Chalice Lighting
Life is a gift for which we are grateful.
We gather in community to celebrate the glories
And the mysteries of this great gift.
--Marjorie Montgomery
Meditation
The Forgotten Grave
After a hundred years
Nobody knows the place,-Agony that enacted there,
Motionless as peace.
Weeds triumphant ranged,
Strangers strolled and spelled
At the lone orthography
Of the elder dead.
Winds of summer fields
Recollect the way,-Instinct picking up the key
Dropped by memory.
--Emily Dickinson
Have you heard that Paul McCartney is dead?
That’s right. Apparently, he died in 1966 or thereabouts. The young bass player
and singer/songwriter for the Beatles was killed, so the story goes, in a tragic car
accident while driving home from the recording studio late one night. The three
surviving members of the rock band, afraid that the death of “the Cute Beatle”
might damage the group’s enormous popularity, decided to keep Paul’s death a
secret and replaced their fallen band mate with the winner of a Paul McCartney
look-alike contest.
How do we know all this? Well, according to the urban legend, John, George,
and Ringo decided to hide clues about their friend’s untimely death in their songs
and album covers as a way to ease their guilt over covering up the tragedy.
Take the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, for instance. One of
the most influential and recognizable album covers in pop music is actually, so
the story goes, a funeral, with everyone, including the imposter Paul McCartney,
somberly standing around the real Paul McCartney’s freshly dug, flower-covered
grave.
Likewise, when you consider the symbolism of what the Beatles are wearing on
the cover of Abbey Road, some say it’s quite obvious that this photo represents a
funeral procession, with John leading it as the minister dressed in white; Ringo
the dark-suited undertaker behind him; followed by a barefoot Paul, the
deceased, walking out of step and wearing a shabby suit; and bringing up the
rear wearing what appears to be a blue-collar working shirt and jeans is George
the grave-digger. Removing all doubt that the Beatles are really trying to tell us
something here is the license plate of the Volkswagen along the curb. It says “28
IF”—which means, of course, that the real Paul McCartney would have been 28
IF he had lived.
There are supposedly a multitude of such “clues” on other album covers and in
the Beatles’ songs (although the Beatles themselves denied putting them there
even as an inside joke). However, my purpose here this morning isn’t to explore
this intriguing rock and roll folktale (maybe that would make for an interesting
adult RE some day). I would like to use it to introduce what I do want to examine
a little more carefully today: the stories we tell ourselves about death and what
these stories might tell us about ourselves.
So, what does the folklore surrounding the “Paul is Dead” legend have to do with
such a weighty topic? There are many factors that contributed to the creation of
this odd story (perhaps chief among them was the heavy use of hallucinogenic
drugs among many Beatles fans in the late ‘60s), but the one that sheds light on
what I want to reflect on today is how this story, as silly and preposterous as it is,
can be seen as a very human attempt to make sense out of an often senseless
world.
The “Paul is Dead” story emerged in the late 1960s during a time of intense
social upheaval and violence in America. The war in Vietnam was escalating and
so was the causality rate; Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were
assassinated months apart from each other; riots and violent protests rocked
cities and college campuses across the country. Amid all the chaos featured
nightly on TV newscasts and in daily newspaper headlines—real news stories
about real events—there arose this strange tale about a member of the most
popular rock band in the world suddenly dying in a car crash.
When it was first broadcast in the late ‘60s on a college radio show as a joke, the
“Paul is Dead” story unexpectedly took on a legendary life of its own, quickly
spreading on college campuses around the country. One reason this story
caught on the way it did might be that, as many folk stories try to do, it tapped
into and expressed something largely unspoken percolating beneath the surface
of that generation’s group identity. As Bill Moyers said in “The Power of Myth,”
the main reason we tell myths, legends, and folktales is to “come to terms with
the world, to harmonize our lives with reality.” Such stories serve to help us, in
some small way and however illusory, make a little sense of what can otherwise
be an incomprehensible and perplexing world around us.
So to a generation trying to make sense of the violent deaths of friends in combat
or of the sudden assassinations of its political leaders, the popularity of the “Paul
is Dead” story can be seen in some ways as an unconscious attempt to make
sense of a seemingly random and senseless world. There may not be any easy
answers that will help us understand why Robert Kennedy was killed, but we can
figure out what supposedly happened to Paul McCartney that night as he drove
home from the studio: all we need to do is look hard enough for all the clues
hidden there in the Beatles’ songs and album covers, and the mystery will be
revealed.
I think the assumption that mysteries can be solved if we just look hard enough is
a very basic human trait. It underlies much of what passes for entertainment in
our pop culture today. From fantasy shows like the X-Files—which wove
together all sorts of urban legends, folktales, and conspiracy theories into its
storylines—to more reality-based crime dramas like “Law and Order,” viewers are
reassured every week that, as the X-Files used to say, “The truth is out there,”
you just have to look for the clues and piece it together.
It’s not surprising that many of the stories that capture our imagination the
most—like those told on a show like “Law and Order”—are trying to make some
kind of sense out of death, because what is more senseless to the living than
that? I think a lot of us are drawn to these kinds of shows because they subtly
appeal to a universal concern—our mortality—and attempt to reassure us in a
roundabout way that there are answers to that ultimate mystery, and that death is
something we can figure out and, to some extent, explain.
While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I think these kinds of stories end up
serving as entertaining diversions that speak to our anxieties and uncertainties
about death on a superficial level, while at the same time paradoxically
distracting us from examining our own personal mortality. I wonder if this
fascination with unraveling the mystery of someone else’s death in these stories
isn’t a way for us to avoid coming to terms with a genuine realization that we are
mortal too, and will someday enter into that mystery ourselves.
