Karen married Dave when she was too young. Well, that’s what her family said. “She’s too young. This will never last.” Karen didn’t receive much support, which is why she found Dave so amazing. He was always so supportive.

Dave would have been a 7^th generation farmer. His family had been living on and tending the same plot of land since they arrived in Connecticut. Dave’s oldest brother was running the farm, so Dave decided to head to college and become an accountant. That’s where he met Karen and that was that. They were married right after and started a family.

Karen and Dave settled in Amhurst and filled their Craftsman home with all sorts of things. Dave’s family sent things from the farm: a quilt Dave’s grandma made. A huge family tree poster that was custom-made from 1818. A tall-boy dresser made from wood on the farm during the Depression. Everything in their house reminded them of something from the past. They were surrounded by markers of history. Everything in the house an echo from an event or a person long-deceased. All this was new to Karen, and she felt like she wasn’t living in her own house. She was living in a haunted house.

Theologian Peter Rollins writes, “There is a deep sense in which we are all ghost towns. We are all haunted by the memory of those we love, those with whom we feel we have unfinished business. While they may no longer be with us, a faint aroma of their presence remains, a presence that haunts us until we make our peace with them and let them go.”[1]

Last Sunday I preached on how I was haunted by my grandfather and father’s absences. I understand what Peter is saying. Many of us are haunted by absences or trauma or mental health and all sorts of things. Peter phrases it in the negative. I also think we’re haunted by love as well. The presence of those who loved us into being. The haunts of love that keep us going on the hard days.

Once the work of grief is done and the wound of our loss has healed, we learn… as poet John O’Donohue writes, “to wean your eyes from the gap in the air and be able to enter the hearth in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all this time.”[2]

Maybe it’s why your house looks the way it does. You have so many memories attached to the things you own. It’s hard to part or sort through all the things. It’s why your children might not have the same attachment you do. It’s impossible to describe their meaning to you, just as it is impossible to describe what someone or something means to you.

I could try to describe the feeling I get when I look at a Van Gogh painting. I would fail. I’ve tried to explain to my children what it was like to grow up in the 1900s. 1980s and 90s to be clear. The texture, the smells, the advertising, what TV looked and sounded like, the fact that our TVs were more furniture than wall-art. It’s impossible to explain what it was like. You just had to be there. Just as you just had to be there to see how funny your late uncle was. How your favorite aunt who died 20 years ago would pull your earlobe when she’d hug you goodbye. How your father walked. Your mother’s posture. You just had to be there. We surround ourselves with these little seeds of memory.

Dave’s family sent all sorts of seeds to them. Karen learned to appreciate the house and the gifts and the seeds and so together planted a vast garden. Her favorite was the apple tree grew from seeds from the family orchard. They loved the smell of apple blossoms each spring. Dave and Karen’s kids would pick an apple on the way to school in the fall. It was a great ritual that the kids came to love.

Dave’s favorite ritual was making pies from a massive Rhubarb plant that his great-great grandmother had planted. The recipe for rhubarb pie was passed down through the family. He taught Karen and the kids. It was a rite of passage. A holy ritual passed down with the family lore.

Oral tradition and ritual is how the Bible came to us. It was passed down first through spoken word. Folks didn’t think to write it down because writing wasn’t invented yet. The Bible came into being over a long period of time. Perhaps the most widely held hypothesis is that the Bible has been around 4,000 years… starting with the earliest book Job to the latest book Revelation.[3]

We have these ancient technologies that have been handed down to us. We call them rituals. Ancient ways of storing data and transferring through the generations. There is power in rituals. Rituals have power, and they connect us beyond ourselves.

We celebrate Christmas and Easter, the birth and resurrection of Jesus, as our 2 highest holy days. We have observances. We Congregationalists started the whole Thanksgiving thing back in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Today, we are celebrating All Saints. All Hallow’s Eve is the celebration before All Saints Day. A day to mark the deaths of those in our covenant community. We will light a candle for the names we carry with us in remembrance.

Maybe you mark other days. Your family does birthdays a certain way. Maybe you post a memorial each year on your social media on the death day of someone. Maybe there’s a recipe that’s been handed down. A tradition that binds you and anchors you into your family. Everything might be feeling out of control but when you set out to intentionally honor whatever ritual you have, all is well. You’re most grounded and you’ve come back to yourself. Ritual is why our worship services look a certain way. Our ancestors valued certain things, and they passed them down to us. Seeds of meaning, rituals that connect us through the ages.

Karen and Dave had the Rhubarb pie ritual. The apple tree ritual in the spring and fall. They developed their own small ones, but these were the two most prominent.

