For me, today's service is a bringing together of two themes, Hallowe'en and Remembrance Day -- and in a way they always belong together, for they're both about remembering our dead. Hallowe'en is literally the eve of All Saints Day, November 1, and the next day is All Souls Day, November 2.

When I arranged to visit my partner John in Mexico, it seemed important to try to do so at a time when I could see something of how these days, known as "the Days of the Dead" are actually celebrated in a country which keeps them more wholeheartedly than just about anywhere else. Now I'm back, and eager to share with you what I found. I'm eager, too, to muse with you on the relationship between the Mexican ways and our own ways of remembering those who've passed on, as we observe them both on Hallowe'en and on Remembrance Day.

First of all, I want to mention with appreciation someone else who went to Mexico for a similar purpose, a man called Greg Palmer, who I've mentioned before, but who has since contacted me because he happened to read the talk I gave last year on a similar theme. Greg is the author of a book, Death: the Trip of a Lifetime, from which I shall quote again today. (My big regret right now is that I've lost his email address; if he happens to read this talk, I hope he'll contact me again so I can thank him for sending me a copy of his book and the tape of a talk he gave to a Unitarian congregation some years ago on "Saying Goodbye".)

Palmer went down to Mexico to observe, and try to understand, the Days (and Nights) of the Dead, in which ancient beliefs have become interfused with All Saints' and All Souls' Days and with Halloween, in a mixture fairly typical of what happens in the encounter of differing religions and cultures.

Some of these customs, which I've now seen happening, might seem quite bizarre at first -- whole families, including young children, may spend hours cleaning the graves of their departed relatives -- and then spread out a picnic on the grave and enjoy eating a meal -- which might include a treat for the littlest ones -- a skull made out of sugar! There are toys, too, like the little wooden coffins with strings sticking out one end. When you pull the string a clay cadaver pops out of the coffin. Music is probably playing and games are played around the graves: it's a kind of party. The idea is that when the spirits of the departed see their beautifully decorated graves, they'll be happy because their descendants still care about them.

Palmer conducted an interview with the priest presiding over the Night of the Dead in the Mexican town which is best known for this particular festivity, and I thought you'd enjoy an excerpt from the conversation. To me it illustrates the tendency we all have to see things the way we want them to be.

Sitting in the church atrium, under the first olive trees planted in the Americas, [Father Cervantes] discreetly inquires as to my religious affiliation. And when I answer "lapsed Unitarian" he says "Ah!" and becomes a shade more intense. ...

"Does the competitive aspect of the Night of the Dead bother you at all?" [I ask].

"Competitive aspect?" Father Cervantes looks confused. "What competitive aspect?"

"Between villages. Even between families. I'm told that families compete to see who can decorate their ancestors' graves in the most spectacular ways. ..."

Father Cervantes begins shaking his head halfway through the translation. "This has nothing to do with competition, or tourists," he says with conviction. "The Night of the Dead is the people's affirmation of the glorious life after death." He speaks carefully, so even Unitarians can understand, and then rises to leave.

Well, we didn't learn much in the Liberal Religious Youth, but we did learn not to be intimidated by priests. Psychotherapists, yes; priests, no. So I try again.

"But Father, what about the humor in this -- the funny artwork and the Old Man's Dance and all that? Aren't your people trying to show that death doesn't frighten them, that in fact they can laugh at it?"

Father Cervantes turns and sighs a very long, priestly sigh. "There is no fun. There is no humor. We are not afraid of death because we know a better life awaits us with the Lord. That's what you will see tonight. Nothing more, nothing less."

Greg Palmer, I think, is not totally convinced, but he knows that we, too, see what we want to.

I quoted that because I, too, went to Mexico knowing what I wanted to see. I've been interested in death and the rituals connected with it for a long time, but a particular train of thought was sparked for me a couple of months ago when a member of the Sunday Services Committee (as the Programme Committee is now called) responded to my invitation to suggest topics for my reflections.

"Could you explore what's happening in our culture around death?" she asked. "I've noticed how a new custom seems to be growing up of placing flowers and crosses other memorials at roadsides where someone has died in a car accident, or on the lawn of a house where someone has been killed. We never used to see this. What's it all about?"

