A sermon by the Rev. Daniel Schatz, delivered at BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Feb 6, 2005

Saying Goodbye

Reverend Daniel S. Schatz

BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

February 6, 2005

Dr. Zhivago, attending as a physician a young woman dying of cancer, turned priest and said to her, “Your soul will live on.  Your soul is you in others.” 

“The most precious thing is you in others, others in you.”

 Those we love become a part of us.  We become a part of them.

We are not ourselves only.  Many now living, many who are gone, are a part of us, an enriching, strengthening, deepening part of us.

How poor we would be if we were not added to by all these others!

 - Jacob Trapp

 Again and again it comes:

The Time of Recollection,

The Season of Remembrance.

Empty vessels of hope fill up again;

Forgotten treasures of dreams reclaim their place;

Long-lost memories come trooping back to me.

This is my season of remembrance,

My time of recollection.

Into the challenge of my anguish

I throw the strength of all my hope:

I match the darts of my despair

with the treasures of my dreams;

Upon the current of my heart

I float the burdens of the years;

I challenge the mind of death with my love of life.

Such to me is the Time of Recollection,

The Season of Remembrance.

- Howard Thurman

      After the Buddha Sakyamuni had achieved enlightenment, he taught for many years.  Some people mistakenly thought of him as a god, but he made no such claims to glory.  He was an enlightened human being.  Nevertheless, as a holy man, he received a steady stream of visitors seeking healing, blessing and teaching, greeting them all in the spirit of love and compassion.  One day he was especially touched by a woman carrying the lifeless body of her own child.  Her grief was overwhelming; she felt alone and lost without her baby.  “O Great and Compassionate One,” she sobbed, “Will you bring my baby back to life?”

      The Buddha looked into her face with gentle eyes and said to her, “If you can bring me a mustard seed from one house which has never lost a loved one, then your child will be returned to you.”

      The woman left at once, but at every house she visited, she heard stories of loss – a parent, a child, a friend, an uncle or an aunt.  To be sure, there was joy and celebration as well, but she could not find a single house that had never known grief.  As she heard the stories of the people, she began to understand her own story and her own loss.  She returned to the Buddha no longer expecting miracles, at last able accept the loss, bury her child, and turn to others in compassion.

      Loss is not an easy topic to deal with.  For many of us, saying goodbye is not only a real part of our lives, but a very present one.  Our losses may have come through death, life, or change of heart; they may have been family, friends or acquaintances.  But every one of us, at some time in our lives, must come to terms with it.  The people who become important to us do not always remain with us and we are faced with the difficult task of grieving.  No matter how many times we have learned these lessons or how well we think we have prepared for a loss, the intensity of the feelings involved can take us by surprise. 

      Five years ago, when I interviewed for my first congregation, I was finishing a chaplain residency in Virginia.  The first person I met in the congregation was a search committee member who also happened to be a hospice volunteer.  We sat and talked about hospice, spiritual care in times of grief, and the work I was doing as a chaplain until the rest of the committee arrived.  In the interview, someone asked about my approach to ministry when a member of the congregation was dying or had died.  Before I could answer, the member interrupted, “Oh, didn’t you know?  Death is Dan’s specialty!” 

      Six months later, my own stepmother Cary died of breast cancer, and despite all my experience, the intensity of that loss still took me by surprise.  She had been ill for three years, but none of us were as prepared as we thought we would be. 

      The person who helped us all the most was Cary herself.  She was also a Unitarian Universalist minister, and her greatest ministry to me was the way she said goodbye to each of us, calling us in to her room and talking with us, saying the things she thought we needed to hear and the things she knew she wanted to say.  It was not pleasant or easy, but it was one of the best and most healing experiences I have ever known. 

      Until the end, Cary kept her sense of humor.  I rode with her in the ambulance from the hospital to the hospice building, and it seemed she was holding herself in reserve for the transition.  She and I had said the words we needed to say to one another and we were quiet.  When she arrived at the hospice she summoned her energy to greet her new nurse, look around at the large and beautiful room, and make herself at home.  As the nurse was walking out Cary said, “I think we have a problem.”  We all looked at her, concern in our eyes.  Then, with a little effort, she said, “This room is so nice, I may not want to leave.” 

      The next afternoon our family sat in the parlor of the hospice, while a friend kept watch over Cary, and listened to a tape of one of her  last sermons.  It was called “Humanists in Foxholes.” 

