Harry T. Cook

11/02/08

A Sermon for the Feast of All Saints

In one of the early scenes of the 1950 movie “King Solomon’s Mines,” ivory hunters shoot a huge bull elephant. As he collapses, other elephants are seen to gather around him trying to get him up. Finally they just stand around the corpse as if in mourning. Only another volley of shots causes them to scatter, but, if you are paying close attention as the film rolls, you can just see in a fleeting instant one of the elephants in flight stop and look back. Since it was not a staged thing, I have always assumed that the elephants’ behavior was some early form of what on up the evolutionary path would become human behavior in the face of loss and death. We, of course, are not pachyderms but Homo sapiens. Yet our mourning, too, proceeds from memory, and our memory is intensified by mourning in some ways like the elephants of “King Solomon’s Mines.”

Somewhere floating in the ether of my voluminous memory is the phrase, “O memories that bless and burn,” which, Google tells me, came from the pen of one Ethelbert Nevin, a popular song writer in the late 19th century. It is said that he was mourning the death of his wife in verse. “O memories that bless and burn.” While I would not put it quite like that, I know (and so do you) exactly what he meant. We would none of us willingly give up certain memories even though they sometimes make us cry. Memories and memory are among the most human of all traits.

Some anthropologists and psychologists suggest that the ability to remember and the stock of memories we possess individually and collectively contribute a large part of what makes us “sapiens,” that is intellectually equipped beings. Memory is the theme of All Saints’ Day as the church remembers its life from the beginning when prophets, apostles and martyrs went about being who they were and doing what they did to make an indelible mark upon their world. More immediately we remember those who, closer to us in time, put their imprints more directly upon us, so helping to make us who and what we are. I can tell you that none of us is a maverick, that is, one unclaimed by a genetic code. We each and all come out of a tradition and are beneficiaries of a heritage. We do not need a brand upon our haunches to remind us of to whom and to what we belong.

The holiday known as Thanksgiving is a little less than a month away. It is as naturally a family affair as any holiday. It is not for nothing that Thanksgiving annually sees huge increases in inter-city travel. People are drawn to the family table wherever it is spread. It is a day upon which even the most negligent of siblings or children will pick up the phone to say “I love you.” There will scarcely be a Thanksgiving table set anywhere this or any year from which loved ones will not have gone and left behind both empty chairs and longing hearts. That slight dimming of the illuminating and warming holiday light is memory at work as those still living look back in time and remember when. For the first time, my wife and I will be guests of our daughter at her table, which will surely cause us to remember with no little nostalgia all those past Thanksgivings when we and our children were together at our own table. Beyond that, we will remember ones we loved in earlier days with whom we sat at other tables and who no longer sit at any table we know of. So Ethelbert Nevin was right about memories: They do bless, and they do burn. It’s what makes us human. It’s what makes the heart softer and us more empathetic to others’ losses. It’s what in church-talk makes us “the communion of saints.” We are not unclaimed mavericks possessing neither past nor present. If we’re lucky, we know who and whose we are . . . because we, like the elephants in “King Solomon’s Mines,” stop to mourn our dead and then go on living with the occasional look back to remember. The dead and gone are always with us in memories that both bless and burn.

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.