a sober appreciation for the sacramental triduum of samhain

Yesterday was All Saints Day - a liturgical feast I knew nothing about while growing up - and the same goes for today's All Souls/Day of the Dead. My coming of age took place in small town New England as a child of the Congregational Way. Being raised a true Yankee Prod meant I knew precious little about Roman Catholic spirituality. A few close friends sometimes showed up at school with a dark smudge on their forheads and periodically got out of school midday on Wednesdays for something called CCD. But visiting one another's house of worship was not even considered. Besides, mine was the faith of New England's founding fathers, and I held an abiding affection for my roots in the non-conformist wing of the radical Reformation. 

Being a white, middle class child of Connecticut and Massachusetts meant that I celebrated the Thanksgiving mythology of my Pilgrim forbearers without question.

As a young adult I went so far as to naively proclaim Thanksgiving to be an American Eucharist. We learned nothing about living upon land that was once the ancesteral homes of the Pequot, Wampanoag, Massachuesett, Nipmuck, and Mohican nations. I never heard about settler genocide until well into adulthood for our schools and churches treated Thanksgiving as a Pilgrim feast day. And to this day I cannot find whether or not the founding pastor of my home church, Moses Mather, was a slave owner. Of course, he was active in the Revolutionary War. Since its founding in 1737, ours was an intellectually creative and socially aware congregation as well. But our complicated and cruel origins were nevertheless always sanitized and romanticized - and never discussed with historical candor.

Small wonder then that I matured into a Congregational/United Church of Christ booster. Coming of age in the 60's was when the United Church of Christ mattered in the USA. Not only was our post WWII charism about deep ecumenism, we were grounded in a vibrant commitment linking the love of Jesus to bold social, racial, gender, ecological, and economic justice. As Jesus proclaims at the close of this week's gospel reading, we serve and worship the "God of the living" (Luke 20: 38.) At the founding ceremony for the United Church of Christ in 1957, we chose a motto from St. John's gospel: "That They May All Be One." Consequently, we were allies with Dr. King in the early days of the struggle for civil and social rights for people of color. We were advocates for fair housing and invested in public/private projects to build affordable homes throughout the USA. Just months after Dr. King's assasination, a few week's after RFK's murder, and a short time before the Democratic Convention police assault on antiwar demonstrators: I sensed a call to ministry on our 1968 youth mission caravan trip. 

The purpose of our trip was to show 25 privileged white teens the depth and breadth of our tradition's engagement with real life. Over the course of three weeks we visited five key United Church mission projects: a rural orphanage and farm, an arts and culture organizing project in Appalachia, an urban ministry within the Black community of Washington, DC, the Church of the Savior's Potter's House (a coffee house outreach to alienated artists and intellectuals), and an inter-racial, working class congregation in Baltimore, MD. It was a heady time to be a young believer committed to justice and grace. And as Karl Barth presciently quipped, it was an era when reading "the Bible in one hand and a daily newspaper in the other" was essential.

The Rev. Dr. Sam Fogal from my Connecticut home church helped ground me in the best of our tradition. He introduced me to the work of theologian Roger Shinn, historian Louis Gunnemann, the writing of both Niebhuhr brothers, the biblical scholarship of Walter Brueggemann, the sexual ethics of James Nelson, and the wisdom of doing local church ministry from Martin Copenhaver. These quiet UCC giants were at the core of my formation. Later mentors like the Reverends Jim Drake and Fred Eyster helped me understand the importance of organizing for justice. And everywhere I looked, it seemed as if the United Church was on the cutting edge of what was both just and possible.

+ Our national bi-annual convention, General Synod, interupted business as usual to send a delegation of clergy and laity to stand with Cesar Chavez and striking farm workers in California. 

+ We were committed to finding new ways of doing mission by sharing resources and compassion with international partners rather than trying to convert indigenous peoples to our way of doing religion. The Rev. Dr. George Weber, who gave shape and form to the Inner City Protestant Parish and later went on to be President of New York Theological Seminary, showed me how this could work in the US, too.

+ The Rev. Ben Chavis and others were exposing the links between racism and ecological polution. The Rev. William Johnson became the first openly gay clergy to be ordained. The Rev. Dr. Allison Phillips and Jeremiah Wright taught me about being an white ally in solidarity with Black colleagues. The Rev. Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite shaped our Just Peace commitments. And serious attention and creativity was finally given to a theology of sexuality.  

+ In the early 80's, an inclusive language worship book and hymnal came into being that set the standard for other traditions. I had the privilege to work with the Rev. Bob Strommen on urban concerns. And the Rev. Dr. Thomas Dipko on international peace relations. 

