Flowers, Balloons, and Teddy Bears

“Where there is no longer sickness, suffering, sorrow or sighing, but life everlasting”
(Priest’s prayer of funeral and requiem)

Blessed are those who live in the hope and faith in the Kingdom of God; or as the Creed concludes, “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” We hold in our hearts the ultimate life insurance policy, the reward and fulfillment of a life on earth serving, following and loving the Lord Jesus who invites us to the Kingdom of His heavenly Father.

I’m struck by the recent tradition of adorning with flowers, balloons and teddy bears the locations of prominent persons who lost their lives, usually in some tragic manner. I first noticed it at the death of “Lady Di,” as the former wife of Britain’s Prince Charles was affectionately called. Now it’s become a custom. Flowers are traditional. They represent the purity, fragrance and fragility of life. Because they are delicate and ephemeral, they remind us that our own lives are fleeting. “The wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.” We Orthodox Christians use incense at such times, because they give flowers a resurrection. Thousands of petals are crushed to eke out the perfume, which is set free to rise with our prayers on behalf of all and for our entire beloved asleep in the Lord.

Balloons are self-evident signs of liberation and ascent. They are little more than air or the simple chemical hydrogen captured for a brief time, only to be released into the atmosphere like human souls set free from the bodies, visual affirmations affirming the life transcending the mere physical.

But why teddy bears? It’s been but a century since the time of the eponymous President Teddy Roosevelt, given credit for being the ecologically sensitive leader of our nation and who inaugurated the national parks system. Yet the association of the teddy bear with grief over death has little to do with that President. No, the teddy bears stand for our own childhood. The age of innocence, a stage of life when we believed in fairy tales, when America’s children were taken to department stores and encouraged to sit on Santa’s lap and to imagine that he lived in the North Pole and the Christmas myth was real. It’s said that we are living in a post-Christian era. I’m not sure that is true. All sorts of missionaries are clamoring for our attention, both from traditional faith-based sources and upstart religions of all sorts; nevertheless, millions have bought into the skepticism, agnosticism and atheism that compete with believers for the souls of contemporary humanity. For the latter especially, teddy bears call to mind the aura of believing parents, homes where the seasons of the year were marked by rituals, church attendance and the traditions that gave meaning to life. Even when they gave it all up, graduating from God when they received their diplomas, believing that as the lyrics state “once you pass its portals you may never return again,” memories of faith are better than the stark, dark, hollow feeling of nothingness. One cannot be nurtured on reason alone.

Indeed they are pathetic, and we have little to offer but our sympathy. We priests meet them at funerals. They want to believe, yet cannot. I think of the old movie La Dolce Vita, where a young writer on an all-night party with sybaritic guests bereft of all morals spies on the beach an angelic young woman who waves to him; however, there is a stream between them. She symbolizes lost innocence. He is torn, wanting to join her, hesitates, and then runs to catch up with the drunken revelers. We are united with the unbelievers through pity: They pity us, and we pity them. I pray for them, but more intensely for our own children, that they not succumb to the delusion that they can be nourished by emptiness, and that the despair from the loss of faith in a loving God will not possess their hearts.