One day, they got some bad news. Dave had terminal cancer. He was given a few months. Dave was a planner, and he started preparing Karen for life after him. When she asked about burial, he said, “Just throw me on the compost heap. I’m the happiest in the garden.”

“Dave, you know we can’t do that,” Karen would say.

“Yeah, we’ll see about that,” Dave would shoot back.

They decided on cremation. Some part of him would be on the family farm with his ancestors on their burial plot dating back to before our country was founded. Karen and the kids would have their own set of ashes to scatter or keep in a way that felt meaningful to them.

Dave died on a bright spring morning. Karen was swallowed by grief. She felt would never get through it. The rituals helped, but she wasn’t herself for a long time. One day, she woke up feeling like herself. Grief had taught its lessons and had departed, at least the immensity had.

On that day, Karen decided to bury his ashes under the 5^th generation rhubarb plant. Seemed the most fitting. Life went on. The kids grew up, found partners, and eventually brought their own kids to the annual rhubarb pie baking. Stories were told. Rituals observed, evolved as they were for all things change over time. The time came when Karen couldn’t keep up with the house. She had to sell it.

She hired a guy from church to clean up around the yard and prune back the unruly apple tree. He did a great job. But Karen noticed something. The rhubarb was gone. Grief came and visited Karen, but after all these years, Karen was well acquainted with it.

Stephen Colbert wrote in the June 2013 issue of Psychology Today, “The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you. You know what I mean? I’ve always liked the phrase, ‘He was visited by grief,’ because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me, and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door.”

I love how he ends it. It will be like a wolf at your door. The longer you ignore it, the bigger and more dangerous grief will seem. Often, we’ll engage in numbing activities to avoid it. We’ll ignore the knocks and pretend it’s not there. Often it will make us disengaged or addicted or bitter or a shell of who we once were. Glennon Doyle calls this the hot potato version of grief. But grief is not a hot potato to pass onto the next person or next generation. Pain and grief are not a mistake to fix. They are a sign that a lesson is coming. Glennon thinks of pain and grief “as a traveling professor. When they knock on the door, wise ones breathe deep and say, ‘Come in. Sit down with me. Don’t leave until you’ve taught me what I need to know.’”[4]

We have gone through the No More Tears series together. We have spoken about how we think of the afterlife affects how we live now. We want to look for the good place in our lives and lift that up so that when we eventually die, we will recognize the good place when we arrive. We’ll know which way to head. We’ll go to where the ghosts and ghouls and vampires are getting candy. Where there’s a table set in the presence of our enemies, and our cups overflow. There will be no more tears there.

The book of Revelation is a strange one. So strange that it almost didn’t make the cut of what books would go into the Bible. I love this passage though. We go through all the strange apocalyptic visions of beasts and seals and weirdness and get to this lovely passage of a new heaven and a new earth. It is on earth as it is in heaven. God will wipe every tear from our eyes and death will be no more. This is not an avoidance. The book goes through all the grief and pain and strangeness to arrive here. We have to go through a lot of grief and pain and strangeness in our life, but in the end: God will dwell with us.

Karen must have remembered this passage as she composed herself and asked the young gardener where the rhubarb was. He thought it was a weed. He’d taken it with the other rubbish to the city compost pile.

Karen laughed. She laughed the type of laugh where you start laughing too, even though you don’t know what’s going on exactly. Dave said he just wanted to be thrown on the compost heap. He had finally gotten his wish.

Death was no more in that moment. Every tear was wiped from her eyes. Mourning and crying and pain were no more for the first things had passed away. That day, the Revelation scripture was fulfilled in your hearing.

I pray that the ritual that we are about to do: speaking the names of our dead and lighting candles might open the door to what you think is a wolf. You will find that it’s just a visiting professor. I pray that this grounds you enough that you invite grief inside to sit down and teach you what you need to know. Maybe put coffee or the kettle on, grief might be awhile. But once grief departs, it departs as a friend. You are more whole. Your faith deepened. Your connection with others stronger. Rituals remain, changed as they are. The memories are yours forever. After all, the stuff we have is just stuff. We can always ask a friend or family member for another cutting of rhubarb. What matters is love.

As Paul writes in the 8^th Chapter of Romans: We are sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Nothing can separate us from love. Not even death. Observe the rituals. Speak the names. Light all the candles you have. Be surrounded by the warm and gentle light of love. For you have been all this time. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Works Cited

[1] The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction

[2] To Bless the Space Between Us: A book of blessings, page 118.

[3] Claim made from doing the math from Frank Frick’s Journey through the Hebrew Scriptures and Bart Ehrman’s The New Testament: A historic introduction to the early Christian writings.

[4] From Glennon’s talk Building Open and Honest Relationships on March 21, 2015 at Sylvania UCC