Getting the Most From Your Ghosts

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church in Wakefield 
	October 31, 1999

Reading:  "Tam Lin" Child Ballad #39A (Robert Burns Version)

As I told the children a few minutes ago, Halloween is thought to stem
from the old Celtic celebration of Samhain.  But along the way,
Samhain got mixed up with the Christian church?s All Saint?s Day, All
Souls Day and, in England, Guy Fawkes Day.  The relationship is not
simple and there isn?t enough evidence in the historical record to
sort it all out.  Fortunately, we don?t need to sort it all out.
Halloween has taken on a life of its own, particularly here in
America, and seems to grow bigger every year.  The search for origins
gives way to a search for ways to celebrate this occasion which will
be meaningful to our lives here at the close of the century.

It is fruitless to worry too much about authenticity in revivals of
pagan customs which have been, if not dead, at least underground for
the better part of two millenia.  After all, the Celts were
marginalized in continental Europe in classical antiquity, and the
Celts in the British Isles were Christianized by the 5th Century of
the Common Era.  So the details of actual practice of a full-blooded
pagan religion are permanently shrouded in the mists the ages, and all
we can do is make educated guesses from four types of evidence:
archaeological finds at burial sites in the British Isles and
Continental Europe; observations of Greek and Roman writers who came
into contact with Celtic peoples; surviving folk beliefs and customs;
and Medieval Irish and Welsh literature and law.

One scholar who has studied the origins of the holiday, Folklorist
Leila Dudley Edwards, has this to say about the meaning given to it by
contemporary pagans in light of its history:

The most important focus of the festival for many pagans is the
emphasis on death a rebirth and the vast importance of having a time
specifically dedicated for letting go, being aware and acknowledging
the more difficult aspects of life.  It is the time of ?going into the
dark?  as one individual puts it.  Samhain is the point of the year
which embodies the concept of the mutual dependence of light and dark,
and strongly acknowledges the presence of the supernatural world.  The
process of earth?s regeneration can be directly related to personal
feeling and life experience.  Loss and death are essential elements of
life and cannot be denied; Samhain provides an opportunity for people
to process these feelings, to experience the ?underworld journey?  and
through its experience obtain greater strength and knowledge of self.
Several pagans told me that they recovered from the breakup of
emotional relationships or bad experiences at this time, exorcizing
memories or ?ghosts?  and psychologically discarding unwanted baggage
from the previous year."

Here is something we can hold onto, I think.  Most of us will not take
readily to the supernatural as traditionally conceived.  The idea of
fairies, ghosts or goblins actually abroad in the land wreaking havoc
is a charming relic of another era to most of us.

But we do deal with the Otherworld, and we deal with it every day.  In
fact, not just with one, but with several.  One otherworld that we all
visit daily occurs when we go to sleep at night.  Another otherworld
is the world of our past.  Still another is the world of our future.
And finally, there is the otherworld of the way things might have
happened but didn?t.

I put to you that it is spirits from these otherworlds that haunt us
today, just as surely as the spirits of the dead haunted the ancient
Celts.  What I want to do here is to name the ghosts from these
Otherworlds and talk about how we can either banish them or learn to
live with them.

First we have the Dream Ghosts.  The Otherworld of Sleeptime is, of
course, entirely inside our heads.  We obviously can?t control what we
dream, and efforts to understand why we dream what we dream are mired
in the morass of psychological theory generally.  Freud thought that
all dreams were attempts at wish fulfillment, and I recently heard
that neurologists partially validated this by showing that damage to
the motivational centers of the brain makes one incapable of dreaming.

The biggest objection to Freud?s theory is that often the dreams that
most affect us are not ones where we get our wishes, but where
something terrible happens to us.  Those who are traumatized by
violence suffer terribly from nightmares.

I don?t have any pat formula for dealing with troublesome ghosts who
visit in the night, other than having someone to talk to about them
afterwards.  I had a bizarre experience in a dream Friday night, where
I was playing my concertina in a group of people and suddenly looked
down and it had been altered so as to be unplayable:  where the
buttons had been was now a solid metal.  sheet.  I was distressed, but
I remember thinking, this doesn?t really happen, it must be a dream.
This realization enabled me to put the scary part at bay and I was
able to sort of enjoy the rest of the adventures that my subconscious
had in store for me.

