All Souls/All SaintsDay of the Dead | November 1, 2026 | Rev. Dr. Kathryn Benton
“I want to die easy when I die.” This is a line from an old song which belonged to another period and another age. There is no gruesome note here, not a single morbid or depressing overtone. We are not face to face with something that is grim and foreboding. But we are faced with a grand conception of death that gathers in its sweep all the little fears and anxieties that condition the personal view and the private contemplation of the end of life. It is the Trumpet Call to human dignity.
I was drawn to the opening words from Dr. Thurman because of the process of dying that I have recently been witnessing with my friend, Michael Sharpe. I have been reminded of the following song, since he has several people, as well as Jesus walking with him at this time.
This is the time of the year that we commemorate our ancestors…those upon whose shoulders that we stand…those who have led the way forward. These voices could lead us today, if we are aware to that Trumpet Call…to that greater understanding of human dignity and the dignity of all life. This is one side to the celebration…the Day of the Dead, All Saints/All Souls Day…a remembrance of our ancestors.
But it is interesting that we focus on the underworld on Halloween. There are skeletons, gravesites, ghosts, devils and evil spirits, all amid the parade of small children asking for candy. These realities seem to be separate, except perhaps in the celebration of the Day of the Dead, in which we celebrate our ancestors in a variety of ways, including by celebrating. The roots of this holiday are probably both European and American/Aztec. There is a kind of complete consideration of humanity…the good and the evil that we often don’t experience in Christian holidays. It seems to be better able to hold the contradictions. Of course this is a generalization, but I see it as symbolic of the nature of life. We risk an oversimplification and a sentimentalization when we proceed only with the good or only with the evil. Instead, it is the process that causes this shift that we may need to investigate.
We have seen ample evidence of what is now being termed evil by so many. Matthew Fox wrote about this phenomenon in his book, Wrestling With the Prophets. The last chapter of this book entitled, Desentimentalizing Spirituality addresses this reality. He cites extensively Ann Douglas in her book, The Feminization of American Culture, in which she states that in a spirituality of sentimentalization morality is strangely irrelevant. Of course, this is true in our profit motivated society, but it is sometimes masked in a cloak of right and wrong, focused on racist, sexist, xenophobic and fascist ideology. It is the masquerade referred to by Howard Thurman…a façade that seems to point elsewhere to the evil…the wrong when actually it is right before our eyes…killing people and other species with impunity.
We are reluctant, though, to name this evil. Fox is not reluctant. He quotes a Lakota teacher of his who said…Fear is the door that lets evil into the heart. Thurman was also not reluctant. He wrote:
There is no need to fear evil.
There is every need to understand what it does,
how it operates in the world,
what it draws upon to sustain itself.
In addition, in a sermon from 1954 entitled, Be Ye Not Overcome by Evil, he describes how to understand what it does…how it operates. He said:
…to be overcome by evil is to have one’s inner awarenesses of rightness and wrongness so dulled, so worked over, that slowly, here a little and there a little, for me there is no right and wrong. When moral dullness and then deadness so irradiates my life that I can hurt you, I can be involved in a series of activities and actions, the results of which are destructive to moral values and to human needs without ever realizing that I am rotting on the inside.
This rotting inside means that there is no good or bad…there is just the assumption that we are moving forward on the wheels of inevitability as King said. But instead, it takes hard work to do right, and we must use our time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.
But in order to do this, Thurman also reminds us that we need to keep alive our sense of sin…he tells us not to let it die, for when it does you move out into darkness. A teacher of his (and ours) Mohandas Gandhi wrote of this idea of sin this way:
Politics without principle
Wealth without work
Commerce without morality
Pleasure without conscience
Education without character
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice
Thurman continues with his lesson on how to face evil. He says…the extent to which it triumphs in me, it triumphs in the world. And that is important to remember. Important to remember! Further he says…I must not permit my life to be destroyed by inner bitterness, by the inner spirit of retaliation, by hate.
Of course, it is hate that can enable us to act on this evilness…Thurman continues by saying that…We must not shrink from the knowledge of the evilness of evil…we must know that the real target of evil is not destruction of the body, the reduction to rubble of cities; the real target of evil is to corrupt the spirit of man and to give his soul the contagion of inner disintegration.
This inner disintegration can certainly be contagious. It has happened before our eyes. Thurman continues:
When this happens,
there is nothing left,
the very citadel of the human being is captured and laid waste.
Therefore the evil in the world around us must not be allowed
to move from without to within.
This would be to be overcome by evil.
This is the essence, I believe, of what Howard Thurman did for so many and does for us today. He teaches us how to resist the infiltration of evil on a personal level, making clear that this has the power to enable whole societies to do so. But Thurman does not leave us there. He takes us further into the realms of mysticism by reminding us of the beauty of the earth…of the creature…be it human or otherwise and the intricate connection between us…the common ground beneath our feet…the deep river of existence and the great sky above our heads. He writes:
To drink in the beauty that is within reach,
to clothe one’s life with simple deeds of kindness,
to keep alive a sensitiveness to the movement of the spirit of God
in the quietness of the human heart and in the workings of the human mind—
this is as always the ultimate answer to the great deception.
It is this ultimate answer that my friend has been seeking in the days he may have left in this realm. He has been able to envision a grand conception of death. This conception has indeed gathered all the little fears and anxieties of his living in order to contemplate his death. This Trumpet Call to human dignity reminds us of the power of our current remembrance…our celebration of the ancestors…perhaps especially in this place, the celebration of our beloved Dr. Dorsey Blake and his mentors, Howard and Sue Bailey Thurman. May we remember their ability to protect themselves and others from the infiltration of fear and hate and their ability to keep fresh before them the moment of their high resolve…their resolve to do right. In their honor and the honor of all of our ancestors.
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