-- Ugo Betti
Opening Words:
Let us gather for worship mindful of the words and wisdom of the poet Mary Oliver, who wrote:
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Meditation: a poem by May Sarton entitled “Late Autumn”
On random wires the rows of summer swallows
Wait for their lift-off. They will soon be gone
Before All Saints and before All Hallows,
The changing time when we are most alone.
Disarmed, too vulnerable, full of dread,
And once again as naked as the trees
Before the dark, precarious days ahead
And troubled skies over tumultuous seas.
When we are so transparent to the dead
There is no wall. We hear their voices speak,
And as the small birds wheel off overhead
We bend toward the earth suddenly weak.
How to believe that all will not be lost?
Our flowers, too, not perish in the blight?
Love, leave me your South against the frost.
Say "hush" to my fears, and warm the night.
Reading: by Tom Montgomery Fate from Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search of the Wild (p. 121)
Our cat Rosie, a gray tabby who now weighs just four pounds, is dying. She’s completely deaf, nearly blind, and has been since spring. But she holds on, and we can’t bring ourselves to put her to sleep. She was five weeks old when Carol and I found her at a shelter… twenty-one years ago. The kids say she’s over one hundred – that a cat year equals five human years. One of my days feels like five to Rosie. The idea intrigues me. How does that work? Is cat time slower because they never worry – about what to say or wear, or if they are late to a meeting? Does Rosie have some sort of heightened kitty consciousness that allows her to live more in the present? Or maybe if I curled up in a bright square of sunlight on the oak floor for a few hours each day, those hours would begin to slow for me too, to elongate, to become something else. I wish the present would slow down…
I think of… decay now, sitting outside at dusk on the back porch of our house. The wild green buzz of summer is gone. The robins and goldfinches and bluebirds have flown south or are preparing to. It is the fall. And everything falls – not just the leaves. The temperature falls as the earth again tilts away from the sun. Darkness falls more quickly as the days shorten. Plants droop and dry up and break apart. Trees fall into dormancy and stop growing. Their leaves and seeds fall into the cool air, and then to the ground, where they will rot and root and become something new. This is the season of decay – a word that means “to fall away” – to return to your constituent parts, to what you are made of. We die and fall apart, but the parts go on. The same is true for the human species. Though lately I’m finding how much harder it is to accept this cycle with people than it is with pets or plants – particularly if they die suddenly, and seem to fall outside the natural cycle of time.
Reading: by Adama and Naomi Doumbia from The Way of the Elders: West African Spirituality & Tradition (p. 149)
Death is not the end of life, but a transformation of it. It is a profound crossing over of the soul from this world into the next. When we pass on, we become ancestors, residing close to Spirit. Crossing over is the final and grandest initiation we make in our life journeys. All of our initiations, teachings, lessons are preparation for this final moment where we experience our most significant rite of passage. We now have more influence, more power, and more insight to guide and instruct those who remain embodied. When we cross over, we are able to promote the well-being, the unity, and the peace of the community. Many of us believe in a reincarnation of the spirit. Each time we cross over, Spirit keeps a piece of our soul until we are eventually fully united with Spirit.
Reading: Poem by Ruth Stone “Train Ride”
All things come to an end;
small calves in Arkansas,
the bend of the muddy river.
Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever.
They go on forever, the swamp,
the vine-choked cypress, the oaks
rattling last year’s leaves,
the thump of the rails, the kite,
the still white stilted heron.
All things come to an end.
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever,
the wide dry field of geese,
a man stopped near his porch
to watch. Release, release;
between cold death and a fever,
send what you will, I will listen.
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.
Beyond Life and Death
A Sermon Delivered on October 27, 2013
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
My grandmother had a good death, I think. She was at home in bed, in the house she shared with her daughter – my mother. She was spared long illness and died peacefully last year.
I had seen her just a few weeks earlier, at her hundredth birthday celebration. Though she was frail and couldn’t climb stairs anymore, and though her diminished hearing increasingly turned our conversations into what seemed like one-sided shouting matches – still she was cheerful and lucid. And despite physical limitations that frustrated her, still she was always able to find something to be grateful for.
