This is Life: A Funeral Message

I’m giving the speech at a “Celebration of Life” for some people in a community who passed away recently. This is it, slightly tweaked for bloggage.

Hello family & friends. My name is Ethan Renoe, and I am a pastor here.

Today we are here to celebrate the lives of these people whom our community lost this year. We’re going to reflect on their lives, and as we listen to them, we can be reminded about life itself and just how beautiful it is.

David Foster Wallace tells this didactic little tale about two young fish swimming along when they pass an older fish. He says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” They swim on and one of the younger fish says to the other, “What in the world is water?”

We’ve come together to reflect on life, and I can’t help but think that sometimes we take it for granted, just like the young fish in the story. We are all alive, but sometimes we need a reminder of this fact. We’re alive but forget we are. We need to be reminded just what ‘water’ is, and that we need to look around and take it all in, to wake up and become aware of that very important fact.

So what is life? Sure, it’s a beating heart and expanding lungs, but as humans, we know it’s so much more than that.

Life is that spirit that we experience and express in a million forms: Sometimes it comes out in travel, sailing, eating or building a model train. We let a little life out through our creativity: when we paint, draw, sing, pour into a poem, or read someone else’s. Creativity is not optional.

Life is also tasted in raindrops hitting the skin, hugs, rope swings, beauty, sunsets, the smell of bookstores, white mist rising from a forest floor, perfectly brewed cups of coffee, and ESPECIALLY, dancing. Dancing is also not optional. Anything that moves your body reminds you that you’re alive.

You know who is really good at living? Dogs. You could walk them on the same path every day of their lives and they will be equally excited to sniff the same spots with the same vigor and curiosity as the first time. But us humans? We get bored. We lose our excitement and our life — the very thing which animates us — becomes tired and rote; our days rely on muscle memory.

You may be familiar with the Latin maxim, Memento mori — remember that you will die — but I think the inverse is often forgotten but equally important: memento vivire. Remember to live.

David Foster Wallace concludes that speech with this:

This all has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water. This is water.”

So I urge you, friends, don’t forget: “This is life. This is life.”

Closing after reading of names

Each of these people shared their lives with us. Earlier we reflected on the idea of life and all that it entails. Life is amplified when it is shared, whether it’s lived alongside friends and family, or transmitted through art and writing and music. Or poems like Maggie Smith’s Good Bones:

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real dump, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

[Pause]

Art and music and poetry are ways of sharing not just information, but life with one another. We can call each other to life. These words have the power to move and inspire us, if we will let them.

That’s why creativity isn’t optional.
Neither is dancing.

Neither is remembering the lives of our loved ones, and all they shared with us. So I urge you, family and friends, don’t hide the light of all the life inside of you.

May we be people who pop the lid off the life inside of us.

May we spill it recklessly until at last, when the grave swallows us whole and the lights turn out, we can rest giddy, knowing we didn’t let one ounce of our precious, PRECIOUS life go to waste.

May we never forget, as we swim along, “This is life. This is life.”

e

Day 35 of 100 Days of Blog

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