Day Of The Dead

At our church on Sunday we incorporated the Latino Holiday Celebration of Dia de los Muertos into our worship gathering. We've done this the past few years on the Sunday after Halloween or All Saints' Day. We create an altar with photos and ofrendas in our worship as our way of celebrating what the church universal is - those of us following Jesus gathered from with our differences, from around the world, and across the ages through life and death.

It's a favorite for members of our church community. It was again this year. I was really moved as I realized the presence of those who pictures were on the table, as we remembered them in the gathering for the ways in which they marked us as people, shaped our community of faith, and are still present with us in the great mystery, or the life that Jesus promises us is after physical death.

Makes me think that we so often avoid death. We don't want to talk about, think about, deal with it because if forces us to recognize that we too will die. Yet it's an unavoidable and essential part of life, which has a beginning and an "end." I was struck in particular by our celebration of communion, in which the juice was made from grapes picked from a grape vine planted by one of the church members who died several years ago. What an image and experience of the promise of resurrection and life beyond death - to have that man present with us around the communion table both according to the promises of scripture and through the continuing gift of his grapes. Maybe that's what it's all about? Recognizing that we will die. Death cannot be cheated. And that death is not the end. We shouldn't live in fear of death, neither should we be seeking it. It is as we are. Maybe that's a big part of what Jesus was trying to do and teach, that we have to live death - not from our fear of it, and not into it...but with death and in the hope and promise that there is more than just this. Maybe that's part of what he was getting at when he said, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free"?

I'm supposed to have the answers in our congregation. Right? I mean I have the Masters in Divinity. I have the ordination. I'm the one "in charge," the resident expert on all things spiritual, related to God and existentially true. Yet I don't know what happens after we die. Sure there are things in the Bible that point to what the next life is like - starts in a twinkling of an eye, at the sound of the trumpet, we will be raised up anew, with new yet the same bodies. Yet all of that is somewhat vague. I've heard many things from other Christians on my journey: the righteous will be there with wings and in power while the evil, sinful, doubters will burn in hell. I've heard that depending upon how and who you have sex with you'll either know an eternity of bliss or of torturous pain. I've heard that the whole reason to believe in Jesus is so that you can go to heaven. I've heard - and prayed myself - that a simple prayer of less than 100 words will get you a get-out-of-jail direct pass to the pearly gates where Peter is waiting with a harp, a large ring of keys and some sort of giant book with our names in it.

But I don't believe it. How can faith - or following Jesus - just be about the future, about life after death. What about life right now? I've prayed that prayer of repentence. But what then? It has to be about right here and now too, in the middle of the grim and shit that seems to be going down all around us. I believe that Jesus is the hope of the world (though I don't always feel it in my daily life) and that can't just be about saving certain ones of us, or of giving us hope for heaven so that we'll put up with the crap were in up to our knee caps.

I don't know what happens. But like the Mayans and Aztecs, like those that followed Jesus 2,000 years ago (and still do) I believe that death of our bodies, the flatline on that screen, the last exhale isn't all there is. Call it what you want. I call it the great mystery (I think that's what the Apostle Paul was meaning). There is life - not our bodies floating up with wings to heaven or descending in chains to hell, but life - different yet the same - active, not just passively watching what's going down on Earth like Patrick Swayze in Ghost - purposeful and passionate, not just like the ghost of Christmas Past pointing the right way to act morally. It has to be LIFE. Different yet the same. Not isolation but community. Not freedom from suffering and pain, but freedom for passion, purpose and community: freedom for life.

It can't be all based on how or who or if you have sex with someone else. It can't be about a ritualistic prayer that is simply repeated as a mass phenomena. It can't be about some truth that you scream at others while waiving your picket sign. I think it has to be about Truth that we can't know with just our minds, but also with our bodies, with our relationships, in our actions, - it has to be some sort of an experiential relationship in which we participate, are challenged, challenge back and find meaning. It has to be something that makes sense, not congitively, but in and for our lives.