In the last two weeks or so I have lost two dear mentors (one a priest and one a bishop) and a dear parishioner to death. The Virginia Seminary Chapel where I prayed and worshiped for three of the most formative years of my life has burned down so that little remains. So we come to the season of Samhain -- the Pagan Celtic time of the dying earth at the close of summer that eventually got tangled up with the Christian festival of All Saints (or All Hallows) and Halloween. I am grappling with this sense of a closeness of the threshold with dying and decay and all that takes life. It is a strange place for me to remain. I usually eat enough chocolate to keep from such a morbid lingering. But I don't stay here because I want to, or because I just wish to feel bad. I am here to discover a new beginning. Always, the threshold that is an ending is also a beginning. The black vultures that took the dead deer's life from its remains near the road outside my house have brought their own life even as they cleaned up, so that we would not be diseased. It is this that makes Halloween a joy for me: it is not just about pretending and dressing up or candy, but about life and death and who we really are and how we grow through things -- even or maybe especially through dark things. We are all like vultures who must live off death. We grow through the dark times to find new light. We cannot waste the carcasses of our life, for even they have nourishment to show us new life. Thresholds are rich places to stand for a moment, but eventually we must walk through them to discover what new awaits. There is life to come out of things like the destruction of the seminary chapel. There is even life to find in the loss of my mentors Phil and Charles and my parishioner Margo. Always, always, the dying is really about life. The vultures in the tree outside my window are not ominous but virtuous. They portend new life to come.

Sacrifice (A visit to a Mayan ruin in Belize)

I climbed the steep grey steps in the heat of the day
Not thinking of what I would see at the top.

Below I had seen the baths and the market --
Hints of life and humanity from long ago.

The table is
Nothing --
Just fitted rocks,
Held together by the silt and clay of the beautiful green rainforest surrounding it.
It sits on the top of the tallest mounded pyramid, with silent stone faces larger than a man on the way up.
It is about four feet in diameter.
Not long enough for an entire body --
Just a bit too short.
It is round.
A strange shape amidst the jagged pyramids and pointed arches.
It must have held, as best it could, many a sacrifice.
Humans.
Hearts beating.
And then not.

I touched it.
It spoke it‘s stone words.
Soaked in the blood of the martyrs,
It seemed to bask in the sun today like all the others.

And I pulled my hand back.

No one else wanted to touch the thing
But part of me wanted to lie down on the stone as best I might fit and see what happened.
Part of me knew I was the priest to perform the sacrifice also.

There was agony
That ages of sun and rain could not deny.
There was the strangely shaped human ability to destroy life
With the hope of something good or holy or right to come of it.
The stones.