With Halloween just now behind us, thoughts about the relationship between the living and the dead may be present for several of us.  Perhaps you’re thinking of a loved one who died recently and you are feeling close to them.  Or maybe someone who died long ago is returning to your thoughts.  

In the Harvest the Power class that Jan Goodwin and I co-taught a few weeks ago, the class looked together at the history of Unitarian Universalism and the nearer history of our own congregation.  For our church we created a timeline, beginning with our founding in 1913 leading up to the events of the present day.

We measured out the timeline with the names and dates of previous ministers of the congregation, some still living, many long past.  Ministers are convenient for this sort of exercise because their involvement in the community has a clear beginning and end, and we keep records.  And then we surrounded the minister’s names with other staff and church members we remember, and also church events and programs and building issues and so on that tell the story of the church.

That history of the church is with us.  In the sense of Halloween or Dia de Los Muertos, the past continues to live with us as long as we remember and stay in relationship with it. Some of those stories move from “That was something that happened to us” to “This is an element of who we always are.”  Sometimes it’s healthy to embrace an identity rooted in past experiences.  Sometimes it’s important to liberate ourselves from the past.  

Whenever I do a timeline exercise, I notice two things.

One is that the timeline always grows more crowded as we approach the present.  The past fades.  The long ago past is nearly gone.  The timeline entries become facts without feelings.  The present teems with energy.  This is where life is.  And the future beyond the timeline is like the past again:  planned activity, a few dates on the calendar, mostly empty.

And I notice that the stories of the past often get reduced to simply a phrase or two.  Different people will even tell the story in the exact same words.  It becomes an incantation, a habit of language.  The past becomes what we tell about it.  Like a once-in-a-lifetime vacation trip eventually reduces to a single souvenir preserved in a keepsake box.

But the past is not really gone.  Even if remembered only in the rote way of a ritual phrase or a souvenir.  Even if forgotten. We carry past experiences into the present, individually and communally.  They are with us in the DNA of our bodies, or the DNA of church traditions and buildings and programs that we inherit, inhabit, and re-enact.  

In this season, between summer and winter, between the worlds of the living and the dead, in an interim period between one minister and another, make note of what you remember, and what you hope, and how your past and future live in the present.