Love Never Dies | November 2, 2025 | Rev. Dr. Kathryn Benton

People ask me, “Why celebrate the Day of the Dead/Samhain

 if you’re not Mexican or Celtic?”

Because this time of year is not owned by one culture....it is a universal threshold, a moment when the veil between worlds grows thin and we are invited to remember that we, too, are part of the great web of life and death.

Honoring the ancestors is an ancient practice found in every lineage on Earth. It reminds us that life moves in cycles, that endings are sacred, and that we are sustained by those who came before us.

When we light candles, build altars, and speak their names, we feed the ancestors with remembrance and gratitude. In return, they feed us with

strength, guidance, and belonging.

In a modern world that often rushes past the mystery of death, these rituals bring us back into right relationship, with the Earth, with time, with our bodies,

and with Spirit.

Celebrating the Day of the Dead aligns our souls with the seasonal rhythm of descent, when nature turns inward and invites us to release, rest, and renew. It is a way of participating consciously in the great turning of the year, of saying yes to life’s full cycle.

We do this not to imitate another tradition, but to remember our shared human inheritance...to keep the thread of reverence alive in a culture that has forgotten how to honor death as sacred.

To honor the dead is to honor life itself. It heals the wounds of separation and brings us home to the truth that love never dies.

 I called on the wisdom of one of my teachers, Luisah Teish today for fortification and strength. I was feeling worn out…at the end of my strength and realized I needed to call on one of my teachers. Teish is a powerful teacher and healer whose voice is essential at this time. She is a voice of reverence for water and for life. She points out that this is a time when the veil between the worlds grows thin and when we are saying yes to life’s full cycle. We are, as she points out sustained by those who came before us. Having experienced a great deal of loss this year, especially the loss of Dorsey Blake, I felt the need for Teish’s powerful message…the message of the Goddess Oshun who is the goddess of sweet water, love, fertility, compassion and water. Teish shared a story about the Goddess on YouTube…

The story tells us what would happen if the Divine Feminine left the earth. We are in dire need of her power, her strength, her spirit. It seems that Oshun is perhaps leaving the earth. We are in an atrocious situation…I don’t have to tell anyone this. On so many levels we are in need of Oshun…the environmental situation that is intimately tied to our wasteful, disgraceful and disrespectful behavior. This behavior is supported by our very system…a system is great need of balance…we need the Goddess and we need our ancestors. They provide a perspective that has been, to a large extent, lost. One ancestor I have been calling on is Mohandas Gandhi.

He got to the heart of the issue, politically, socially, spiritually. He realized what we need to realize right now in this fight for humanity…this fight for the world. Gandhi’s wisdom can provide us with renewal at this time of turning…this time of darkness. Gandhi recognized that what was needed was peaceful, non-violent, non-cooperation, direct action. He said, they are not in control, we are. This is a universal message for our current situation on all levels. I deal with it with people on a personal level…people who have not been able to recognize their agency…their ability to be in control of their own lives. Yet we are, all of us, as Gandhi says, one in spirit. We have access to the power of this spirit as manifested by Oshun and by those who have come before. Gandhi wrote:

The forms are many, but the informing spirit is one. How can there be room for distinctions of high and low where there is this all-embracing fundamental unity underlying the outward diversity? For that is a fact meeting you every step in daily life. The final goal of all religions is to realize this essential oneness.

The final goal of religions, and I would add, all spiritual traditions is to realize this essential oneness. And if we are one, then we will have an effect on our situation…through prayer and meditation, through direct action, like Gandhi’s salt march. It is not, as he says, a matter of just protest but of direct action…direct action. This action can bring us back into right relationship, with the Earth, with time, with our bodies, and with Spirit. Both Teish and Gandhi remind us that prayer is essential to this remembrance and gratitude…he goes further:

But God does not come down in person to relieve suffering. He works through human agency. Therefore, prayer to God to enable one to relieve the suffering of others must mean a longing and a readiness on one's part to labour for it.

We are not meant to just wait for God or Oshun to take care of everything. We must labor…and we need a longing and a readiness.

Maybe that is what we are doing today at this time of turning…maybe that is what we are being called to do in this community. We may be accessing our internal longing and readiness… Thurman spoke about this in a series of sermons at Fellowship Church in the 1950’s. He talked about what we were actually accessing when we center down. He said:

…it is where nothing can abide that is not authentic. It is where there is no barrier. It is in you. And when the God in your spirit makes contact with the God of life, then there is established, in that moment, a courage that can turn any darkness into light — any darkness into light. How tragic it is if we turn our backs on so great a wholeness. How tragic it is.

Tragic indeed that we turn our backs on wholeness. When we make contact with the Great Spirit of the Universe through meditation, prayer, song, dance, art we find that the all-pervading presence is there and it is authentic…with no barrier…no separation. And according to Teish, this honoring of our ancestors:

 heals the wounds of separation and brings us home

to the truth that love never dies.

And perhaps it is this love that never dies that we are able to come home to today. We are able to meet in this Beloved Community in order to access the power of Oshun…of love and compassion at this time when the veil between us is thin…even between the living and the dead. This is the power that so many of our ancestors, including Gandhi, King, Thurman and Dorsey Blake accessed. They taught us where we had to turn in disastrous times like we are facing today. And once we begin to access this power, we can commit to it…like our ancestors did. Howard Thurman said this about commitment:

Commitment means that it is possible for a man to yield the nerve center of his consent to a purpose or cause, a movement or an ideal, which may be more important to him than whether he lives or dies.

It is God’s purposes that need to become our own. There needs to be an awareness of this Oneness with our ancestors we will reap the benefits that Teish was talking about. We will be sustained by them through this spirit and they will feed us with strength, guidance, and belonging. Equipped with this power of the spirit of Oshun…the power of our ancestors at this tragic time of separation, when it seems that love has left the planet, we need to keep the thread of reverence alive and call upon Oshun to return. It is dangerous indeed that Oshun may have left. May she return though our efforts.

I don’t feel noways tired

I’ve come too far from where I started from.

Nobody told me that the road would be easy

And I don’t believe God brought me this far to leave me.

I just can’t give up now

Come too far from where I started from.

Nobody told me the road would be easy.

And I don’t believe God brought me this far to leave me.