When The Dead Aren't "Gone"

The season of All Saints asks us to re-imagine the breadth of our belonging.  It is hard enough to imagine ourselves belonging to a community that stretches around the globe.  Harder yet to imagine belonging to a community that includes the living and the dead.  Should it so easily escape us that we the dying are connected to the already dead in a community of grace?  Perhaps the boundary line “separating” us from them is more permeable than we assume.

Those of us alive in this particular cultural moment don’t have the luxury of a parochial vision.  We know that we live in a globalized, connected world.  It may have once been possible to imagine that Chinese factories had nothing to do with me.  Or that my coffee drinking is divorced from those who grew and harvested the coffee beans.  Or that my eating habits had little to do with fish populations and far away agricultural patterns.  Or that my local bank had nothing to do with banks in Europe, Russia, and Dubai.  But no longer.  In terms of climate, commerce, agriculture, trade, transportation, and technology, we’re more connected to our fellow human beings than we ever have been.

Which could, I suppose, prompt us to think a little harder about all the ways that we the dying are connected to the already dead.  Our faces, gestures, metabolisms, psychic health, and disease vulnerabilities are all ways in which our ancestors’ DNA are still with us.  To broaden that picture a bit, the branching of the evolutionary tree connects us to yet more distant relatives.  The recently dead are among us in memory of course (perhaps fewer than we think, and for a shorter time than we imagine).  The longer gone are remembered only if their lives were remarkable, or recorded.  Or if they left something that endures.  The dead are among us in language, in poems and novels.  Or visually, in sculpture or paintings.  The dead are present to us in the architecture we inhabit.  And in the layouts of our villages, towns, and cities.  The traditions we live by, of course, are given us by the longer dead.  

Oh yes, and the dead are with us in our cemeteries.  Our dead are among us as those buried in the earth in the places where we live.  Cemeteries have long been a public acknowledgment that whatever commonwealth we enjoy has come to us from those who lived, labored, and loved in this particular place.  But this cemetery thing may be a trend nearing its end.  Fewer people are being buried (the terrible expense, the burden on loved ones who have moved away to keep up the grave, the awkwardness of committing to one place, when one has been traveling around all one’s life, it just doesn’t make sense anymore).  People in their twenties see cemeteries as “creepy” places.  They probably don’t live anywhere near where their relatives are buried.  If they do, they probably don’t “visit” the grave site like their parents, or at least their grandparents, used to do.  What’s the point?  Or, if they’re in business school, they may also see cemeteries in economic terms: a bad return on investment when you think about other ways this land could be developed.

We live in culture which encourages us to part with our dead.  To tell them goodbye and to mean it.  We consign the dead to oblivion, as those already on the way to being forgotten.  Yet we’re troubled by this abandonment, this forgetting.  Maybe that’s why so much of our film and literature gets its spark by portraying us as those haunted and hunted by the dead.  Those ever popular zombie films are, one one level, our way of worrying about the continuing presence of the dead.  The refusal of the dead to go away.  The possibility that the “dead and gone” aren’t “gone” at all.  The ghosts of the departed pick at this same sore of ours.  Shakespeare’s use of King Hamlet’s ghost to get that story going and the continuing ghostly appearance of the father on HBO’s “Six Feet Under” can serve as examples here.

In the biblical tradition, those “saints” who have died in the Lord have not died in vain.  They probably are forgotten. Yet they are not lost.  They are not gone.  They are among us, held in whatever “reality” they inhabit by the God who is among us.  Could we the dying be among the dead, not reluctantly and with a cold shudder - but with gladness?  Could we imagine the emergence of alternative practices - promoting remembering and honoring the dead?  Can we imagine moving from the metaphor of haunting to that of hospitality?