Sermon by Rev. Russell Daye

The River of Live and Death

Daniel 12:1-4, Revelation 7:9-17
St. Andrew's United Church, Halifax
Service of Remembrance of our Saints

Every religious tradition speaks to an underlying reality that dwells beneath the chimera of 'ordinary existence'. Some call this reality God, or the Kingdom of Heaven; others call it nirvana or brahman or moksha - here it is impersonal. These various names refer to a place where all the dualities - good and evil, heaven and earth, life and death - collapse into one unified horizon. While all religions assure us that this horizon can be traversed, each warns us that it cannot be captured by language or any other kind of rational thought. Such thought requires comparison and contrast, point and counterpoint, which draws the thinker out of the unified field, throwing her into a world of opposites and condemning her to alternate between joy and suffering. The Buddhists say, 'all comparisons are odious.'

For some reason, it is our fate to inhabit this earthly world of duality, this fractured realm for a time. We must journey through it knowing ability and disability, gain and loss, love and betrayal. One of the reasons we are drawn to children, I believe, is that we see in them the reflection of a place beyond the knowledge of good and evil.

Marcus Borg, the widely read biblical scholar and champion of the emerging paradigm, likes to speak of 'thin places,' places that draw us closer to the awe-full horizon where all experience collapses into oneness. We slip into a thin place when we see that still, purple body emerge from our womb - or our partner's womb - be placed against the breast and shudder with its first cry. We slip into a thin place when we see acceptance and desire in another's eye and we know we have a lover. We slip into a thin place in worship, just for an instant perhaps, when we realize that the bodies around us are being moved as we are, that, like a rising sea, we breathe together.

In my years as a minister, I have over and over again found a thin place with the dying. Palliative care nurses know about this; some of them carry it within them. I have sees the thin place in the dying, but even more often in the families gathered around them. As we hold hands in a circle around the bed, saying a final prayer before the life support is turned off. As the wife holds her husband's hand while he moves through the shallow, laboured breath, then the final breath, more peaceful, then no breath at all. As the baby who will never know this world of opposites relaxes into the warmth of its mother's arms and slips back into the river of life and death.

I know that some of you have places inside you that still hold the moment of the death of a loved one. For some of you, these are moments of love and warmth. For some of you, these are moments of great brokenness that have frozen parts of you solid. For some of you, these are moments given colour by dreams or stories that accompanied the death. Sometimes these dreams come alive in other times, connecting life and death in a personal mythology that holds great meaning.

I will not try to interpret these moments for you. All I will say is that they, like all the instants of our lives are part of the river of living and dying, and that this river inevitably flows to the horizon where life and death, love and loss are one. I can't promise that you will pass through a great light and meet your loved ones - neither do I refute this - but I can offer the Christian promise that is shared with other faiths: Our experience of duality is a banal experience and that there is a deeper place, a Reign of Heaven, that pulsates within and among us, a river that dances with colour and darkness. If we allow ourselves to pass into the thin places of this life, we move close to, perhaps even into the embrace of all that is, was, and will be, including those we have loved and lost. In the thin place we may even draw some of their character back here. In the thin place we may even complete some of what they left unfulfilled, healing them perhaps.

One thing, repeatedly reinforced in the scriptures, including the two read today, which place the fate of the individual saint firmly in the context of the greater upheavals of this world … one thing needs to be made clear: To pass into the thin place and glimpse the eternal horizon is to move into communion with all the living and dying on this earthly sphere. We may move into communion with the saints, but we also move into communion with the souls locked up in the Abbey Lane psychiatric facility across the street. We also move into communion with the frogs and the caribou and the penguins who will disappear as the globe warms and the ozone layer disappears. We also move into communion with the thousands of Colombian families trying to flee to our country.

We don't get to have it both ways. We either cling to duality, running from the thin places and deeper love or we surrender to unity and step into a river where we live joy and sorrow in communion with every other creature that is swept into the flow.