Well, I truly love it when someone actually asks for a sermon, so I promised I would respond, and this seems the perfect occasion. Because, you see, I think All Saints and All Souls Day, and Remembrance Day, and funerals and memorial services, and flowers at the scene of a death, and many other observances, in Mexico and here and everywhere else, are all about the same thing -- about transforming the human fear of death into a hope of immortality.

Some of you will immediately question my assumptions that at some level we're all afraid of death, or that we all have hopes for immortality, and there's certainly lots of room for discussion about this. Perhaps it would be better if I said that we're all conscious of death, rather than afraid of it. Forrest Church, one of the authors of the book Our Chosen Faith, says that the whole task of religion is to make sense of two facts in the consciousness of each of us, being alive and having to die.

I think that Remembrance Day and the Days of the Dead are essentially religious observances because they're about this: we're alive, while others are not; and we, too, will have to die, to become nothing. Our restrained Anglo-Saxon two minutes of silence and the exuberant Latin celebrations are tailored to our temperaments, but they're basically the same thing -- ensuring that those who are now dead, and we who will be dead, will live on, will not be totally obliterated.

Let me tell you a little bit about what I saw in Mexico, and how it fit and didn't fit with what I'd expected to see. First of all, my major surprise -- and a very significant one for a Unitarian, I think -- was that the Days of the Dead are not the same all over the country. There's diversity! There's variety! There's difference! Notably, in Merida, which was where we were from October 29 through November 2, the main observances are not in the graveyards at all, but in the main square, the Plaza Major, on Halloween, October 31.

We went to the main cemetery at dusk on November 1, All Saints Day, and there were indeed decorated graves and flower sellers with the traditional marigolds, and a few people visiting the graves, where candles were burning, but the cemetery closed at nightfall and in fact John and I were the last people there and had to be shown out by the cemetery authorities -- very politely, I must say. I'm glad they told us it was closing, because although we were quite ready to stay through midnight if that was the custom, I don't think we'd have enjoyed being locked in the cemetery all night long!

Fortunately, this discovery was not a disappointment, because two days beforehand we'd seen more than we'd ever expected of Days of the Dead observances, in broad daylight, in the City Square. I'm very glad John had been told about this beforehand, or we might have timed our travels differently and missed it all.

What took place was this: starting at about 9 in the morning, families and groups and civic organizations of all kinds began to set up shrines consisting, for the most part of huts with three bamboo walls and a leaf-thatched roof, usually about eight or ten feet wide and high enough to stand up in easily and visit with friends and family. Within this structure, on the back wall, an altar was erected, spread with a cloth and elaborately decorated with flowers, food, drinks, photographs and all kinds of items of significance to the dead person or persons who were being honoured. I've brought lots of photos, and I invite any of you who're interested to look at them afterwards.

What's almost impossible to convey with the pictures is the air of festivity. These shrines were all about dead people, about what we'd call ghosts. There were usually little paths marked off in the front of the altar, which were strewn with flower petals and were a way of inviting the spirits of the dead to come back and feel welcome. And if they came, they would indeed have felt welcome, I think. At every shrine there was traditional food and drink, not only for the ghosts (I didn't actually see any, unfortunately), but for all the passers-by and anyone who cared to participate in the feast. And I have never seen so many smiling faces, never.

There wasn't a single gloomy expression on anyone. I saw just about no other tourists, by the way -- the tourist season in Merida seemed to start about a week later -- and we were rather conspicuous gringos, but welcomed in as eagerly as the spirits of the dead. I think we must have seen at least fifty separate shrines, with all kinds of variations -- a sort of skeleton minstrel band at one, live honey-bees' nests hung high above the wall of another -- and everywhere the pan de los muertos and the bottles of beer and tequila which the dead person used to enjoy, and the sugar skulls, and always the smiles.