She was the kind of person who paid attention to the simple things around her. The way the light fell through the window into her small living room. The latest blossoms to bloom in her garden, or in one of the many flower pots that crowded her windowsill. When she wrote cards – and she wrote a lot of them – she would talk about the walk from which she just returned: the look of the forest after an autumn rain, the smell of the forest, the song of a bird she spied on a nearby branch. And often her cards would contain a small flower or leaf she had found and carefully pressed between the pages of a big book.
My mother once confided to me, that her mother’s unrelenting cheerfulness and quaint observations sometimes drove her crazy. There’s a lot more to life than flowers and birds and the latest change in weather. But in the end, I think we both agreed that the joy my grandmother found in life was not a superficial habit, but expression of a deep spirit. In her hundred years – through two world wars, unspeakable losses and unimaginable change – she had shown amazing fortitude and resilience.
When I visited her in her late nineties, she told me on more than one occasion that she was ready to die. She had had a good life. She was ready to go.
Not all of my family members who have died in the course of my life conveyed such equanimity. Among my aunts, uncles, cousins, and my father – more often than not – death was marked by sickness and suffering, sometimes unexpected accident, sometimes suicide. Several died much too early, in their twenties.
The time and circumstances of my grandmother’s death were about as “right” as could be. But still, her death left me deeply shaken. And even though her life was long and rich, her death left me feeling robbed, diminished. A place within me, which had felt her gentle presence all of my life, was now a strange and aching emptiness. What remained was sadness. And a sobering and frightening sense of finality, the unsettling sense that a door has been closed, which can never again be opened.
* * *
Is it true that death is a door we pass through, which can never be opened again? Is it true that death is irrefutable proof that all things come to an end? Or is death the profound crossing over of the soul from this world into the next?
A lot of people say death is the doorway to a different life. In his book The God Delusion Daniel Dennett cites a survey that says 95 percent of Americans believe in life after death. Other polls offer different answers. The Christian Science Monitor is more conservative and says 75 percent of Americans believe in an afterlife. An International Social Survey says it is closer to 55 percent.
By any of these measures, the members of our church tend to be more skeptical than most Americans. I have conducted a few unscientific surveys over the years. And the general trend here is that about a third of us believe in an afterlife. A third of us say, after death there is nothing. And a third of us are not sure.
* * *
There was a time in my life when I was firmly convinced that when we die, that’s the end. Period. And I imagined those who believe differently were in a state of denial, subject to superstition, or simply seduced by wishful thinking. But today I am less convinced of the wisdom or folly of those on either end of the spectrum. And I now put myself in the “not sure” category.
A good part of my “not sureness” has to do with my uncertainty about how to imagine life after death. Another part is borne of the realization that most people – regardless of their stated beliefs – grieve deeply when someone they have loved dies.
No matter how we make sense of heaven and hell, of this world or the next, the loss we suffer is real. And death – when it finally confronts us – seems strangely unreal.
The closer we come to death, the more it seems like we are entering a strange liminal space. All our regular routines are put on hold. And the certainties of our lives – what matters and what doesn’t, what is relevant and what isn’t – seem called into question. When we allow ourselves to enter the time and space, the thoughts and feelings, surrounding death, it seems we are stepping into a parallel universe.
In his book The Art of Losing, Kevin Young writes:
“To lose someone today is to go into strange realms of “bereavement specialists” and sympathy cards and funeral arrangements – things you suddenly realize have been going on for a good while, without you, in something of a parallel world. The world of grief can feel like that, a limbo realm that… gives you a strong perspective on the everyday world: Why are all these people walking around, oblivious to loss? Why am I still here while my loved one is not? Surviving any death can carry its own guilt. It also brings a slew of clichés, often in lieu of sympathy, that can sometimes cause more anxiety than comfort. It is hard to know what to say….
