The end of October and the beginning of November is a time when we pay special attention to those who passed away. In Poland on November 1 and 2 cemeteries will be crowded by people and candles will be lit on graves. This tradition is much older than Christianity. The Polish “Dziady” or the Anglo-Saxon Halloween, essentially pagan, remind us that also in pre-Christian cults when days became shorter and shorter and the world was longer and longer immersed in darkness, the boundary between the world of the living and of the dead became “thin” and porous. It’s a time when we turn to our inside and tend to recollect times that passed and people who are no longer with us.
Below you can read the reflection Pradusz delivered at the service commemorating the departed in his congregation, the Kritische Gemeente IJmond . It was inspired by the story of the risen Jesus meeting his disciples on their way to Emmaus (Luke 24, 13-32).
“What’s your name again?” There are hardly more unpleasant things than such a situation. We recognize the face, we realize that we should know the person standing before us… But the name, we just cannot find the name. Finally we cannot hide it any longer and have to ask: what’s your name again?
Forgetting is a part of life, not only of one of its phases. In a few
days, in the next series of house meetings, we will talk about aging. And I can imagine that we will take up this topic too. Yet it is not only a problem of the elderly. The fact we forget things has to do with the functioning of our brain. Our brain needs to forget in order to do its work properly. The fact that we work with computers so much can help us understand this phenomenon, because they too need to reboot from time to time. Otherwise they become slower, because they no longer can process the required quantity of data. So they too need to “forget” something from time to time.
Just as our economy is based not only on the money we really have, but even in a much greater degree on our debts, so our world isn’t based only on information we really possess but also the information we have lost long ago. We realize this, but we don’t like it. In the Bible one truly dies only when all have forgotten them. And the Eternal One, the God of Life, the One God, is the one who DOESN’T FORGET ANYONE. This is how we recognize him or her. In a hymn by Huub Oosterhuis we sing: “This house full of people. Do you know who they are? I hope so. Have you counted us? Do you know our names? So you are the Only One.” I recall as we sang it together on the Schiphol Airport during one of the vigils near the detention center (the place where you can see how our country, allegedly so hospitable, treats those it doesn’t want to receive) organized by C.v.d.S. Today we commemorate him. We place a stone with his name on our commemoration board, because we haven’t forgotten him. Him with his commitment and enthusiasm, with his visions and ideals. Him, one of us, the unforgettable C.
The idea to make the topic of the service commemorating the departed commemoration or even memory itself came to my mind when we paid farewell to another member of our community a few weeks ago, T.V. For some reason I didn’t realize it when we were preparing the service and I understood it only during the celebration: T. was for the last time among us at the funeral service of his wife, your mother and grandmother, ten years ago. It made a tremendous impression on me. During the long years of his stay in the nursing home, when his dementia deepened and deepened, most of us didn’t see him. Yet for all those years we cherished his name and that’s why T. could once again come to life among us on that September day. I thought then: when we ask why we are here, why we do what we do, this is the answer, isn’t it? We CHERISH names and dreams, ideals and visions, memories and feelings they awaken in us. We cherish them because, regardless of how natural and normal forgetting is, there also has to be a place where we remember people and commemorate them. We need this both with regard to the departed and to the living, like for example the people at the Schiphol airport who would have been forgotten long ago if it weren’t for our vigilance.
This memory can also have something funny about it from time to time. Last Tuesday I was traveling with a friend, an American minister, from Southern Poland to Warsaw. At one moment he was informed that a member of his congregation, an elderly lady, passed away. Then it went like in the KGIJ. Our friend had to make a few phone calls, like I in such a situation. The procedure had to be started. So he was talking on the phone and I listened. Suddenly the conversation turned to a certain detail. As it turned out, the lady who passed away had an aversion to wafers because they would always stick to her throat. So she wished that only real bread be used at the funeral service. Those who prepared it had to take care of it. When I heard this, my first thought was: “are there any other places in this crazy, hectic and forgetful world where you can count on such a detail important to someone not being forgotten?” Today – perhaps, given the time difference, right now – the funeral of Mrs. M. is going on and I’m certain that bread will be broken – real bread, not wafers. For, however futile it may seem to some, it is an important matter that also belongs to cherishing her name.
In a moment we too will break bread and share wine. Then we will sing a hymn some of us consider too long. Its length results from the fact that it commemorates the names of Jesus’ ancestors. We cannot do it every time, of course, but tonight we have a special reason: for this hymn shows us, perhaps more than any other, what our service is about – commemoration, remembering, cherishing. Singing it, we tell the story of Jeshua-Jesus, “who in the human fashion was given his own name when he was born in distant past far away from here.” We commemorate him “as the dead who is not dead, as the living beloved.” And because we call him “the helper, the travel companion and the brother of the least among people,” we commemorate not only him. We remember everyone, we include everyone in his story, the story of the one who lives. There are no boundaries here and we don’t need to worry that we deprive someone of their identity, because, for example, they were not Christian. Of course there are also other names, other religions and other traditions. Of course there are also other stories, which are not worse but simply different. Yet this is the story we are rooted in. Maybe accidentally, maybe not. And it is this story that we tell in the broadest, most inclusive possible way.
And when we tell this story anew, and when we break bread and share wine to life (lechaim) and against death, something unexpected happens. In our Gospel reading today we read: “Their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” He was among them “as the dead who is not dead.” For to commemorate in the Biblical sense always means more than only to commemorate, it means to make something or someone present, to experience something anew. “The Word touched by sound, touched by holiness” (St. Hildegard of Bingen) becomes the LIVING WORD. The name comes to life again. This is the root of what the church called EUCHARIST – grateful remembering in a way that he whose story we tell is alive again, and together with him all the names we cherish, and we too:
“May we not live imprisoned in emptiness.
May we not turn back into dust.
Send your Spirit to transform us.
That we hear you, that we live you,
people for people, everything for everyone.
That we fulfill you word, our peace,
AWAKEN YOU STRENGTH AND COME TO MAKE US FREE.”
(Huub Oosterhuis)Because
“This stream does never end,
even cold breath, the breath of death,
will not resist this word.”
(St. Hildegard of Bingen)THE LIVING WORD…