I expect you're wanting to ask whether the people who do this really believe that the spirits of the dead come back, and I can only say I don't know, or rather, I expect they do and they don't. I expect they believe it in much the same way we believe it when we sing, "Spirit of Life, come unto me .....", with a mixture of expectation and hope and devotion. I expect they'd be rather surprised if they saw grandma materialize on one of those paths, but I may be wrong. I feel fairly sure, though, that not seeing her does not undermine the significance of the occasion in any way. Grandma is remembered; her spirit is invited back; she is honoured and celebrated. How can this be anything other than wonderful and truly religious?

Back for a moment to the comment made at the Programme Committee meeting about the infiltration of similar kinds of customs into our society -- roadside shrines and so on -- and the underlying question about whether this is just a way of dealing with our guilt about how we treated people while they were alive.

I think it IS a way of dealing with our guilt, but I don't think that's bad, necessarily. We all have guilt about how we've treated people. I'll bet there's not one of us who hasn't wished we'd spoken more kindly to someone who's now dead, or visited them more often, or just been nicer to them. Leaving flowers at their grave, lighting a candle or contributing to a fund in their memory, certainly isn't going to change the reality of how it was, but it can be a reminder to us that we can do it better next time we have a chance with someone else.

It can help us commit to the honouring of a loved one's ideals and causes. Unless a gesture of remembrance makes us feel absolved of all further responsibility, which I doubt happens very often, I don't see how it can hurt. True, sometimes our observances seem to be more sentimental than significant, but so often it's simply a matter of differing tastes and preferences, not a moral issue at all. The way we remember is not half so important, I think, as the fact that we do remember.

A few days after we'd seen the Day of the Dead shrines and visited the cemetery at dusk, John and I went to Chichen Itza, the renowned Mayan ruins in eastern Yucatan State. We marvelled at the great pyramidal structure (John climbed it; I didn't), the great stone colonnades, the intricate carvings of gods and mythical creatures. We walked to the sacred cenote, the huge and fathomless pool into which human sacrifices, including children, had been thrown a thousand years ago, their bones recovered much more recently. We sat on the rocky rim of the great pool and pondered the Meaning of it All. Why were we, and travellers from all over the world, there at that place? Why is it, in all the best and worst senses of the words, a major tourist attraction?

Apart from the fact that it pours a good many dollars and yen into the Mexican economy, which is not all a bad thing, I believe it's good that tourists come to honour the past and the memories of all the sacrifices made at places like this -- sacrifices of lives and labour and love. I imagine that every single tourist at that sacred pool thought, for at least a moment, about the little children who had been thrown in there in an attempt to make life better for those who remained, and I doubt that it did us any harm at all to remember. Perhaps our brief moments of remembering connected us with Remembrance Day and with the traditional Wiccan celebrations at Halloween. In her book The Spiral Dance, Starhawk says that

..... the important elements [of the ritual] seem to be the public naming of our Beloved Dead, especially those who have died in the previous year [so] we can feel connected to the dead, honor the ancestors, and receive help and information. ..... we chant .... what we hope to bring into being in the coming year [and] sing the names of babies who have been born....

I suggest that Halloween and the Days of the Dead and Remembrance Day all recognize that we're linked in some mysterious, spiritual sense to those who have died, our saints, our loved and holy ones. How wonderful to have the conviction that we are linked, still, with the spirits of this year's dead. (Who are they in this congregation? Charles Paape, Irmgard Raynham, Nick Harder, and others who're in your thoughts.) Wonderful, too, to believe that we will be linked for all time with this year's babies, with Nicole Young and others close to you. It's good to think that they may remember us when they're grown and we're gone, and that they'll feel connected to us, isn't it?

To remember the dead as still present with us in some way we can't quite understand, but which we call "spirit" -- that's not superstitious, I believe; it's religious. To recognize that our children's future life is already in some sense present with us now and in some sense is our responsibility -- that's not superstitious but uncannily true. To recognize that our absent friends are here with us, that our thoughts and our caring feelings have enormous power -- this is not superstitious, it's what our community is about: it's our communion of saints.

As we remember, we know that death has not annihilated those whom we remember. As long as memory endures, their influence will be felt, and, most vitally, we are now responsible for their share of love, and joy and laughter. If we live our lives fully and deeply and joyfully now, we'll best honour all those who have left us. We will re-member them. We will remember them.