In my own grief it was and is the smallest kindnesses that still stick with me [for instance]: the man who gave me my father’s dry cleaning for free, refusing my repeated offers to pay; the dry cleaning I’d had to drive all over town looking for, using old tags found on other of his still-plastic-wrapped clothes as a guide. How to explain “I’m looking for my dead father’s clothes, things he’ll never need,” yet that, duty-bound, you do? Death brings with it a duty and devotion that cannot be explained to those who don’t know it. Why, after all, would you keep his crummy plaid shirts and give his good suits away? Why do material things matter at once less and more? Why, in the void, does ritual, both inherited and invented rush in?” (p. xviii)
* * *
My late colleague Forrest Church, who long served the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City and was a prolific author, wrote eloquently about the mystery and wonder of life and death. In his mind, this is what ritual and religion is all about. Religion, in essence, is “our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.”
His theology was put to the test when he was diagnosed with cancer in his mid fifties. Initially treatment was very effective. In the years that followed he wrote a poignant and insightful book entitled Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow. I highly recommend it.
The year after that, in 2009, he published his final book, The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theology. He died in September of the same year. One day after his 61st birthday.
In this book, he recounts two questions he was asked by parishoners years earlier. A very young girl asked, “Where was I before I was born?” And a few days later a very old woman asked, “What happens after we die?”
Reflecting on these questions, Church writes,
“Of all that we experience, there is nothing more natural than birth and death... Looking at this in a purely biological way, without death there would be no birth, not as we know it, for the simplest forms of life never die. For all practical purposes, single-celled organisms are immortal. In other words, we were immortal until we became interesting! …This invites us to reconsider the advantages of immortality…
…I don’t worry all that much about where I was before I was born and where I will be after I die. It is not that they are unimportant questions. It is just that for me the miracle lies in between. [--] No experience of being, unknown to us and probably unknowable, that has taken place before this life or will take place after it, could possibly be more remarkable, more wonderful, or stranger than this life we share today. Life is a miracle couched between mysteries. It is a miracle incarnate, not a given, but a gift, an unaccountable gift.” (p. 187)
* * *
Death is not the enemy of life. But rather life and death are partners in a dance. They are partners in a spiral dance that has been spinning onward and upward for eons. In its wake it creates ever more complex, ever more miraculous manifestations of life.
Life and death are propelled forward by a force that arises from the very stuff of existence. Physical matter itself – long before it became life – was already shaped by a self-organizing principle. Something within the most basic building blocks of the universe compels them to create order out of chaos. Something in the dance of atoms and the spinning of the stars. Something that we try to make sense of in the language of physics and chemistry and biology, as ever more complex interactions build upon each other, until life itself emerges.
“Emergence. Something more from nothing but. Life from nonlife, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near-inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances,” the scientist says. (Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature, p. 28)
* * *
There is something that moves the universe, and everything in it, from nothing to something. This something binds us together, each and all. Something which, as we spin faster and faster in the dance of life and death and more life, keeps us from flying apart.
Some religious people call this “God.” “The word, “God,” is a symbol. It’s an arrow pointing toward a reality invested at the heart of our being,” Forrest Church says.
“God doesn’t throw babies out third-story windows or cause tsunamis. God is that which is greater than all and yet present in each. When that which is present in you relates to that which is present in all, you are sustained. You are billowed on the ocean of divinity and made safe. There’s great safety in being a part of, rather than being apart from, the ground of your being.” (p. 172)
Another word often used interchangeably with God is love. “Love never dies,” Church writes,
“I’m not certain about life after death. I know, however, that love is immortal, that every act of love we perform in this life extends like a little [chain] of pearls. It’s carried on into one life and then passed on into another, so that centuries from now, not named with our name nor signed with our signature, but initiated by us and borne by our heirs, our love lives on. That’s the work of religion. The work of religion is to make sure that the love we spread carries further than the division and hate.” (p. 176)
* * *
Life and death are two sides of the same coin. They are partners in the same dance. What holds them together, and what propels them forward is a mystery. A mystery at the very heart of existence, at the very heart of creation. A mystery that moves us and sustains us. A mystery I call love.
Love – as beautiful and powerful as it is – cannot save us from the pain of loss. It works just the opposite way. The more deeply we love, the more deeply we will grieve. The depth of our sadness is in direct proportion to past gladness.
This is part of what it means to live well. As Mary Oliver says, you need to do three things:
- love what is mortal;
- hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;
- and, when the time comes to let it go, …let it go.
May we firmly embrace everything life and death have to offer us.
And may we be unafraid to love.
Amen.
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