Haunted by Otherwise
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
October 28, 2001

Reading: “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon (text is in body of sermon, below)

	This is the time of year when we observe Halloween in the culture generally, and in this church, we honor our pagan heritage by observing Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”), the Celtic pagan holiday which became Halloween.  Samhain was the Celtic New Year, and it is often said that it is the time of year when the veil between the two worlds is the thinnest.  The other world for the Celts was the world of the fairies, the sidthe (pronounced “she”).  I have read in previous years the great Celtic ballad Tam Lin, which tells of the love of a beautiful girl for a man held captive by the fairies, and how she rescues him by pulling hm off his horse.

	One scholar who has studied the origins of the holiday, Folklorist Leila Dudley Edwards, has this to say about the meaning given to it by contemporary pagans in light of its history:

The most important focus of the festival for many pagans is the emphasis on death and rebirth and the vast importance of having a time specifically dedicated for letting go, being aware and acknowledging the more difficult aspects of life.  It is the time of ‘going into the dark’ as one individual puts it.  Samhain is the point of the year which embodies the concept of the mutual dependence of light and dark, and strongly acknowledges the presence of the supernatural world.  The process of earth’s regeneration can be directly related to personal feeling and life experience.  Loss and death are essential elements of life and cannot be denied; Samhain provides an opportunity for people to process these feelings, to experience the ‘underworld journey’ and through its experience obtain greater strength and knowledge of self.  Several pagans told me that they recovered from the breakup of emotional relationships or bad experiences at this time, exorcizing memories or ‘ghosts’ and psychologically discarding unwanted baggage from the previous year.”

	This will not be quite the Samhain sermon I intended to preach.  I said in the Gleam that this Halloween Sunday I’d preach on a subject I’ve touched on before, how we’re often haunted by the parallel universe, the way things might have been, the road not taken.  If you came expecting that sermon, let’s talk later, because on reflection I realized that this is really not what’s haunting us as a people right now.  What’s haunting us as a people is what did happen September 11, what is happening now, and how much worse it might get in the future, both here in this country we all love and in the world that we also love and in which our country is a big player whether or not we always approve of its actions.   I’m not at all confident that I can make better sense of what we’re going through than any other commentator you might read or see on TV.  But I think I have to try.

	And there’s another thing that’s haunting some of us on a very different and more personal level. Some of us have recently lost loved ones.  I think this also ties into the wider concerns, appropriately considered here at Samhain, and I think that the poem I read speaks to both.

	Let’s start with hearing the poem again.  You may know that Jane Kenyon, the author, died in 1995 of leukemia.  It’s hard to get that out of your mind once you know it, but in fact the poem was written a year before she was diagnosed.

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise.  I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach.  It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate.  It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks.  It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
 
	Despite the fact that she was not yet diagnosed when she wrote this, the poem clearly is contemplating her own death.  That is the ultimate otherwise of the poem.  The last otherwise, the one she knows will come, is the same otherwise that comes to all of us.  

	Our lives are an exception, what T.S. Eliot called that “dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.”  I, Edmund Robinson, had no existence at all prior to the moment of my conception in October of 1947, and I will have no physical existence after my death, so my period of life is an exception to the long period of non-existence.  In all the history of the human race, the time in which there has been no Edmund Robinson is far greater than the time in which I have been here, and the same can be said for any mortal.

	But there is more to it than that.  Listen, Jane Kenyon says, particularities matter.  It matters that I am waking up in this bed.  Not any bed, but this one with the four posts.  It matters that I am eating peaches. That I am working in my garden.  Not your garden, not any garden.  This garden.  This is the work I love, the work in this garden.   It could have been otherwise, but then it would have been completely different.

	We are wedded to the particularities of our lives, though sometimes we behave as if they don’t matter.  We live in Wakefield or Lynnfield or Reading or Melrose, particular towns.  Oh they each have town greens and clapboard churches and a Dunkin Donuts or two, but they are not equivalent.  What the poem says, it seems to me is that what you do with the particularities of your life is you embrace them.  You celebrate that it is this way and not otherwise.  You celebrate that Reading is not Wakefield is not Melrose is not Arlington.

	We have been living in a particular country, a country particularly blessed, until recently, by the absence of military action on its own soil in more than a century, of friendly nations on its borders and oceans between itself and most of those who wish it ill.   It could have been otherwise.

	And now it is otherwise in a sense.   We are losing our exceptionalism, which was always more myth than reality.  We are having to come to terms with the reality of terrorism operating on our soil, as the Israelis and Italians and Germans and British and Greeks and Sri Lankans and Japanese have been coming to terms with it for decades.  And if you meet someone from one of these countries, where cafes and school buses and rock concerts regularly blow up, they will tell you that you must develop a thick hide.  You must desensitize yourself.

	And that is one of the challenges that the changed climate in America poses to us.  Are we going to desensitize ourselves to violence?  Isn’t that just what we shouldn’t be doing if we the people are going to insist that our government conduct this military campaign with a minimum of civilian damage?

	Yes life is riskier in today’s America than it was in yesterday’s.  But those who have lived where terrorist movements are active will say you can’t hide indoors with your gas mask.
  
	For someday it will be otherwise, whether or not you have tried to play it safe.  Someday, no matter what we do, we will each die.  Many of us are fearful of airline travel now.   My ex-wife wrote an e-mail to me and our children saying that she won’t fly anywhere over the holidays and recommending that our son Luke consider the risks carefully before flying to the States from London for Christmas.  His reply was “oh, Mom, we’ve all gotta go sometime.”  

	We’ve all gotta go sometime. Brave words.  While we may pronounce them out loud, many of us are quietly changing routines to better our odds.  We may handle the incoming mail a little differently, we may avoid going to large public places, we may take the train.     Besides, if we take this gotta-go-sometime attitude to the extreme, it would lead to the proposition that anything goes.  We can be as risky or  destructive or counterproductive or selfish as we like, because we’re each going to die anyway.  To read life or the poem that way would be wrong, for nothing comes through in the poem so clearly as the writer’s love for the particularities of her life the way it is.  She prefers it this way rather than otherwise.  She cherishes its details in the time she has to do so.

	Now a colleague of mine, a woman in her mid 40's who left an abusive marriage a decade ago, criticizes the poem on the basis that it counsels people to be content with their lives as they are.  Her slant on it is apparent: she doesn’t want anyone telling her or other people in abusive relationships that they can’t get out, that they should accept the situation as it is.  I don’t think this is the message.  I think the poet is here in love with the details, but that doesn’t say that change won’t happen or can’t happen.  Indeed, the whole concept of otherwise is that there are other possibilities.

	It is the imagination of those possibilities that makes us human.  For cats and dogs and pigs and horses, there is no otherwise.  There is no other way it could have turned out, because they don’t, so far as we know now, have the capacity to imagine a world other than the one they are living in.

	If we love this life, if we love the community we are living in and which we are building, we want it to prosper and blossom after we are gone.  This leads, not to a withdrawal from the world, not to acceptance of those parts which we ought to change; rather it leads to a passionate engagement with it.  

	Do you find yourself with a bigger appetite for news and commentary on national and world affairs than you had before September 11?  In part this heightened interest might be fueled by anxiety – we want to know where the next threat is likely to come from, so that we can put our worries in a nice prioritized order. But a by-product of this interest is a new caring about policy, about the choices that are made.

	A passionate engagement leads us to feel not only for the Americans who died September 11 but also for the Afghan civilians who may be killed or wounded by US bombs.  We know that any out-and-out military exercise tends to succumb quickly to the law of unintended consequences.  One of the otherwises that haunts us as we survey the grim policy options is that we may have been goaded into a reaction which results in more widespread harm than the atrocity we have already suffered.  

