I often conclude burial services with words like these:

We commit the body of our friend and loved one to the keeping of Mother Earth who bears us all. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

We are glad that she lived, glad that we saw her face, and felt the glow of her friendship and kinship. We cherish the memory of her words, her deeds, and her character.

In love we will remember her life and the years of her companionship. And thus thinking of her, let us go in quietness and peace, to live our lives in charity toward one another.

There is an intense and religious relationship that spans the bridge between life and death. It's one that often requires rehearsals, rehearsals that take place sometimes in our dreams and sometimes through the celebrations of our holidays.

For several decades now, Halloween has been an increasingly popular holiday and one of my favorites. The history of this festival underlies some of the religious impulses it grew up to serve. Even if we disdain the commercialism that has sprung up around Halloween, its themes do speak to deep and dark human motivations that aren't necessarily evil, but that warrant our attention, still.

La Dia del Muerte esta aqui. The Day of the Dead, is upon us. Let's take some time this morning to look at some of its history and at its meaning for us. And as we welcome new members into our congregation today, let's look for a moment too, at a possible Unitarian Universalist understanding of the importance of this day.

More than 2,000 years ago, the feast we now celebrate as Halloween was a celebration of New Year's Eve on the Celtic calendar. It was called Samhain, the time after the harvest when the souls of the dead were thought to roam the barren landscape.

Long before the Christianization of the island kingdoms, there was a blending of Roman and Celtic pagan traditions. Roman soldiers, who had been in Ireland from as early as 43 AD, brought with them the festival of Feralia, an honoring of the dead. They also brought Pomona - a celebration of the Roman goddess of fruit and trees - perhaps an inspiration for later day apple bobbing.

When the Catholic Church moved into Ireland in the fourth century Christianizing its people, a sort of reverse conversion occurred. To a certain extent, the church was paganized by the rural culture there that held on to many of its persuasions and practices.

One such custom was serving the holiday dish, called callcannon. It was a mix of mashed potatoes, parsnips and chopped onions. Also thrown into the mixture were a ring, a thimble, a small doll and a coin. Whoever found the ring was said to get married in the next year. The finder of the thimble would stay single. Whoever got the doll was predicted to have a baby, and whoever got the coin was destined for riches. Personally, I think the hidden objects were a thinly veiled attempt to get the pagan children to eat their vegetables.

Another custom was that of soul cakes. These square buns with currants were given to the poor so that they would pray for a good harvest. Also, groups of poor would go begging from house to house asking for money to buy food for a Halloween feast.

In the year 609 AD, Pope Boniface IV created All Saints Day. Later it would be known as All Hallows Day. It was originally celebrated in the month of May. Two hundred years later though, Pope Gregory III moved the date of All Saints Eve to October 31st and the feast day, itself, to November 1st. This was an attempt to try to undermine the popularity of Samhain. All Souls Day, a minor holiday, was added on November 2nd to honor all the faithful departed. The Church was attempting to establish a monopoly on the dead, but the rural, or pagan practices continued.

In the next hundred years, there were many reports of satanic witch cults. The witches were said to have especially great powers on All Hallows Eve. The practice of lighting bonfires to ward off evil spirits began. I suspect that the reported satanic deeds were more of a political creation by the Church intended to scare people, than they were a focal point for the witches, themselves. Pagans, then and now, tend to be fun loving groups of earth worshippers, not evil doers.

Still, time marches on, even for ghosts and goblins I suppose. Through the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, settlers brought the traditions of Halloween to North America. Apple snapping ­ in which a suspended twirling stick holds an apple on one end and a lighted candle on the other, and the person tries to bite the apple without getting burnt ­ was a big hit at all the colonial Halloween parties. So too were apple bobbing, corn popping, taffy pulling and hayrides.

The 1840's brought with them the great Irish potato famine and an enormous wave of Irish immigration to America. The old country practice of burning candles inside turnips and potatoes was adapted to utilize the more ample North American pumpkin. The Jack-O-Lantern was named for an Irishman of yore so renowned for playing tricks on the devil that he was banned from both heaven and hell. Jack was doomed, it was said, to walk the earth with his lantern until Judgement day.

