They are the poets that help me—when I have no other way to make sense of it—to feel my way through death: to the love hidden underneath tears, when common words do not help. It’s not that they heal at all—what these poets say—instead, they help me feel. Which is I think the first thing we owe to those we’ve lost in death: to feel the loss, to mark absence with pain, to love by weeping.

The world-ending feel of it—when someone loved by us dies or when we contemplate our own inevitable death. “Unfriendly friendly universe…/But the world is out…/I did not know death was so strange.”[1] A sad poem by Edward Muir: sometimes I can barely read it; but when I can, it helps me feel the pain of the thing—no ordinary pain, pain that changes me, that should change me, that has changed you. For why else would you be here?

But that’s the thing, what good poetry does. It can speak to us, keep speaking to us when silence would be too numb and too dangerous. We verbal animals need words to survive; and I guess misery loves company, and poetry—good poetry—keeps the flames of words burning even if just barely. They teach us that even our rote words—those repeated I love you’s or those I’m here for you’s—even those words when spoken in confused affection, even they do much to keep at bay the deafness of death’s silence. Even those throwaway words do much to help us—that phone call, that small word, the words of friends.

I know I am perhaps being too literary here, my apologies. My point is simply that poetry for me, poetry and other words, has the capacity to touch our pain with gentleness. And that’s a good thing, for here’s the secret: all death awaits a word. And here we come to the heart of the Christian faith, to the dark Easter beginnings of it, outside a tomb, Magdalene weeping.[2]

But what is that word? Here the poets can only point and maybe rhyme hope. Like that mystical John Donne: “My span’s last inch, my minute’s last point,/ And…death will instantly unjoint/My body and soul, and I shall sleep a space,/ But my ever-waking part shall see that face.”[3] Or that sadly un-mystical but beautiful Langston Hughes: “Gather up/ In the arms of your pity./  Gather up/ In the arms of your love—/ Those who expect/ No love from above.”[4] These words are music, notes that make the soul want to keep dancing, to sing more—a rondo, a refrain, words that if we were not mortal ourselves, we could in theory sing forever. Now here I’ve gone on and got not too literary, but too musical, again my apologies. But perhaps you can begin to understand why we have come here this evening to sing for our departed loved ones, why it feels right to whisper their names within the whispers of sacraments and sacred music—because maybe it’s the closest we can get to the music of eternity, the closest we can get to heaven.

And it’s a word that is finally personal, the first word of eternity—our names. “Mary,” the Lord said to her that still-dark morning.[5] Who’s to say the Lord didn’t sing her name? Maybe he did; sometimes I like to think he did. I don’t know much else; faith simply holds me here. I just feel that it feels right to sing, to speak the names of our dearly departed. And I hope you do too. I hope you sense as I do that it just might be the beginning of heaven—tonight, so close in communion with those we still love. Amen.

[1] Edward Muir, “A Child Dying”

[2] John 20:11-18

[3] John Donne, Holy Sonnet VI

[4] Langston Hughes, “Litany”

[5] John 20:16

© 2024 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield