A Message From the Rector

This week we are celebrating two related feast days. All Saints’ and All Souls’, also known as All Hallows and the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, respectively. We celebrate the saints as the great forerunners in the faith. We share their stories, we remember them on specific days, we have art and iconography dedicated to them. We know about their lives.

All Souls’ teaches us something different. All Souls’ remembers those we don’t know. Those whose names and faith may be long forgotten or known to God alone.

And every year at this time, when I think about those I love and see no longer, who I can’t interact with in the same way, I am reminded of a story that was shared with me while I was doing a rotation as a chaplain at Harborview Medical Center. My colleague, Beth, a Buddhist, offered it one morning as a meditation and it was one of the most profound and beautiful understandings of death I had ever heard. It appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered in 2005 and I want to share it with you now:

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every BTU of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

We talk about the saints as a Great Cloud of Witnesses. Perhaps that cloud is maybe a holy cacophony of particles and energy that embrace us at every turn. All you holy people, pray for us.