October 2022 Monthly Column for The Pajaronian Press Banner
By Rev. John Juno Song, Pastor of Watsonville 1st UMC
“What is life?
It is a flash of firefly in the night.
It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is like the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
~ Chief Crowfoot (1830 – 1810), died during the Blackfoot Crossing in Canada
Día de los Muertos, The Day of the Dead, is a long Mexican tradition of family gathering around the gravesite on the night before the All Saints Sunday (first Sunday of November) to honor and remember the dead. By doing so, they acquaint themselves with the reality of death as part of the fabric of life. In the Hebrew bible in Ecclesiastes 7:2, it says “You learn more at a funeral than at a feast. After all, that’s where we’ll end up. We might discover something from it.”
The veil between this world and the next is thin. Día de los Muertos is a meeting place of “between” the world where the living and the dead inhabit the mystery of co-intermingling of life, death and resurrection. The Christian belief in the “Communion of Saints” is an acknowledgment of our lives living in communion with the ancestors.
I believe learning how to die before we die prepares us to live life with the sobriety of the soul.
David West, a former center and power forward for the Golden State Warriors, was asked why is he playing for the Warriors for minimum when he can get so much more playing elsewhere. His answer is worth noting: “You can’t take it with ya!” Whether you are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or the Donald’s of the world, you are going to die. All the wealth and possessions, fame and power, facelifts and Botox, will not spare you from death. As the scripture reminds us, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!”
Death is the great equalizer. Death defines us. The liturgy for the Christian burial service states, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19). The sobering reality of death reminds us that I came into this world with nothing and I will depart from this world with nothing.
As Americans, we have a propensity for denial of death. We think death only happens to other people. We constantly over estimate how much time we have left in life. Let’s look at the sands of time in the Hour Glass as a metaphor of our time here on earth. In the first half of life, it seems like the sands of time moves very slowly. In the second half of life, sands of time move exponentially fast, and even faster at 2/3 way to the bottom.
As Chief Crowfoot wisely pointed out, your life is like “a breath of buffalo in the winter.” Let that image sink in. The scene of the breath of buffaloes so dramatically visible in the cold, crisp air of winter in the wild plains of America, only to see it evaporate into thin air in wisps of fleeting moment. Or as Carly Simon wrote in her famous song You’re So Vain, it’s “like clouds in your coffee.” How fleeting and ethereal life is.
Life is limited and we are living in the constraint of time. So here is the $64,000 question for all of us: What needs to happen that hasn’t happened for dying to be OK?
John
