Gratitude for Mystery

October 27, 2024 —Rev. Rita Capezzi

“Today the peace of autumn pervades the world, . . . In every speck of dust, in every part of [our own bodies], in the visible and invisible worlds, in the planet, the sun, and the stars, the joyous dance of the atoms through endless time.” Today, we mark the beginning of the “thinning” season, Samhain, the end of summer. The veil between the material and spiritual worlds is at its thinnest, they say, on October 31, so it is a time to connect with and honor the dead. Samhain signals the passage into the darker half of the year, and thus it is a celebration of the fallow time of rest in darkness, seeds gathering strength and the labor of the time of light stored to sustain us through the winter. In this darker time of the year, we celebrate our ancestors and the realms of Spirits into which they have passed. We celebrate, strange as this may sound, death.

I attended last night a gala fundraiser for a small opera company my daughter Helen sings with, the Buffalo church alight with candles and then plunged into sudden darkness, with costumes and singing, with the smells of food preparation coming from the kitchen behind the sanctuary. It was all very fun, and the singers were great. And every piece they sang—from operas by Puccini and Verdi and Bellini and Donizetti—was fully infused with two things, Love and Death. Every. Single. Piece.

“How can one speak of life without death, to which all things are certain to return?” And “How can one speak of death without life? Death is like a desert until rain falls, then, all the living things sprout miraculously from the rocks and sand.” “Neither can exist without the other: [all creation] wears both those two masks.”

Ancient peoples, from every part of the world, understood and embraced this reality. Our traditions—guising and mumming, pumpkins and apples, tricks and treats, dry leaves blowing messages to our departed loved ones, bonfires, bonefires originally, to create ash from bones to fertilize the fallow fields, did you know that?—these doings all emerge from our Celtic backgrounds.

In modernity, we struggle more with it, in part because modern science cures disease and corrects the body’s failings and so we live longer. But in part also because of cultural shifts in values, where consumption and accumulation enable us to fall asleep to the realities of death, move us to fear of death, providing us fewer and fewer resources for living with death.

The death of loved ones, the pain and sorrow we feel is, of course, enormous and real and worthy of our attention. And community rituals are what help us as individuals to bear this hurt of being alive. Next week, we will worship by actively mourning in community. Today, we don our costumes and we laugh. We play. We mock death because we are lively and alive today. But we do let death in today—dressed as spirits or monsters to let death know we understand its changed state. And dressed to fool Death into thinking we are in league with its aims. Also dressed as favorite characters and superheroes to fool death so it doesn’t come for us. Guised or disguised as ourselves, an extra layer of protection, of lively life, another day to celebrate, no matter what challenges and problems weigh us down—for this day, for this hour, here together, we are glad and grateful. We will play, we will feast, we will, later, recall our history and plan for our future. All in and as community.

All our lives, and all of life, exist as and in “a riddle and a mystery,” regardless how well we can describe the mechanisms of life and reality, the why and the significance of it remain ours to define. And so “We clasp the hands of those that go before us, and the hands of those who come after us. We enter the little circle of each other’s arms and the larger circle of lovers . . . whose hands are joined in a dance to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.”

May we celebrate our fragmentary, fragile, meaningful reality with reverence and awe through these words from the Rev. Lyn Cox:

“Spirit of Life,
Ground of our being, Root of unified mystery, growing into myriad branches of expression,
Bring us together now.
Bring us close to the earth, ear to the whispering grass, quietly, attentively, waiting with slow
breaths,
Listening for the very stones to cry out with their rocky stories of tectonic plates meeting and
parting meeting, their mineral memories of Hadean days, molten rocks flowing and joining their
ancient legends of stars born out of the collapse of other stars.

Help us to re-member. Help us to piece together our one-ness with matter, our one-ness that
matters.
With one more deep breath, may we rise, star-stuff walking and rolling across the surface of an
impossible blue-green planet.
May we join together to heal what is divided. May we find wholeness within, without, among,
between. Eternal Source, Seed of the Universe, help us to grow peace.”

Spirit of the season, spirit of life, spirit moving us in unison together. Seeking meaning in uncertain days, flame of hope as our guide. May we live and love, and when the time comes die, in vital, loving community. May it ever be so.

Rev. Rita Capezzi