All Souls Rembrance

As we move closer to All Souls Day (November 1st) I find myself thinking about my dad.

It’s been three and a half years since he died, and yet every time we lose someone in our community, regardless of whether or not I knew them, was close to them, or not, I feel my own loss at the edges of my consciousness.

We have lost much this year. 

Even more across the past few years.

And grief compounds.

Which means, among other things, that when you experience the second hand grief that comes from hearing about the loss of others, or you experience new grief yourself, all the feelings from griefs past can hit you in fresh waves.

It is too much for any one of us to handle alone.

We cannot love one another and be open to helping each other through struggle without learning to share the load. We can’t be communal in how we care for each other without finding ways to be communal in mourning together. And if we try, we will find ourselves isolated and crushed under the weight of more pain than any one person was ever meant to carry.

That is why we are talking about grief in church and in small groups. It’s why Summer Kemp-Schlemmer and Julie Flora are exploring options for grief groups here at Broadway. And it’s why Summer and I built the ofrenda you may have seen in the Welcome Center space.

An ofrenda (Spanish for “offering”) is a Mexican tradition of creating an alter of sorts with remembrances of lost loved ones in order to welcome them back on DIa de los Muertos (the Day of the Day, similar to our All Souls Day). What we have created is not a traditional ofrenda (we are not Mexican and are not trying to appropriate a culture we respect a great deal) but is inspired by the tradition. It is an opportunity to place remembrances of those whom we have lost in this life, both as a reminder that they are never truly gone and a reminder that we at Broadway are shaped by folks whom we have never even met. It is an outward and visible sign of the fact that we are surrounded by “so great a cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1).

We invite you to bring pictures or small remembrances of those who have gone before you - of those whose loss you feel at the edges of your consciousness whenever you see or experience new losses (my dad’s picture is already on the table). And we invite you to take a moment to look at the table, to ask questions of one another, and to celebrate the amazing lives which have formed, and are forming us, here at Broadway!

Your brother on the journey,
Pastor Brian