Living a Story Worth Telling

Both the Mexican tradition of El Dia de los Muertos and the Celtic tradition of Samhain can be traced back thousands of years. Both ancient cultures believed that at this time of year, when the harvest had been gathered and the dark is replacing the light, that the veil between the living and the dead becomes thin. As we have heard, Mexican families gather at their loved ones gravesides, spread blankets out on the ground, eat a meal together and tell stories. It is through those stories that beloved mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters and children are made real again. Those stories are living memory.

I love stories. I love telling them and love sitting and listening to a story well told. My grandmother, Cece, was a story teller. Her full name was Cecelia Chase Lasbury but I called her Gran. Gran filled my childhood with stories of her youth and of my ancestors. She was a powerful woman, my grandmother. Tall, elegant and strong willed. She taught me many important life lessons: not to chew gum in public (I looked like a cow chewing my cud), which fork to use when there was more then one in front of me and that a well bred lady never needed to resort to profanity in order to express herself. And she taught me not to make important life choices based on fear. One of my favorite stories of my grandmother happened when I was a teenager and we were traveling together in England. We were waking down a street in a small English village when she spied a garden she admired over a fence. Before I knew what was happening she had walked through the fence gate and asked me to take a picture of a bush she liked so that she could show it to her gardener in Camden. I was mortified. I was also sure that we were going to be arrested at any moment. Instead, due to her charm, we were invited in for tea. By sharing this story with you this morning, by speaking her name out loud, I have brought my grandmother into the room with us. The veil between the living and the dead can be made thin at any time of the year when we tell their stories. Gran’s spirit lives on within my family whenever I tell her stories.

But what happens when we do not tell the stories? When evoking a name or a memory causes such pain that we hesitate to speak? My sister died when I was nine and she was 5. As you can well imagine, my parents were devastated. As a child, I soon came to understand that it was not O.K. to talk about Katie. To this day, my mother prefers not to talk about my sister. This silence has meant that her stories have passed from living memory. When we shy away from speaking of a dead loved one because it is uncomfortable or we are told not to tell the stories, something essential is lost.

What does this mean to all of us this morning? I think a good sermon or homily should give us something to chew on. It challenges us to live better lives. Here is my question: What stories do you want to be told about you after you are dead and gone? What stories will my darling children and their children tell about me when I am gone? Will you tell the story about the time that I forgot your sister’s birthday? Or when I set the oven on fire cooking Joshua’s birthday brisket? Or when the police came to the house when we were having the minister over to dinner because two of my children, who shall remain nameless, were hanging out of the upstairs bedroom window yelling to passerby’s that they had been kidnapped and were being tortured? Yes, those stories will be told but the part that I want to be remembered are the choices that I made. That I chose to laugh and not to yell. That I lived with humor and joy and love. That is the essence of my spirit that I want those stories to contain. So my question for you is this: Are you living a story worth telling? And how do you want that story to be told?