On Faith The Rev. Mike Young

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Spreading Kyoko’s ashes was a Unitarian gathering

Last April, I received an e-mail from Japan asking me to scatter ashes at sea for them. Over the months, the negotiations were curious. At one point it sounded like a variation on the Nigerian Scam. "Please send me your bank account number, and I will have the fee and the expenses transferred from my bank to yours."

Fearing the transfer would go the other direction, I said no thank you, please send a check instead. He understood, and we later received a generous donation in the form of the tallest stack of traveler's checks I've seen since MasterCard was invented.

The ashes were those of Kyoko, my e-mailer's sister-in-law, who had said in her will that she wished for her ashes to be scattered at sea in a beautiful Hawaii bay. At first there were to be three of them coming, my e-mail contact, Yuji; his wife, Etsuko; and the husband, Mr. Kai. As it turned out, only Mr. Kai came, but Yuji and Etsuko will visit in the spring.

But, what should I do? Arranging for the canoe and paddlers was easy. Kevin and Hal at Ultimate Cremation Services had handled such things for us in the past. And I had words for such a ceremony from previous ashes-scattering services. But I had never officiated at a Shinto anything before. What would be appropriate?

As we conversed electronically, it turned out that Yuji and I believe that we have met before. In 1987, I attended the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF) World Congress at Stanford University. Yuji is a member of the Tsubaki Grand Shrine, an unusual Shinto group that had opposed the Japanese government during World War II. Its high priest had even spent most of the war in jail.

Before the IARF conference, I had spent a week in the High Sierras with IARF members including a group from the Tsubaki Grand Shrine -- Yuji included. I had even led the group to a high waterfall near Lake Tahoe where some of us did a Shinto purification rite called "misogi," complete with traditional loincloth and headband.

So that gave me the needed clues. Of course, I did not attempt to do something specifically Shinto. That would have been presumptuous. But it gave me the imagery and context. The Friday after Thanksgiving, we scattered ashes from an outrigger canoe. We scattered lei blossoms for Kyoko and on behalf of her loved ones who could not be there.

What I did say gave my translators, Susan Yamane-Carpenter and Makiko Carlson, a bit of a challenge to translate into Japanese metaphors. And Yuji says they very much pleased him and Etsuko, reading along with us at the same time in Japan.

It was not "Hawaiian" and it was not ersatz Shinto. It was Unitarian: language drawn from our own experience of what it feels like to be human, responsive to the spirit of place we find ourselves in, created in collaboration with those whose lives are being celebrated.

Halfway through the ceremony, a green sea turtle surfaced nearby. "Look! There!" said one of the Hawaiian paddlers standing up in the canoe. "Oh," he said, "that is a very good omen."

Indeed, it was. All the way around.

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