“Life and Death” – January 31, 2010
“Life and Death”
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
January 31, 2010
(delivered extemporaneously, so much of what is written below was not spoken,
and some of what was spoken is not written below)
Life and Death, a small topic, no…an intimate topic, yes…a topic that reaches into every human heart. From the youngest to the eldest, life and death hold all the “big questions.” How did I get here? What am I doing here? What do I want to do? What can I do? How can I be? What happened before I was here? Will I really die? How will it happen? Will I be missed? What do I want to leave behind? What do I hope for after death? Is there life after death? What will it be like?
“Religion….our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die,” so said my late friend and mentor and a minister to us all, Forrest Church. Forrest breathed his last the day after his 61st birthday this past September.
Yesterday in this very space we celebrated the life of a much-loved member of this community. Two years ago, there was no inkling that cancer was about to make a fatal call. It did. It came with a vengeance. We lost her.
Just a week ago we marked the first anniversary of the loss of another woman, a young woman dear to this congregation. For so long she had struggled and suffered. For so long her loving husband cared for her and did all he could. Her frail frame could no longer fight the illness that claimed her. It was time to let go. We lost her.
“We laugh, we cry, we live, we die;
We dance, we sing our song.”
So it is for each of us. It’s almost bearable when we do it together….when we laugh and cry and live and die and dance and sing as religious community holding faith and wonder that we are here at all.
Sunday after Sunday we share our joys and sorrows, the fiber of our being together. We speak, we listen, we hold silence, and today we’re lighting candles again….bringing our joys and sorrows into caring community. In sharing from your heart, you spoke of life and death.
[Weave in the shared offerings of joys and sorrows.]
You brought into our worship what holds life and death and what transcends life and death. Some of us call it God. Some of us call it Spirit of Life. Perhaps we can all agree that love, love above all holds life and death and transcends both. Love lives. Love is eternal.
I am among the luckiest people in the world. My mother loved me. She gave me the most important of gifts—birth, life, love, and a graceful death—her death, not mine, or maybe it’s mine too. This past Christmas was the first Christmas of my life without Mom. How to celebrate birth, even a birth that rocked us like the birth of a baby in a stable in a lonely corner of the Middle East 2000 or so years ago? How to celebrate birth when your very own Mary, your very own Mommy, isn’t here anymore? Well, I cried. Even though at times I felt I had no right to cry, because my Mother had lived a hundred years. That’s a long life, and it’s the blink of an eye.
We were ready for her to go. A wonderful birthday party just over a year ago brought our whole family together. We blew up balloons. We wore funny hats. We toasted her with champagne and chocolate. She was present and aware and told us some amazing stories about her life that we’d never heard before.
We parted with hugs and kisses. Mom had made it so far. She had summoned whatever adrenaline was necessary. Then, in a matter of weeks, dementia came to call—not an easy visitor. Decline was rapid and not without struggle. In October, we got a call from our niece that “Gram” was in the hospital and her vital signs weren’t good. A quick trip on the Acela to Philadelphia and then to Bryn Mawr Hospital, where my niece, Tenny, and I sat on either side of Mom as her breathing was labored and her consciousness dim. A hundred years old! She was ready.
“Walk with me, Jesus,” was the comfort that she wanted as she let go. She had told me so a few years earlier. The 23rd Psalm was her favorite. Most of it I remembered from childhood, as I held her hand and stroked her forehead…
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul……”
Then…..what comes next? “Wait,” said Tenny, digging out her Blackberry. “I’ll Google it.” So with my high-tech niece on the other side of my Mom, her Gram, together we spoke the 23rd Psalm, hoping she would feel a comforting Jesus walking with her through “the valley of the shadow.” Whatever she took in, whatever was comforting her, we were a unit, loving our Mother and Grandmother across a passage that we too will make. It’s inevitable.
When your mother is dying, you might not think about giving her news about what’s happening with the family, but there was good news to share. I don’t know if she received it, but I trust that she felt it in the bones of her soul. “Mom, you’re going to have a sixth great-grandchild in May. Sarah and Robb are pregnant.” I knew how much it would mean to our daughter, Sarah, that her Gram got this news before she died. I knew that if Mom were fully conscious it would mean so much to her. Life and death and life were full circle.
Her breaths became deeper and the intervals longer, but she was peaceful, so peaceful. Then….that very last breath, a sigh, a long deep sigh. Tenny and I looked at each other. The tears rolled. She was somewhere else, not here, definitely not here. We didn’t know where, just not here. We called my brother, Tenny’s Dad. Jeff and Donna were in the Middle East, and at the moment of Mom’s death, they were in the ancient city of Petra, in the Valley of the Tombs. I’ve been there. But now I was here. Perhaps we were in the same sacred space, a space inspiring awe and marked by the sure promise of life at its outset…the promise of death.
As I look at your faces this morning, I know that so many of you have lost mothers and fathers, some of you have lost husbands or wives, and some of you have lost children. You know grief. You also know the joy of the love you shared, the love you gave, the love you received. Would you trade for a second the love you knew to escape the grief of losing your loved one into a mystery more vast than any of us here have yet experienced?
We’re born. We live. We die. And then…we don’t know…it’s a mystery. It’s a mystery where we were if we were before we were born. All we can know for sure is that we’re alive now, and that’s a miracle. The odds that any of us are here are overwhelmingly against us being here. All the ancestors coupling across generations, all the possible couplings of sperm and egg, the odds are so against us being here, being who we are, being alive. But here we are, a miracle. My friend Forrest called it “the miracle sandwich,” a miracle sandwiched between two great mysteries. All we know for sure is the miracle.
Actually, we know one more thing. We know that we lose those we love, and one day they will lose us, but what doesn’t die is the love. Even when our names are forgotten, the love, like some crazy kind of DNA, lives on from generation to generation. Not just generations of humanity connected by bloodlines, but through friends and passing strangers on into the future as long as humankind survives itself. Love lasts. It’s eternal. Love given, love received, love shared. Life and death would be opposites were it not for love.
So hold silence for a moment. Close your eyes. Open your hearts. Breathe it in. You’re alive. There’s still time. Breathe it in. Breathe in the love. And then, let it go, let it go into the heart of the person sitting next to you…into the hearts of the folks easy to love…into the hearts of the folks hard to love…into the universe. Let it go. Let the love flow as we all join the hands of our hearts in knowing that we will each and all one day draw our final breath and then let it go into the breath, the spirit, of all who have ever lived, beyond time and space, breath beyond breath, love beyond life and death.
I love you each and all, I do. Amen.
Sources:
Forrest Church, Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, Beacon Press, Boston, 2008.
Psalm 23, The Book of Psalms, The Bible (Revised Standard Version)
“We Laugh, We Cry,” Words and music: Shelley Jackson Denham (1950 – ), in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 354.
