Both are scary—our kids and our gargoyles. Neither is terrifying. Fear and spirit conspire in wondrous ways amid this seasonal transition from light to dark, from nature’s vibrancy to nature’s rest.

What strikes me in the cadences of Dav Pilkey’s “god bless the gargoyles” is the heroic quality of the scary, the almost martyr-like quality of these intentionally frightful faces leaning sentinel like on the ledges of cathedrals and even my own alma mater seminary! We can all use an angel or two, and gargoyles are no exception.

…now, angels have ways of making things right,
so they stayed with the gargoyles all through the night,
patting their heads and wiping their tears
and whispering life into gargoyle ears.

And soon all the gargoyles did magical things:
they gurgled and coughed and shook out their wings.
then together the angels and gargoyles took flight,
and they soared through the clouds on a blustery night.
and while over pastures and hills they were winging,
the voices of angels were radiantly singing
music of healing and songs of rebirth
to all of the creatures in all of the earth:

Fear and spirit wing their way across the earth issuing blessing upon blessing:

…god bless each soul that is tortured and taunted,
god bless all creatures alone and unwanted.

And the gargoyles beheld wherever they roamed
that the souls of the lost weren't really alone.
each one had an angel, each one was protected,
and each one was cherished and loved and respected.

Sounds like one of those principles we spout as fluidly as any Notre Dame gargoyle spouts rainwater! “Each one was cherished and loved and respected!”

Yes, it’s fantasy, yes it’s imagination, yes it’s an appeal that rises up in each of us from our childhood recognition that fear and spirit walk hand in hand. The shadow that accompanies each of us becomes far less scary when the angels of our higher nature befriend it.

Amid this time of fear, may we turn to that which scares us most and find there a partnership of blessing. It takes trust, layered reflection, and that transcendent state that comes when fear and spirit at long last merge—awe!

Let us issue blessings with reckless abandon upon our little ghosts and goblins. Let us forge a partnership of spirited imagination with what haunts us most fiercely. Let us bless the possibility that we might remember what it was like to be eight or nine or ten or eleven and relish a night when we morph into forms designed to inspire fear and yes, candy. I wish us each the imagination, the daring, and the love to rise into the arc of our own lives with a new blessing, buoyed by this season of blessings beyond reason. Amen.


Sources:

Dav Pilkey, god bless the gargoyles, Harcourt Brace, 1996.

Kathleen Tracy, words and music, As You Go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Souls_Day