By the late 1800's, Halloween had become a national observance in the U.S. In the early 1900's communities began throwing citywide Halloween parties for children in an attempt to minimize damage from pranks and practical jokes. Cities across the country began organizing Halloween parades. One of my colleagues told me this week that in her small town of Meadville, PA (population 14,000), the Halloween parade is so popular that it lasts for over two and a half hours.

In 1950 children in a Sunday school near Philadelphia began to Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Relief Fund). They collected $17.00 that first year. Our own church school kids will be taking home their UNICEF boxes today. I wonder if each of their efforts might net more than $17.00 per child. That's the sort of thing we can make happen. If you don't have a child bringing a UNICEF box home to your house you might want to seek one out during coffee hour. This is a part of the tradition that goes back to the earliest days and the serving of soul cakes.

In the past several decades Halloween has continued to grow in popularity and in increased revenues. According to the National Retail Federation, Halloween is second only to Christmas in consumer dollars spent in observance of a celebration. $1.8 billion on candy, $1.5 billion on costumes and $2.5 billion on decorations have been spent on this year's Halloween.

And so, we might ask ourselves a few questions: What is it that so fascinates us with death that we just can't get enough of it? Why, since time immemorial, do we find special ways to celebrate it year after year? And, what is it about the current state of our culture that has encouraged this recent explosion in the popularity of this fascination and its holiday?

To begin answering these questions, I turn again to words we often use here in the celebration of funerals and memorial services. The poet writes:

"They are not dead who live
In the hearts they leave behind,
In those whom they have blessed
They live a life again,
And shall live through the years
Eternal life, and grow
Each day more beautiful
As time declares their good,
Forgets the rest, and proves
Their immortality."

Halloween falls at the time of year when, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, the landscape takes on a Sheol-like appearance‹barren in the afterlife of the season that has been.

Fiery autumn fades to brown.
The final leaves so slowly find their way to the ground.
Soft white cloud overhead,
So soon comes sunset of red.
Seasons whirl, their cycles spun.
Just as birth so death does come.

Perhaps the reason for such a holiday as Halloween is that we know, through the inevitability of death, that our time here is finite. And we long deeply to be connected with that which is infinite. We have as much a need to remember those who have gone before us as we do an urgency to be remembered by those who will follow us.

It's scary‹whether you're eight or eighty‹it's scary not knowing what comes after life. Many of us learn to grow more comfortable living with that fear; some of us never do. All of us though, need some kind of release for it, and so Halloween comes along to remind us that we're not always going to be here. And it also reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously.

The Catholic Church wanted its followers to resolve these questions and fears of mortality with a faith in eternal salvation with a risen Christ. I suspect this effort wasn't fully successful because the pagans of the countryside could not so easily quell their fears. Embracing a single past event of life and death did not satisfy their longings for loved ones departed, nor did it succeed in removing their anxieties over what was next for them.

They found their hope for these answers in the cycles of the seasons. Yes, autumn and winter were inevitable, but so were spring and summer. Somehow life would continue; they could see the promise of that all around them in the natural world. And so, they imagined it must be in some variation of this world, in the nature of things, in which human life would continue, too. May Sarton wrote, "What has been once so interwoven cannot be raveled, nor the gift ungiven."

This kind of religious urgency has continued through the centuries. I suspect that this is the way it is for many Unitarian Universalists as well. The story of a divine revelation, once opened and then closed cannot hold all the answers for many of us here.

We each have our own understanding of the cosmos and our part in it. Still, I suspect there are some strong similarities in those understandings. We know that we come out of the infinite stream of life; that we walk together for these short years of life, and then we return to that same stream. Some of us envision a personal consciousness that will be a part of our return; some of us do not.

For me that part's not so important. What is important is knowing that we emerge from and return to a source, a source that is the stream of life. We are a part of this stream, a part of that something much larger than ourselves, and we serve it by the way we live our lives while we are here, and while we are conscious.

We serve that something larger when we recognize and honor all souls as likewise being a part of that grand source of which we are a part. We connect with and serve that something larger, when we celebrate life, even after its passing, by holding in our hearts those who are no longer here, but upon whose shoulders we still stand. We connect with and serve that something larger by honoring those no longer with us, who have taught us, and nurtured us, and have led us along the way.