During my 40+ years as an ordained clergy person, I was blessed to pastor four very different United Church congregations. I was priveleged to serve the living God and her people as moderator of the SW Conference, work for social/racial justice in Michigan, and then give almost a decade to being the registrar of the Berkshire Association. I was called to assist two different congregations in their commitment to become Open and Affirming churches. And in the day, we were able to take a youth group (and their parents) to the former Soviet Union for people-to-people peace-making. Years later, in partnership with the National Council of Churches, I was chosen to lead the Ohio Conference delegation on a solidarity pilgrimage with believers celebrating 1000 Years of Christianity in Ukraine and Russia. And became a founding organizer for three very different faith-based social justice organizing projects that received financial and spiritual support from the wider United Church of Christ. My formation, development, and ministry was saturated with the charism of the United Church of Christ in its prime.

And now this once beloved tradition looks more like a shabby footnote in what passes for faith in our barely United States of America. We are a shadow of our former self - content with elitist self-congratutions - and irrelevant to the body politic. We squandered the possibilities of the "God is Still Speaking" campaign and lost our creative balance. No wonder that for the first time in a half century, I forgot completely about celebrating Reformation Sunday. Why bother? What was once vibrant is now moribund. I recall a pundit once quipped that the labor movement of the 1980's had become more of a labor "twitch" than a movement and that feels true for my denomination. A report from a regional judicatory meeting only documented our  demise noting that no one in the association was interested in serving any of the necessary elected offices. In fact, the minutes show that we could not even reach a quorum for an annual meeting. Church historian, Diana Butler Bass, put it like this in a recent column:

This week the Pew Research released a report modeling the potential future of Christianity in the United States. (They) developed a model to draw four possible futures for American Christianity and released the report a few days ago. Pew’s conclusion? By 2070, Christianity in the United States (the whole thing — all forms of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy, all racial and ethnic Christian communities in a single category) will be a minority faith in a nation with a majority of “nones.” The study states: "While the scenarios in this report vary in the extent of religious disaffiliation they project, they all show Christians continuing to shrink as a share of the U.S. population, even under the counterfactual assumption that all switching came to a complete stop in 2020. At the same time, the unaffiliated are projected to grow under all four scenarios." (Read her full commentary here: https://dianabutlerbass. substack. com/p/the-future-of-faith

To everything there is a season, yes? Perhaps that's why I have come to find solace and gravitas in the sacramental spirituality of the liturgical church rather than the overly abstract intellectualism of my origins. There is new life yet to come for the way of Jesus, but not so for many of our denominations. In fact, before new light and life arise, what is destined to die must be allowed to wither and atrophy. All Hallows' Eve, All Saints and All Souls/Day of the Dead help me embrace the cycle of life: they ground me in reality, they encourage me to grieve what is dying and dead, and to trust that God's grace is not yet complete just as spring surely follows the darkness of autumn and the solitude of winter. The Zen-Eco-Beat poet, Gary Snyder, puts it like this:

The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics

lie before us.

the steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers

go light.

I don't pretend to know what will be left of my tradition by 2070. Nor do I even try to speculate. What empowers me now is a "small is holy" spirituality rather than the inflated triumphalism of my roots. A spirituality linking God's first revealed word in nature with the arts and prayer. The mystical wisdom of silence, music, contemplation, and quiet acts of compassion in concert with trusted allies. A life of faith shaped by the circle dance of the Holy Trinity instead of the hierarchy of Jacob's Ladder. So, while I hold a great deal of sorrow in my heart for the decline of my once beloved tradition, I am not despondent. As Brueggemann points out: the prophets of ancient Israel insisted that there are times when God's people must grieve and empty ourselves of hubris and control before there's room to even consider a new way of being. Moreover, new life will not emerge from what has been completed nor from those with nostalgic obsessions for the soon to be buried status quo. No, a new fidelity usually arises from those creative artists consigned to the fringes of society. Like Jacob Nordby said: Blessed are the weird people: poets, misfits, writers, mystics, painters, and troubadours for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.

I will be sharing some of those creative and life-giving experiements this coming Sunday during the "Small is Holy" livestream at 4 pm. Perhaps you will join me @ 

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credits:

1_ Pilgrims and Wampanoag: https://historyexplorer.si.edu/resource/pilgrims-and-wampanoag

2) Angels in the Subway: http://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/alexey-kondakov-paintings/index.html?gallery=0

3) Art in the Cathedrals: https://www.theartdose.com/blog/art-in-the-cathedrals-b45.html

4/5) Personal photos