First Parish Cohasset

“Afterlife”

A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
February 7, 2010
(delivered extemporaneously, so much of what is written below was not spoken,
and some of what was spoken is not written below)

Afterlife….we wonder about it, imagine it, paint it, mythologize it, and construct elaborate scenarios about it. We even preach about it. We might believe in it. As for knowledge, we’re clueless. We simply don’t know. Some of us might say, “Not so! I’ve had experiences that tell me there is something on the other side of what we know as life here and now.” Well, that may be the case; I’m in no position to doubt this.

The story we heard earlier this morning from Jim, Warren Hanson’s The Next Place, sounds awfully appealing on a windy winter Sunday—“peaceful and familiar as a sleepy summer Sunday and a sweet untroubled mind.” My favorite phrase is the one that reminds us it’s a complete mystery:

     “I won’t know where I’m going, and I won’t know where I’ve been as I tumble through the always and look back toward the when.”

….echoes of Dr. Seuss, who had more than a few profound things to say about how we live our lives and how we imagine.

In the Christian tradition that so many of us grew up in, we perhaps committed to memory that verse from the Gospel According to John, what I call “the walnut verse” of Christian theology:

     “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Its appeal is intense. Our instinct for life is intense. Even when things get us down, even when we step into the biggest of potholes, even when our children hurt, wars break out, we’re diagnosed with an illness that may or may not be the way we die, our instinct for life is intense. The prospect of everlasting life holds immense appeal. No wonder it’s the focus of great works of art, music, mythology, poetry, and of course, religion.

What happens when we die? Is that it? Ker plunk into some black hole of the universe, into some nothingness? Do we who have lived suddenly become part of the void, whatever that might mean? Or is there something more? Is there life after death? Or should we be asking if there’s life after life? How we ask the question shapes the how of our imaginings.

Yes, we can go to the Bible or the Dhammapada or the I Ching. We can also turn to our own experiences of having lost someone dear and wondering where they are, if they are, how they are and whether we will ever connect with them in any way that will salve the grief of not having seen them since what we call death happened.

In early February of 1968, Russ Flesher, my first husband, was killed in Vietnam during the Tet offensive. He was 27; I was 25. After calling my family and closest friends, I phoned Michael Allen. Michael was the priest at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church-in-the-Bowerie on New York City’s lower east side. It was where I had done my field work as a student at Union Theological Seminary, the seminary where I had met Russ and where we had married. I was living the following February in the East Village, a few short blocks from St. Mark’s. Michael responded immediately to my call. Within the hour he was sitting with me at my kitchen table.

“Michael, what do you think? Do we live and then one day just stop cold? Is death the end of it all? Will we ever see and hold the person we’ve loved so much?” Here was this Episcopal priest, filled with all the John 3:16’s you can imagine, looking me in the eye and saying, “I had a friend. We were so close. I couldn’t imagine life without him. Then he died. He was so young, and he died. I want to believe that he’s somewhere happy and healthy, but all I know for sure is that I haven’t seen him for a long time. I still miss him. I still love him.”

What do we know? What do we believe? What do we experience? What do we learn?

I’ll never stop learning from children. They’re little philosophers with no axes to grind, no belief bones to pick. Shana, my firstborn, was about six years old when her granddad, my father, died. Shana adored him. He would tease and tell stories and imitate animals and take her for rides on his golf cart. He was a great granddad. As I was preparing to fly to the Midwest for his memorial service, Shana brought me a book from her room. It was Eugene Field’s lullaby poem, “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”

     “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
     Sailed off in a wooden shoe–
     Sailed on a river of crystal light,
     Into a sea of dew…”

Shana loved it and so had my father. “Here, Mommy, take this for Granddaddy. It will make him feel good.”

My darling daughter was convinced that her darling granddad would need something comforting to read on his journey, in his new home, whatever. It was no less a gift than what the ancient Egyptians prepared for the pharaohs in the form of food and artifacts nestled into the Great Pyramids. Here was a lullaby intended to accompany my father on his trip to wherever.

Now there’s a second piece to this story. My little daughter and I continued our conversation about how we feel when somebody dies. “Will I die? Will you die? What will it be like?” she asked. “I don’t know, honey. I’ve never died. But think of it this way. We don’t know where we were before we were born.” With a gleam in her eye, Shana exclaimed, “Well I know. I know just where I was before I was born!” “You do?” I asked. “Yes, I was in Daddy’s penis!”

Well, there you have it, Shana’s philosophy of the “beforelife.”

Our children tend to be concrete, but no less so than how we construct our images of what might be an afterlife, of what might be heaven. How many times have you heard that you’ll become an angel? That you’ll have wings and lie on clouds and be at peace? It’s a beatific vision of what might be, a never-ending vacation but in a fluffy celestial resort. When my dear friend and mentor Forrest Church discussed the matter in his final book, Love and Death, he suggested that a heaven defined as “an eternity of harps, halos, and hymnals….might best be described as punishment for good behavior.”

So let’s bring our imaginations back to this realm that we can perhaps all agree we inhabit—the realm of life. We re here and now alive. What an extraordinary state. If any of us could go back to the moment before birth and imagine, just imagine what we might be getting into when the lights went on and we took our first breath and let out our first cry, it would be downright traumatizing. We do, after all, speak of the birth trauma. Ka-boom, we’re here! We graduate into the miracle of life most quickly during our first year—the stimuli of tasting, touching, hearing, seeing, smelling, sensing all draw us into the miracle of life. The fortunate among us grow up and grow old. All of us die. Can what follows be any more extraordinary than what we’re experiencing right now? Could it possibly be any more mind-blowing that what we experienced at birth? Could we even have imagined the “right now” before we were born?

I hold comfort as I long for all the dear ones I’ve lost in knowing not that they might be in some tangible, harmonious, peaceful heaven—although who knows—but in trusting that the love they gave and the love we gave them holds. I take comfort and reassurance in knowing that the love that you and I give to each other, the love that we send out into our larger world in acts of caring and compassionate justice continues from life to life and that it extends from life across the bridge of death into the mystery that awaits us all, unites us all. Where it begins, this love that holds, this love that lasts, is here, right here in this world, on this earth.

“Spiritual awakening,” writes the Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön, “is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain.” In journeying to a mountaintop, we leave everybody else far below; we escape. Such is not the way of bodhichitta, “awakened heart.” The way is down, earthward, down into the thick of where life is lived. “Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.”

When we memorialize someone, what do we hold up—the afterlife that we imagine, that we believe, that we hope for? Perhaps, but above all, we hold up the exchanges of love—the stories of summer days on a beach, the chapters of growing up and growing with, the tales of tabletops laden with food shared and laughter rising. When we memorialize someone and when we miss someone and when we wonder what will become of us when we too shall die, the stronghold of our trust lies above all in the love we give, the love we have given, the love we have shared.

Is there life after death? I don’t know. My imagination can’t stretch that wide. Is there love after death? It is an act of love that brings us here in the first place. It is love that sustains us. It is love that accompanies us into what I can only imagine as ultimate family.

In the fullness of life that is, let us love one another. I love you each and all. Amen.

Sources:

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Shambhala, Boston & London, 1997.

Forrest Church, Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, Beacon Press, Boston, 2008.

Eugene W. Field, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, first published 1889.

The Gospel According to John, The Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Warren Hanson, The Next Place, Waldman House Press, 1997.