      “My belief,” she said in that sermon, “that this world is all we are guaranteed frees me from worrying about an afterlife.  My beliefs that we are part of the natural world, that death is natural, is simply the end, that we have worth because we are, have somehow freed me from a fear of death.  My belief that we don’t have to be perfect to be good enables me to acknowledge that I have, on balance, lived a productive and good life.” 

      Half an hour later, we surrounded her, held her hands, and watched her breathe her last. 

      That moment was both wrenching and beautiful, a sacred and transforming instant in time.  Then my father gently reached down, closed her eyes, removed her chalice pendant, and gave it to the UU minister who was with us.  “Cary wanted you to have this,” he said, and she with everyone else in the room burst into tears – healthy, cleansing, graceful tears. 

      There is such a thing as a good death, a healthy loss, a peaceful separation.  Though I miss my stepmother very much, and I wish she could have been present in the important moments of my life since then – ordination, wedding, installation here – my feelings today are gratitude and wistfulness rather than anguish and sorrow.  Of all the gifts Cary gave during her life, that is the one for which I am most grateful. 

      Every loss is different.  Not every death is as graceful or gentle as my stepmother’s, and people do not always part on good terms.  When loss has been sudden or emotions have been conflicted, it may be all the more difficult to find the resolution and peace we need to move forward.  Even in the best of cases, loss is rarely easy.  This is why it is so important to work through our feelings and find ways to say goodbye – even after a person has gone. 

      We each deal with loss in different ways – sometimes many different ways at once.  For all we hear about the grief stages of denial, anger, bargaining, resentment and acceptance, the truth is that sometimes we feel many or all of these things at the same time.  Or we may feel only anger, or denial, or just emptiness, or something else entirely.  There is no one right way to grieve. 

      For that matter, there are as many kinds of loss as there are ways to go through it.  We might grieve the loss of a job as much as the loss of a friend, or we might grieve having to move from a well-loved house, or something that has happened in our lives or in world events.  We may grieve a pet that has died, or a marriage that has ended.  None of these losses is necessarily greater or lesser than any other.  What makes a loss profound is not its circumstance, but its effect on us.  Whatever we are grieving, when we find that we must reorder our reality and our way of being in order to go on, our loss has been significant. 

      Everyone deals with loss differently, and there is no right or wrong method.  Colleagues in other denominations sometimes look at me with surprise when they find out I do not believe in Heaven or life after death.  I know some Unitarian Universalists do, but my own theology has always been that our consciousness dies when our body does.  We have ended.  When I explain this to more conservative Christians, they usually react with pity.  Part of that pity may come from a conviction that whether or not I believe in it, I personally will be going to Hell when I die, and nothing they say is likely to change that.  The rest of the pity comes from a more sensitive idea – that it would be too painful to lose friends and family without the belief that they still exist in Heaven, and that some day, sometime, we will be reunited. 

      While this belief is for many a source of comfort, it is not a substitute for the work of leave taking.  Our futures beyond the grave are uncertain and the our loss today is genuine. Sooner or later these emotions have to be dealt with.  Even those with a firm conviction in the existence of Heaven, reincarnation or some other form of ongoing life still have to deal with the reality of a trusted friend being gone from this life. 

      This is why I’ve always been troubled by funerals and memorial services that emphasize how happy we should be at death, because death brings the miracle of salvation.  There may be good reasons to celebrate at memorial services – death may come as a release from suffering, and celebrating a life well lived is always worthwhile – but to celebrate the loss itself seems to ring hollow. 

      To be sure, Unitarian Universalists also have difficulty with loss, though I suspect not more or less so than those in other religions.  Our particular challenge is not due to our lack of consensus on the existence of an afterlife, but simply to our own optimistic nature. The songs in our hymnal, for example, express joy, optimism, and a commitment to justice – but relatively few express real sorrow, hardship, loss and pain.  There are some songs that do, but relatively few. 

      It isn’t surprising.  These aren’t easy feelings to deal with.  Many of us don’t want others to have to deal with them on our behalf.  So we say things like, “Don’t cry for me; don’t weep.”  But sometimes we need to cry, and there’s no shame in tears. 

      I think of Garrison Keillor, performing his farewell “Prairie Home Companion” show – the first time. He commented that many people who go away say things like, “Don’t cry; don’t mourn for me.”  “Not me,” he said.  “When I go, I want people weeping and wailing and throwing themselves on their knees, begging me to stay.”  The tears tell us that a person has meant something to us. 