And we do well, I think, to approach this topic, at least once a year in a spirit of humor and with some element of irreverence, especially if that humor and irreverence can serve as a doorway into the more profound questions of what it means to be human. Ghosts and goblins, and Jack-O-Lanterns are a harmless and entertaining reminder that none of us is going to get out of this alive. And that none ever has.

What is it that so fascinates us with death that we just can't get enough of it? Death is the inevitable passage into an unknown future that awaits each of us. It is our constant reminder that we have numbered days to live responsively, numbered days in which to love fully, and numbered days with which to do the work of justice.

In traditional terms the failure to accomplish these goals has been seen as sin or evil. Perhaps that's why witches and ghosts and goblins are so often viewed as evil doers, because they are the reminders of opportunities in life that may have been squandered. Perhaps we can't get enough of death, because we're afraid we won't make enough of life. And so Halloween is here to remind us.

I said earlier that I wanted to ask what it is about the current state of our culture that has encouraged the recent explosion in the popularity of this holiday. Yes, we need an ongoing relationship with death to keep us in some sort of balance as we go on living. But why has Halloween grown so incredibly popular in the past several years? If the way we spend money is a good indicator of where our values lie, and I think it is, why are we spending almost $6 billion dollars on Halloween this year?

We live in a culture where the value of youth far exceeds the value of age. We live in a culture where the significance of the present is seen to far exceed that of either the past or the future. We live in a culture that has, to a considerable extent, lost much of its rapport with death.

This is an age in which, for the past 50 years and for the first time in history, the means of destroying the planet are readily at hand. Because the end of life, as we know it, is now a possibility, we have chosen to live in denial of death. It's almost as though, if we accept death at all, it will take over, and we will lose our very tenuous grip on life.

So we've diminished this wonderful holiday that was intended to help us better understand life by placing it in a context with death. We've sanitized it, and we've made it cute. Witches have given way to the Princess Jasmin. Wild beasts of the underworld have lost their place to darling little Simbas of the Disneyfied forest.

I think one of the reasons why Halloween has become so popular is because we are innately and religiously drawn to death at this time of year, but our cultural psyche won't allow us to get very close it. And so we have begun an enormous campaign to buy off death. We attempt to bribe it with candy and costumes and decorations that give us the false sense that we are in charge, and that death had damn well better keep its distance.

The sad part of it is, unless we are willing to let death in, as a friend, we may indeed create the monstrous cataclysm we most fear. A people who deny the possibility of death are capable of creating and using technologies that place the entire planet at risk of destruction. But a people who have respect for the loss of the life that went before them, also have a connection to the ongoing life that might follow.

I may be overstating my objection to a lot of the really cute aspects of Halloween and little kids. But I'm not overstating my fear of the consequences when a culture turns in denial away from the realities of death. Like the pagans of old, and all the indigenous peoples, we can allow the natural rhythms of the seasons to keep us abreast of life‹and death.

We really are here for only a little while. We emerge from the stream of life; we live our lives in celebration of life, and then death comes, as a friend, to take us back to that stream from which we came. We can't cheat it, and we won't beat it.

Tomas Transtromer wrote, "An angel with no face embraced me and whispered through my whole body: 'Don't be ashamed to be human, be proud! Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly. You will never be complete, that's how it's meant to be.'"

While we may never be complete, our proud work is to strive toward that completion. We sanctify life by honoring death. We bless our own lives as we hallow those lives who have gone before us. We prepare for life, when we allow ourselves to participate in rehearsals for death. By connecting with those who have gone before us, we make a space for those yet to come.

I conclude with this prayer for all saints and all souls by Kathleen McTigue:

In the struggles we choose for ourselves, in the ways we move forward in our lives and bring our world forward with us, it is right to remember the names of those who gave us strength in this choice of living. It is right to name the power of hard lives well-lived. We share a history with those lives. We belong to the same motion. They too were strengthened by what had gone before. They too were drawn on by the vision of what might come to be.

Those who lived before us, who struggled for justice and suffered injustice before us, have not melted into the dust, and have not disappeared. They are with us still. The lives they lived hold us steady. Their words remind us and call us back to ourselves. Their courage and love evoke our own.

We, the living, carry them with us: we are their voices, their hands and their hearts. We take them with us, and with them choose the deeper path of living.

Let us now name those who lend strength in our lives.