This year I was able to once again join the an interfaith leadership group in partnership with All Saints Pasadena for a memorial service for those who died in the last year while experiencing homelessness. I offered the opening reflection, which I wanted to share with you all here. Funerals and memorial services are some fo my favorite pastoral moments, because in those moments the deepest truths of my belief are enfleshed. Language is forced to its limit, as responsible pastors work hard to avoid clichés and easy answers. Here is my attempt at stretching language for a complex task.
Homeless Memorial Reflection by Pastor John Jay
Our brothers and sisters who live without permanent shelter experience life close to the bone. That is, they have the tragic privilege of being well acquainted with suffering, even unto death. What does it mean to have lived one’s existence within eyesight and earshot of death? Humans used to reckon with mortality as regularly as we reckon with the weather. There was no hiding it, no covering it over with Hallmark cards and embalming makeup.
This ancient familiarity bred within humanity a desire, acutely felt, to build a world of meaning around death. The universality of death became a way to understand all humans on equal footing.
Death humbled.
Naked we come into this realm, naked we leave it.
Dust to dust.
But not so anymore. The process of dying is itself reimagined as another plane of difference, distinction between people rather than joiner of peoples. Death sanitized or hidden. Death denied. Death polished until it reveals an inverted kind of privilege.
This evening we resist the modern urge to treat death as another dividing line between people. We join together across traditions to hold in sacred trust the crossing over from life to death. This is a passage humans have minded throughout history, and we do so again tonight.
Each of us has a way of speaking about the pain and hope associated with dying. It is usually with some version of the phrase, “Our friend has died, and yet…”
And yet…
Which leads us again to hunger and thirst for meaning. Tonight we insist that the dignity and scared worth of our brothers and sisters be instantiated and sustained in our collective speech and silence. That we would hold open the space for meaning to emerge in ways congruent with the best versions of our scared stories. And that at least for a moment, we would again belong to one another.