In thinking about this, I was reminded of a passage from Leo Tolstoy’s short (but
very profound) novel, The Death of Ivan Illych, in which the main character
moves from an abstract understanding of death to an all too real confrontation
with his own mortality:
In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only
was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could
not grasp it.
The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius
is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always
seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as
applied to himself. That Caius -- man in the abstract -- was
mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an
abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.
… "Caius really was mortal, and it was right
for him to die; but for me, Ivan Ilych, with all my
thoughts and emotions, it's altogether a different matter. It
cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible."
Such was his feeling.
"If I had to die like Caius I would have known it was so. An
inner voice would have told me so, but there was nothing of the
sort in me and I and all my friends felt that our case was quite
different from that of Caius. And now here it is!" he said to
himself. "It can't be. It's impossible! But here it is. How is
this? How is one to understand it?"
That’s a good question: “How is one to understand one’s own death?” Or,
shifting from the rhetorical abstract to a more personally urgent question: “How
am I to understand my own death?”
I can’t turn a Beatles’ record backward on my old stereo turntable and find the
answer to that question. But maybe the focus of the question itself is wrong in
assuming that I can ever hope to understand such an unknowable thing. As the
late mythologist Joseph Campbell once observed, “You don’t understand death,
you learn to acquiesce to it.” For Campbell, one way we learn to come to terms
with the mystery at the heart of our own mortality was through exploring what he
called “the literature of the spirit,” or the stories we tell ourselves about the life
cycle: birth, death, and rebirth.
These stories include everything from ancient sacred texts handed down through
the centuries to the personal myths we tell ourselves. What are the Christian
Gospels but an attempt to make sense of the brutal execution of an innocent
man and what it reveals to us about the meaning of Jesus’ life, about God, and
about the meaning of our own lives? On a more personal level, I’d like to share
here a brief excerpt from a memoir I wrote a few years ago in which I try to make
sense of my grandfather’s death a couple years before I was born:
“Unlike Emily Dickinson, for whom Death so kindly stopped, Death abruptly
barged into my family’s house in Aberdeen, Maryland one day; and like an
unwanted guest who refuses to leave, Death made itself at home with us
throughout most of my early childhood. Death quietly sat there on the couch in
the sunshine of the living room, watching Guiding Light or As the World Turns
with my Grandmother and kept her company while I played with green plastic
soldiers at her feet on the hard wood floor of her house on Webb Street…and
Death helped tuck me into bed at night and would linger there in the darkness
after my Mom kissed me goodnight…Death would remain behind and sit in the
chair beside my bed, quietly telling me stories as I drifted off to sleep.
“Death had been acquainted with my family since before I was born… first
intruding on my mother and her parents when her father, a veteran of World War
II and Korea, was killed after his car slammed into a telephone pole alongside an
icy Aberdeen road. It was the day after Christmas, 1962.
“The story is murky for me after this point, probably because no consistent family
history could ever hope to arise out of such a violent event that shatters a
family’s nexus into blood-stained pieces all over the living room floor. I’ve spent
much of my life trying to put those jagged fragments back together into a
fractured picture that makes some kind of sense, but many pieces were
hopelessly lost before I was born, sucked up into the vacuum; some pieces—too
many pieces—are so minute, and yet so significant to the picture’s unity, that I’m
unable to find them or even know they exist until I happen to step on one and a
sharp pain lets me know it’s there. And some pieces—far too many pieces—
were embedded inside the souls of my Mom and Grandmother after Death
crashed in on them with that Christmas visit, that I doubt sometimes if I’ll ever
complete the entire picture until Death kindly pays me a visit some day. “
For Joseph Campbell, creating a personal mythos like I tried to do in this memoir
as well as studying sacred scripture and ancient mythology all serve to amplify
the inner voice that Ivan Illych said never whispered to him, telling him that, like
Cauis, he too was mortal and would someday pass away. There are plenty of
other examples of this kind of literature of the spirit, but I would like to end with
two poems that tell me stories about death that inspires me to ponder the reality
of my own death.
When Death Comes
By Mary Oliver
When death comes
Like the hungry bear in autumn
When death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
To buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
When death comes
Like the measles pox;
When death comes
Like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
What is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
As a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
And I look upon time as no more than an idea,
And I consider eternity as another possibility,
And I think of each life as a flower, as common
As a field daisy, and as singular,
And each name a comfortable music in the mouth
Tending as all music does, toward silence,
And each body a lion of courage, and something
Precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
If I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
Or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
And this poem by Emily Dickinson:
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.
We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun
Or rather—He passed Us—
The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet---only Tulle—
We passed before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—
Since then—‘Tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses Heads
Were toward Eternity.
As necessary as the insights in these poems are in helping us to ponder and
open ourselves to our mortality, most of us can’t live all the time in the constant
awareness of death stopping for us some day and carrying us toward eternity.
Such an awareness of our mortality makes us realize how fragile we are, as
Sting sings. It’s not as disconcerting trying to figure out the mystery of someone
else’s death, rather than our own. It’s easier to look for all those clues
supposedly hidden in Beatles songs, than it is to search within to face our own
mortality.
But from time to time, it is good to listen to the stories we tell ourselves that
speak to our deepest, most vulnerable humanity and that unite us all in that
brotherhood and sisterhood of mortality that Mary Oliver writes about in her
poem. From that vulnerability a lovely flower can grow if we tend to it.
Each life grounded in this awareness, as the poet wrote, is a flower, a very
delicate thing destined in time to fall away, and made all the more beautiful
because of this inscrutable mystery.