      Likewise, if we artificially deny the pain of a separation – whether it is a death, a divorce, a friend who has moved, or a child who has gone away – we do ourselves no favors.  Eventually, the grief can, must and should catch up with us.  Grief is a process – it is painful, but it is also healing. 

      Grief is a process driven by hope – hope that we can ultimately come to a different place in our emotional lives.  It is safe to allow ourselves to weep or to shout or to beg or to say goodbye because we realize that we need not always remain trapped in mourning.  It is safe to allow ourselves to smile, laugh, enjoy ourselves without guilt, because we have hope that our life really can and does go on. 

      Grief is also a process driven by love – the love that we still hold for another person or for a place or a part of our lives that we are learning to leave behind us.  We find ways to acknowledge all the love and hope and joy we still have with gratitude and warmth.

      We don’t, however, have to do any of it alone.  We may reach out to our families, to a friend, to members of our fellowship, to a minister or to a therapist.  We may find strength in the silent presence of a pet or the enduring presence of God.  We may go to a support group.  Or we may simply gather our community around us in celebration of a life that has ended.  We don’t need to mourn forever, but neither do we need to be strong.  When we fall apart, hands will be there to lift and hold us; they wait only for the asking.

      There is another way in which love and hope come to heal us in our times of grieving.  It is a conviction that has grown in me with the years and has served in both life and ministry.

      The people we love the most are those who shape us, transform us and help us grow.  The gifts they have given us over the course of years may not always be obvious ones – the most important gift may be that part of themselves that has found a home in us.  When they die or leave, that spirit – the one that has always been so much a part of them and that has taught us and become part of our own spirit – remains and can never be taken away.  So when I think of my stepmother, or my grandparents, or friends who have long since passed out of my life, I know that they have each become part of who I am.  My gifts, too, will one day become a small part of the people around me.  In passing on some of my own spirit, I will also pass on a little piece of the people who have affected me and whose lives have transformed my own.  In the words of Dr. Zhivago, “Your soul is you in others.”

      This is as much immortality as I could ever ask for – there’s nothing supernatural about it, just a simple truth that we become part of the people around us, and there is comfort in that.  So part of saying goodbye really can be a celebration – a welcoming, amidst the tears, of all those gifts of spirit that have now become part of us. 

      As I was writing these words I was reminded of the chorus to a song I recorded when I was 19 years old – 

            A thousand memories are held in our hearts, a hundred different names.

            Every heart we meet and part with joins us in some way;

            Every heart we come to know will love us in return,

            And every time we’re torn apart there’s a lesson to be learned.

When I wrote that song I wasn’t thinking about death, dying or even friends moving away.  What I was thinking about was failed high school romances, of which I seemed to have a surprising number.  But the theology is the same.  Every relationship we have been part of – whether it is with a person, a community, an animal, a place or a period in our lives – teaches us something, becoming part of who we are.  When we part, we’re left not only with memories, but also with a small but significant change in ourselves – a beautiful and lasting gift.

      This is what it means for love and hope to come together – love for that which we have lost and hope that as long as we ourselves have been transformed, it can never be lost entirely.  When we finally allow ourselves to let go of the need for another person to be with us physically, we may look into our hearts and find that they will always be with us spiritually. 

      Saying goodbye is seldom easy, as a grieving mother discovered when she came to the Buddha Sakyamuni for a miracle.  Yet as this mother also discovered, grieving is an inevitable part of life, and indeed a sign of our love for those we have lost, and of their importance in our lives.

      So at last, through all the tangle of emotions, we return, like the Buddhist mother, to meet the parting.

      We will meet the parting with love – love for the friends we have lost, love for that part of ourselves we owe to those who have helped to make us who we are, love for the people around us who remain and love for those we have yet to know.  We will meet the parting with love.

      We will meet the parting with hope – hope for the life ahead of us that yet dawns, the newness of the brightening day and all the years to come, hope that we can grieve and fall apart and come back together changed, but stronger, hope that no relationship worth having ever leaves us completely, hope that we are not alone.  We will meet the parting with hope.

      We will meet the parting with love and with hope, and when love and hope have come together, we have at last entered the realm of the sacred. 

Take courage friends.

The way is often hard,

the path is never clear,

and the stakes are very high.

Take courage.

For deep down, there is another truth:

you are not alone.

- Wayne Arnason