I don?t know how this happened or how I could make it happen again.
It is a little like the technique you can develop in Vipassana or
Insight Meditation in the Buddhist tradition, where you try to keep
your mind focused on your breathing and as troublesome thoughts or
feelings arise, you say to yourself, "oh there?s a thought about my
mother; there?s a bit of anger, there?s a fear," and you gently but
firmly put that aside and go back to your focus on breathing.  The
effect is that you quickly realize that your mind, rather than being a
smooth logical machine progressing purposefully from thought to
thought is actually a boiling cauldron of thoughtlets and bits of
feeling.  The meditation technique is like being able to climb out of
the soup onto a platform and just watch the mind at boil.  Maybe
there?s some kind of way either in your sleep or in the waking moments
afterward that you can try to understand the ghosts that visited you.

For ghosts may be telling you something.  In folklore and literature,
ghosts are always coming with messages - think of Hamlet?s father.
But the ghosts that visit you in your dreams may also have something
to tell you, something about what you?re concerned about, afraid of,
grieving over.

Another set of ghosts are the ghosts of the past.  These are
classically the spirits of the dead, probably what we first think of
when we hear the word Ghost.  But ghosts of the past include anyone
you?ve known in your life who isn?t with you now, whether living or
dead.  In my life, my ex-wife fits into this category, as do most of
the people I knew in South Carolina.

Worship of dead ancestors is common in many cultures around the world,
of course.  In Buddhist lands such as Sri Lanka, the souls of one?s
departed parents are conceived as hungry ghosts who hang around the
house, particularly at dinnertime.  In Buddhist art, they are depicted
as having tiny mouths and necks and huge bellies that they can never
fill.  Even sophisticated westernized Sri Lankans will set aside the
first portion of food at the evening meal to feed the household
ghosts.

In Christianity, the desire to have some remembrance of the dead led
to the creation of All Soul?s Day which is now celebrated on November
2.  The original holiday was All Saint?s Day, which was established to
commemorate the Christian martyrs who perished during Roman
persecution in the first two centuries of the common era, i.e.  before
Constantine.

It appears that around the turn of the first millennium there was some
dissatisfaction that there was a day to commemorate the martyrs, who
presumably had gone immediately to heaven, and nothing to help the
lowlier souls who were struggling through purgatory.  So in 998, St.
Odilo created All Souls Day for the purpose of praying for ones own
departed and thus helping shorten their time in Purgatory.

Ghosts of the past haunt us in several ways.  For my mother, for
example, the memory of her parents holds up for her a yardstick of
perfection that she feels she falls short of.  With some ghosts, we
have unfinished business:  I would like for my father to come back so
I could try to break through the sparring that was our style to tell
him how much I loved him.  With other ghosts there may be anger, fear,
jealousy.  And of course with most of the departed that we have loved,
there is at the most basic level a sense of loss and sadness that they
are gone.

There is no cure for haunting by the ghosts of the past, no
ghostbusters you can call.  What you can do is to try to name these
ghosts, to realize that your own soul will need to grieve its losses,
and you should let it.  Losses which have not been grieved go
underground; the ghost assumes disguises or changes shapes like Tam
Lin in our story.  I found out in my first unit of Clinical Pastoral
Education in 1996 that I had never really been though the grieving
process for my father?s death in 1977.  My father had suffered a
stroke at age 51, the age I am now, and this had led to a mental
disturbance, a kind of bipolar disorder, which was very hard on my
mother and younger siblings who had to live with him.  His death by
his own hand seemed at the time to be a noble act of altruistic
self-sacrifice.  It is only in the last few years that I have begun to
feel the loss that he inflicted on all of us.

Another set of ghosts is the ghosts of the future.  One of the strong
themes in the folklore of Halloween observance is divination.
Sometimes people will drop candle wax into a tray of water and try to
read the shapes.  Fortunetelling is common.  I read of a belief that
if you look in a mirror while combing your hair on Samhain night, you
will see the face of the person you?re going to marry.

In our modern society, ghosts of the future are liable to visit young
people particularly.  Sometimes they are quite seductive; they sidle
up to you and whisper, "you?ve got to get out of this town, this
family, this school, this life and go someplace else where it?ll be
glamorous and exciting and cool."  These are ths spirits that whisper
to your son or daughter that they better not walk with their parents
when they visit the mall.

Othertimes these future ghosts will try to scare you out of your wits,
saying things like, "if you go this way, you?re going to go over the
waterfall, calamity is looming, the sky will soon be falling.  You?d
better get a job, a degree, a spouse, quit smoking, lose some weight
or your done for, over, finished."

I think the best thing to do with these ghosts is to listen to what
they are saying then make up your own mind.  Maybe you do need to
change course a little, maybe you do need to figure out some
alternative for your life.  But maybe you don?t.  Maybe these ghosts
are speaking out of a deep-seated anxiety about who you are.  The
ghosts may have an axe to grind.

