Honoring Our Ancestors:
A Homily for Multi-Generational Day of the Dead

Rev. Peter Friedrichs

October 25, 2009

Reading ^[1]

The odds against each one of us being here this morning are so mind-staggering that they cannot be computed…We're talking miracles here. Not an unlikely miracle, like God parting the Red Sea for Moses to escape the Egyptians or stopping the sun for Joshua to win a battle, but the miracle of water itself, in which living organisms can incubate, and just enough warmth and light from the sun to establish ideal conditions for life to be nurtured and develop here on earth.

Consider the odds more intimately. Your parents had to couple at precisely the right moment to result in your conception. And that's just the beginning. The same unlikely happenstance must repeat itself throughout the generations. Going back ten generations, this miracle must repeat itself one thousand times, one and a quarter million times going back twenty generations. From the turn of the twelfth century until today, we each have approximately two and a half million ancestors…

And that's only the biological part of it. Remember, each of these ancestors had to live to puberty. For those whose bloodline twines through Europe - and there were like tragedies around the globe - not one of your millions of direct forbears died as children during the Great Plague, which mowed down half of Europe with its mighty scythe.

Not only did all our human ancestors survive puberty to mate at the one and only instant that the requisite egg and sperm might connect to keep our tiny odds for survival alive, but their prehuman ancestors did the same. Then we have to go back to our premammalian ancestors; and back from there all the way to the pinball of planets and stars, spinning back through time to the big bang itself. Mathematically, our death is a simple inevitability, whereas our life hinges on an almost infinite sequence of perfect accidents. First a visible and then an invisible thread connects every one of us in an unbroken line to the instant of creation. Think about it. The universe was pregnant with us when it was born.

Sermon

I never knew my grandfather. My father's father. He died before I was born, back when my father was in college. I know his name, because I was named after him, and I know what he looked like, because I've seen pictures of him and a couple of home movies. He was square-jawed, with dark hair and piercing eyes, and he had a full mustache that he kept neatly trimmed. I know that he worked for a wool dyeing business in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, that he was a well-respected businessman and that he liked to play golf. I also know something of his own background, thanks to the research my sister has done on our family tree. His father came from Belgium and his mother from Quebec, Canada. And I know that he was a smoker and that he loved to eat red meat, and that he had heart disease that went undiagnosed back in those days. This fact only became apparent when he came home from work one day, laid down on the couch and died at the age of 49.

I don't know much more about my grandfather than this. Some of you may have pictures of loved ones on this altar whose stories are sketchy, like my grandfather's. Others of you know the intimate details of the lives of those we remember and celebrate today. But all of us, and all of them, have one thing in common: we are all actors in this great, unfolding drama we call life. How we got here is a mystery and the fact of our living is a miracle. As you heard in our reading from Forrest Church today, "the odds against each one of us being here this morning are so mind-staggering that they cannot be computed."^[2] And our part in the play is never revealed to us in advance. Although our lives usually - and thankfully - contain much less drama than the characters on Days of Our Lives and General Hospital, we are much like the actors who play the parts on the soaps. Each day we're handed the next part of the script, never knowing exactly what will be required of us. One day we'll celebrate some great achievement or a victory that is hard-won. And the next we'll be called on to endure some unforeseen tragedy. We're all familiar with Shakespeare's lines from As You Like It: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and [each] in his time plays many parts…"

This, of course, is one view of our lives. A view that says our fates are written in the stars before we are born. That God or nature has predetermined our place on the earth and our role in the play. Or that someone "out there" is writing the script that we are called to act out as our lives unfold. But this view of our lives is too passive for me. We are doubtless subject to unseen forces beyond our control, creating situations we are called to respond to. An earthquake shifts the ocean floor, and thousands of miles away a tidal wave floods a village. We or one we love contracts a serious illness.

But we are not "merely players" on this stage. We are the authors of our lives. We are the writers and producers, the co-creators of the drama. Our birth and our being here are miracles beyond understanding, but we make decisions about the direction the plot line will take. If nothing else, we are in charge of our own responses to the curve-balls that life throws at us. At how we look at life: whether as a series of endless misfortunes to be endured or as a gift of immeasureable value to be treasured and enjoyed.

In how we look at life and in how we live our lives, we have a duty to the countless generations of ancestors who came before us. Those men and women who, through the thread of time, wove together lives of meaning and struggle. Lives as glorious as gold and as plain as mud. Our duty to them is first to remember them. All of them. Those whom we knew and those we cannot even imagine. Because in remembering them we honor them. But more than that. In remembering them we remind ourselves that we owe to them our very lives. Unitarian Universalist minister Peter Raible put it this way:

"We are ever bound in community." That is why we remember. That is why we are called to honor our ancestors. To remind ourselves that while it is our turn to write our own script and to act out our own part, we are not alone on the stage. We are part of a troupe made up not just of those we see around us every day, but a company of spirits, the ghosts of generations that came before us.

And beyond even this, when we recall what others have done for us, we are called to live our lives for the generations to come. To lay our own foundations, to light our own fires, to plant our own trees, to dig our own wells, so that those who follow us may have shelter and warmth, shade and water. We are links in an eternal chain that must remain unbroken, a chain whose continued existence is in our own hands.

And so today we remember. We remember all those who have made us who we are. Whose lives were lived so that we might live our own. Friends, lovers, family, those known and unknown, whose lives have led us to this particular place and this particular moment. We are reminded once again by the faces we see on our altar today that, in the words of Native American writer Linda Hogan, "You are the result of the Love of thousands."^[3] And it is in the face of this reality that we ask ourselves once again, the question poet Mary Oliver asks in her poem "The Summer Day." It is perhaps the most important question we can ask ourselves, and we must ask it over and over: "What is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Closing Words ^[4]

Life's abiding opportunity, bequeathed to us against all odds to each and every one of us, is to live, and also to die, for the multitude of brothers and sisters who beat the odds with us, who labored with our ancestors' hands and wept tears of grief and joy from our ancestors' eyes, connecting us as kin to God and each other, blessed together, always together, with the privilege of running from gate to flag in life's glorious race.

^[1] excerpted from Forrest Church, Love and Death, pp 101-104
^[2] Forrest Church, Love and Death, 102-103.
^[3] Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, 159.
^[4] Forrest Church, Love and Death, 105.

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