When I announced to my nursing and midwifery friends that I was going to seminary, I got two different reactions. One was, “Huh, well yes, that makes sense.” The other was, “Huh, where did that come from?” The people with the latter reaction probably hadn’t seen me sitting with Mary. In my very first job out of nursing school I worked on a medical floor in a DC hospital. Early on, we had a patient on the floor – Mary – who was dying of cancer. This was before hospice swooped in and walked people through the dying process. Mary was dying, and she was dying alone. She was relatively young, as was I. I knew very little about what her life had been like before she got sick, but we knew that nobody – friends, family, colleagues – ever came to see her. On what we all knew would be Mary’s last day of life, I was the charge nurse, saddled with paper work and all kinds of irksome tasks that kept me from being with patients.  At some point mid-morning I surprised the rest of the staff on the floor by saying, “Mary is not going to die alone.” I piled all my charts and papers on to her bedside table and sat there and did paper work while she died. There was nothing to be done for her; no more treatments, no medication other than for pain. She wasn’t conscious, but she was a human being who was dying and I needed to be with her. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was my first experience of offering the ministry of presence.

          It was a liminal moment, a time of standing at a threshold. Liminality can be psychological or metaphysical. Or even neurological. According to Wikipedia, my source for all things metaphysical, “The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behavior are relaxed – a situation which can lead to new perspectives.”

          I only worked on that medical floor for 2 years, then moved on to obstetrics and eventually midwifery. Most of the time, the liminal moments with my patients were filled with joy and awe over the emergence of a new life. But occasionally birth and death come together. Birth and death are, as a wise person once said “the same mystery.” And religion is, as Forrest Church has told us, the human response to that mystery. Where was I before I was born? Where will I go when I die? Some religions offer concrete answers to those questions; answers that are comforting and help people to live fully with the knowledge of their own mortality. Our Universalist ancestors had an answer. “God,” they said, “that absolutely powerful and absolutely benevolent One, brings us all back to God. All souls are saved.”

          Today it is harder for us, the inheritors of that Universalist tradition as well as the Unitarian, to be so blessedly assured. We are agnostic on the subject of the after-life. When asked what we believe will happen to us when we die, our response is, ”We don’t know. All we do know is that as people of faith we will stand together and be present to each other, present to the mystery. We will be open to the ambiguity and to the possibility of transformation.”

          That is a courageous stance that we take. We deny the power of death to reduce us to fearful and irrational creatures. But we do not deny the power of loss to bring us to grief. We all grieve in the face of loss, no matter our theology. And we all grieve differently. We express ourselves in different ways, we crave different kinds of rituals to mark our losses, we need different amounts of time to do the work of grieving.

          To live together in liberal religious community is to respect the different ways we grieve. Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s groundbreaking work on death and dying gave us some tools. Her conceptual stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are a way to understand what all people go through when they lose someone or something precious. But we misuse her work if we think of those stages as a logical, linear progression. To deny the anguish, to say, “I’m all over that. I want to move on,” is not something that happens on day one, replaced by anger on day two and bargaining on day three. Around and around we go – wishing it weren’t so, mad at the world, thinking of all the ‘if only I had said or done this’ scenarios, pulling the covers over our heads and staying in bed – around and around we go as we work through our grief each in our own way and in our time. Even the last stage, acceptance, is not an end stage. We come to accept the enormity of what we have lost, but only for a time. Something happens years later – we hear a snatch of music or catch a whiff of perfume that reminds us of our lost one – and we grieve again.

          Kubler Ross also taught us that the little deaths – the disappointments and less acute losses – are dress rehearsals for the big ones. Each time we grieve a little we learn some more about how to grieve, so that when we must grieve a lot, when we wake up in the morning with a huge beloved shaped hole in our hearts, we have learned already some ways to begin the enormous task of letting go.

          How do we manage our diversities and still maintain a community of faith? That question is always before us in the liberal church, at South Church. How do you manage the diversity of the ways that you process change and loss? The answer is simple: be gentle with one another. Know that there is so much you have in common: experiences, yearnings, concerns for justice and fairness and compassion and mercy, the urgent need to grow a soul . . . . your very humanity. There is so much you have in common. Know also that there is so much that is unique about each one of you: experiences, yearnings, concerns, the very special soul that you are in the process of growing . . . your very unique human life experiences.

So be gentle with one another in times of grief as in your times of joy. In gentle community there is strength. Strength that allows you to bear the ambiguity of the liminal moment. Strength that allows you to bear the experience of having your sense of identity dissolve – strength that empowers you to walk together, not alone, from disorientation to new perspective.