Another response is to live within the present as much as possible.
Thich Nhat Hahn has a great essay on mindfulness in which he points
out that we spend most of our attention worrying about the future or
the past, and thus the present passes us by.  We will be returning to
mindfulness in future sermons.

My fourth and final group of ghosts, closely related to the ghosts of
the future, are the ghosts of alternative possibilities.  Their names
are Woulda, Coulda and Shoulda.  Perhaps these are the most troubling
of all:  the ghosts of all the other ways our lives could have gone.

If you think about the whole universe of possibilities, it?s highly
improbable that either you or I would be sitting here this morning.
Life had to arise on earth and evolve for five billion years.  Your
mother and father had to meet.  One among millions of sperm cells made
by your father encountered one among thousands of egg cells made by
your mother.  Your were born with particular genetic makeup, and this
interacted with the particular environment in which you lived to
produce a body and mind like no other that has ever existed or will
exist again.

But these sorts of statistical what ifs are not really the kind that
haunt us.  What haunts us are the decision points in our lives where
we said something or did something that we might have said or done
differently, and we?re now living with the consequences.

Frost captured this sense I think in his most famous poem, the Road
Not Taken.  You all learned in school, and I?ll spare you a
recitation.  But I remember vividly a morning early in the sequence of
breakup of my marriage where I woke up with that poem on my mind and
started sobbing.  The poet says he will be telling this with a sigh
somewhere ages and ages hence, but for many of us its more of a groan.
Why didn?t I take that job?  Why didn?t I keep dating that guy?  Why
did I have to go and say that?  Why did Garciaparra miss that fly?

This holy trinity of ghosts, woulda, shoulda and coulda can really
drive us up a wall.  I don?t know any surefire technique for
decontaminating the chamber these guys might have slimed, but I think
maybe we can take some inspirations from Rumi.  Rumi, the 13th Century
Persian poet and mystic, once said that we should think of our persons
as a wayside Inn.  Various fortunes may come to stay with us as guests
at the inn.  Some of them will be pleasant and some will be less than
pleasant, but we can fulfill our humanness by showing to all a
civilized hospitality.  If it is sadness that is coming to stay for a
while, say, "hello sadness, I guess you?re going to stay here awhile.
Go ahead and put your feet up and be comfortable.  You wait on them
fro awhile, and then they move on.

Try to engage your ghosts in conversation; find out what they?re
about.  What are they telling you about life beyond the looking glass
of the actual?  Does the road you did take really suffer, foot by
foot, in comparison with the road not taken?

About all that we can say good about the three ghosts woulda, coulda
and shoulda is that it is better for them to be hanging around than to
have a life which had no choices in the first place.  We didn?t take
all the roads, there were many roads not taken, but we?re at least
still moving along the journey.

At Samhain, the Celts say that the veil between this world and the
Otherworld is at its thinnest.  As Ms.  Edwards puts it:

the barriers between the realms of the living mortals and the past
dead and future unborn weakened, allowing both chaos and future hope
to enter into the normal day.

I think that?s the key.  We put down the barrier between this world
and the world of all the choices we didn?t make, and what we get is a
celebration of the fact that we had choices.

In a more general sense, our ghosts come to us for the same reason
that they have always come to humans:  precisely because we have the
power of imagination, the power to envision alternative realities.
This power not only enables us to populate worlds with envisioned
magical beings, the same power allows a scientist to come up with a
new paradigm.  We participate in the creative force of the universe,
and picking up a few ghosts here and there is a necessary correlate of
that fact.

Ghosts of our sleeping, ghost of the past, ghosts of the future,
ghosts of the roads not taken, all may be abroad at any time to haunt
us.  Maybe we should do like Janet did to Tam Lin, pull them off their
milk-white steeds.  They may change shapes a dozen times but if we can
hold on, we may find that the ghosts have transformed into something
that we can live with the rest of our lives

I?d like to close with one verbal attempt to look behind the veil, a
beautiful poem by Don Marquis:

Have I not known the sky and sea Put on a look as hushed and still As
if some ancient prophecy Drew close upon to be fulfilled?  Like mist
the houses shrink and swell, Like blood the highways throb and beat,
The sapless stones beneath my feet Turn foliate with miracle.

And life and death but one thing are - And I have seen this wingless
world Cursed with impermanence and whirled Like dust across the summer
swirled, And I have dealt with Presences Behind the veils of Time and
Place, And I have seen this world a star - Bright, shining, wonderful
in space.



And if you put that poem to the inspirational tune Jerusalem, you will
have hymn #337.  Let?s sing it.

Amen.