One of the best kept secrets of the 2009 Oscars is the winner of best "foreign" (non-USA) flick, the Japanese film Departures. In recovery from a long church meeting in Toronto, i strolled down to the Carleton cineplex and entered another country, and another world.

A cello player named Daigo loses his calling when the orchestra disbands due to low audience numbers (sound like church?). Daigo takes a new job in his old home town, where he and his spouse have moved due to financial pressures. He sees a newspaper ad looking for help with departures and applies, assuming it is in the travel business. Which it is, in a way. He is hired for a death ritual known as encoffinment - the body of the deceased is ceremonially washed and dressed, then placed in its coffin - all in the presence of grieving family members.

i don't know how it plays in Japanese, but the pun in the title struck me on several levels: first, the obvious departures of the dear departed and all the leave-takings that implies. But there are also the departures of old resentments and wounds at these ceremonies, opening the bereaved to reconciliation. Daigo himself undergoes several departures: he leaves the career in music that he dedicated his life to (talk about an identity crisis); his wife, disgusted at his new job, leaves him; he leaves/overcomes his culture's taboos about death and embraces the care of the corpse as the care of the living. He departed the urban, urbane city for the hick town with its old bath house, and soon finds himself embracing the bath house as a place of healing and community.

Death, of course, is a funny business. There isn't a minister or funeral director alive who doesn't have a hilarious funeral story (mine involves a skunk). And the humour of Departures struck me as the honest encounter of the living with the dead - body, bawdy, profound.

Perhaps because i had just been in a meeting wrestling about future directions for the United Church of Canada, i found myself resonating with Daigo. What is our calling as a denomination right now? (The cello-playing glory days are over.) Like Daigo, do we think we have signed up for one thing and find ourselves doing something else altogether? Like Daigo, might we reconnect with ancient ritual and find there comfort, hope and meaning - not just for the dead, but for the living, too? And might we let go of our past glory days and embrace the gentle, respectful work we are called to do?