	Let us who love the particularities of our lives as they are also not shrink from a frank and loving debate on proportionality of the action being taken in our name.

	  But while our anxieties may be focused on the national and international, Jane Kenyon’s poem counsels us to remember the immediate and the intimate.  In that vein, we should remember that some of us here have close and known loved ones for whom otherwise has already happened.

	Grief has its own calculus of distance.  When I was on the second day of my first unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, I had my first death.  I watched as the emergency team tried to resuscitate a 65-year-old woman who had suffered a heart arrest.  When they stopped their efforts, I was asked to wait around until the daughter of the deceased could come.  I was told the daughter’s name and that she was a real estate agent.  I suddenly concluded that I had just witnessed the death of the mother of a person I knew well. It turned out later that there were two real estate agents in town with the same name, and this was the mother of the other one, but for about an hour I had been under the mistaken impression that this was my friend’s mother.  I was startled at how much difference that made in my reaction to the death of this woman.  It was as if my own grief was inversely related to my social distance from her.

	When Jacqueline’s mother died, the Rabbi gave out little mourning pins to the husband and children of the deceased, but not to the in-laws.  I understood that Jewish custom favored those more directly connected over those whose connection was more remote.

	When we have lost someone close, it is a completely different experience than losing someone more remote.  The 5,000 who died at the World Trade Center are abstractions to me, but Sylvia Schwab was a very real and concrete person, with all her foibles and flaws.

	And yet I think death changes the particularity and starts to unfocus it.  When our loved ones have passed beyond the veil, they can start to loom larger than they did in life, but less immediately present.  This is the distorting effect of otherwise.

	My own conception is that we develop umbilical connections to everyone we are close to in life.  When I am born I have a literal umbilical connection to my mother which is soon discarded and all I have left to show for it, physically, is a belly button.  But there is a connector in my soul which has my own mother’s particularities, and that connector doesn’t work for anyone else.  When she is no more, that Bessie Boykin-shaped cord will still be attached to me. 
 
	But we have umbilical cords to everyone who has been meaningful to us.  We are spiritually fed through these cords while the other is still alive, and after they’ve gone, once otherwise has happened, we retain the cords as memories of them in all their particularity.

	Now to combat the Celtic celebration of Samhain, the early Christian church developed the notion of November 1 as All Saints Day, in which Christians are asked to pray for all the saints of the church, mostly for the martyrs who had perished during the time of Roman persecution before Constantine. 

	It appears that around the turn of the first millennium there was some dissatisfaction that there was a day to commemorate the martyrs, who presumably had gone immediately to heaven, and nothing to help the lowlier souls who were struggling through purgatory.  So in 998, St. Odilo created All Souls Day for the purpose of praying for ones own departed and thus helping shorten their time in Purgatory.  It was celebrated November 2.
	In Mexico it has come to be celebrated as Dio de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.  It is a time to remember all those who have died in the previous year.  

	Now it is good to have a time to remember the dead.  For those who have recently lost loved ones, it is an aid in the grieving process.  For all of us, it reminds us that we are members of an ongoing community, one which stretches backwards in time.  As I understand it, this church used to have a remembrance of the dead at its Maundy Thursday service, but that practice has cased as attendance at the service has dwindled.

	Several UU churches are adopting the All Souls/Dio de Los Muertos idea and we have decided to try it out here.   So next week at the Sunday service, I encourage each of you to bring in a photograph or some other memento of a person you have known who has passed away, either this year or anytime.  They do not have to have been members of the church.  We will have a point in the service at which you may come and place these mementos on a special table, and say a few words if you choose.

	I think if this works as I hope, it will help us cope, help us unhaunt our frazzled nerves.  Even though we live in scary times and some have lost our loved ones and even though we know that life goes on and change and loss are inevitable, we can like Jane Kenyon, plan another day just like this day, even though we know that one day, it will be otherwise.

Amen.