Breakfast for the Dead
We can learn so much, but only if we listen
Just after Christmas in 2004, a devastating tidal wave hit the shores of Sri Lanka, causing at least an estimated 12,000 to lost their lives.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, like many other organisations forming a wide basket of responders, an airline I then worked for sent a team to Sri Lanka to offer help, logistics and support for the relief effort. One of my colleagues returned with what for me, is one of the most beautiful and insightful stories from that time.
Some few days into the emergency response, when the rescue effort had turned into one of recovery and relief for survivors, one of the local team approached my colleague with what to her, struck her as an odd request. Her Sri Lankan colleague told her that many of the local team were disturbed by the number of ghosts they were encountering. He explained that they were the souls of the dead, unclear on how to move on, in some cases, unclear that they were even dead.
Asking how she could help, her colleague requested that they organise a breakfast for the dead on the beach. It would be a conventional breakfast of fruit, juices, congees and so on, laid out on a long table on the beach, but with the difference being that Buddhist priests would be in attendance. They would then invite the spirits of the dead to join them to take breakfast. As past of this, the priests would counsel them that they had died, and then perform the necessary funeral rites for those who shed to move on.
The breakfast was organised, the dead were invited first to the breakfast, then to the ceremonies intended to allow them to move on. In the following few days, many of the local team reported that they were no longer troubled by spirits seeking help and refuge. Thus, the breakfast was deemed to have been a rousing success.
It would have been so easy for the UK team to dismiss the request, to treat it as fanciful or to do less than they did to support the ceremony wholeheartedly. Instead, they accepted that there are other views of this beautiful world than the one to which they were accustomed.
In doing so, my colleague always said that with every encounter with a different view, she grows a little each time. She may not accept the premises of the lesson wholeheartedly, indeed she may examine the lesson and decide that there was ultimately nothing there for her. Instead, she grew a little more, and with each retelling of the story, so she supported others in growing a little more, by understanding that there are other views of the world. Whether we accept them, whether we respect them, are different matters entirely, but if we don’t listen to them, we are the losers, giving up the opportunity to be enriched by another view, another perspective, another life.
Alexander Dalgleish-Weaver
