The summer services at JUC are usually a little lighter in tone than during the regular church year. Summer being a time to chill out, or bake out, if you will. Nothing too heavy before heading up to hike that gorgeous trail at 8900 feet where the cool can make you forget it’s summer for awhile. Or heading up to an alpine lake where you shiver instead of sweat. However, I’m guiding us to a more serious place today. As the Minister of Spiritual Life, I am using one of the precious services I lead each year to bring us all to death’s door, so to speak. A part of our life’s journey that we tend not to talk about, especially in summer. How to prepare for the end of life?

In the Western world, death has been characterized by minimization and denial. We don’t like to talk about it, and when we do, it is in more detached, academic terms. We lack the visceral, hands on, clear sighted experience of death that many other cultures have. Buddhists die at home, for instance. Their bodies stay in place for four days with the family before being taken to cremation. It gives time for the Buddhist version of the soul to find its way home. They see that death is natural and organic, a part of life. Not something of which to be frightened, but an experience to be embraced. This is part of what we need do to prepare for our own ending, to create clarity about what each of us believes will happen to us when our life comes to an end, and come to peace with that version of our own death.

Of course there are individual voices out there to help guide us in the search, some found in surprising places. Those in every culture who move and claim their values outside the mainstream and guide us on our search for meaning. I don’t know how many of you know that Willie Nelson, the great country singer, has a lot of depth and wisdom. Early in his career he was a song writer composing songs across the entire pop spectrum. He had over 300 songs recorded. In a recent interview Willie reflected on the death of his 33 year old troubled son, Billy, who hanged himself on Christmas Day in 1991. “Death is not the ending of anything. I believe all of us are only energy that becomes matter. When the matter goes away, the energy still exists. You can’t destroy it. It never dies. It manifests itself somewhere else. We are never alone. Even by ourselves, we are not alone. Death is just a door opening to somewhere else. Someday we’ll know what that door opens to.” Someday we’ll know what that door opens to. If we are to prepare well for the end of life, this is an important, even a profound question.

As we are a pretty typical UU congregation, I think it is safe to assume that many of us in this sanctuary have no solid belief in what happens to us when we die. Devout Christians believe and have faith that they will go up to heaven upon their death. Tibetan Buddhists believe their spirit will go to the bardo to be reassigned into their next life. Hindus believe that the part of them that lives on will continue that way until they collect enough merit to achieve freedom from the continuing cycle of death and new life. Many Unitarian Universalists believe that death is the complete end to life. That when you are dead, you are dead, body, mind, spirit. That only the memories of who you were live on. Many other UU’s, a growing number it turns out, believe that our spirits live on in some form after the body dies. We just don’t have unanimity on what that form is.

When I led the retreat titled What Happens to us When We Die? last November, I had a number of people ask me, “so you know?” It was meant humorously. I, of course, don’t know the answer to this greatest of life’s riddles any more than anyone else on earth. Over 50 JUCers attended that day-long program and there was, it seems to me, a palpable longing to know the answer to that question that day.
What is certain, alas, is that NO one knows. Not me, nor you, nor anyone else on the face of the earth, no matter how wise. We have our opinions. Many have deep faith in one form of our ending or another, but no one, no one, actually KNOWS. How frustrating to the scientific minds gathered in UU congregations around the country. And, I would imagine, in this room.

What does seem certain to me is that death is a profound part of life. They cannot be separated. The meaning of one rests in the other. If we live well, today and every day of our lives, we will die well. If we do not, we will not. Let me share Kahil Gibran’s reflection:

You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
and like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity…
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing , but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Then follows this mystical section that ends the poem:

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

So, what does it mean to say that you must seek the secret of death in the heart of life? I think it means, in part, that death is simply a stage of life. We are born as wailing babies, we grow into toddlers, our bodies begin to grow out of all clothing and boundaries as we become tweens, then teens. We go to college or into a job, then a career, or several careers. Later we stop working and retire. Then we spend time synthesizing all that we have done and learned and pass it on to those who come behind us. Then, we die. Some of us still wailing, some with eyes wide open striding into this last life phase with love and gratitude. Rumi has something to say about his faith of what we are heading into upon our deaths which, potentially, removes the fear of death...

When I die…
When I die, when my coffin is being taken out,
you must never think I am missing this world.
Don’t shed any tears, don’t lament or feel sorry.
I’m not falling into a monster’s abyss.
When you see my corpse is being carried don’t cry for my leaving.
I’m not leaving , I’m arriving at eternal love.
When you leave me in the grave don’t say goodbye.
Remember a grave is only a curtain for the paradise behind.
You’ll only see me descending into a grave.
Now watch me rise.
How can there be an end when the sun sets or the moon goes down?
It looks like the end, it seems like a sunset, but in reality it is a dawn.
When the grave locks you up, that is when your soul is freed.
Have you ever seen a seed fallen to earth not rise with a new life?
Why should you doubt the rise of a seed named human?

Both Rumi and Gibran are more faithful, more sure about the final outcome than many of us. We’re more like Willie I expect. They are Sufi, mystical Muslim, and Christian. How about a modern Buddhist take on the question of the relationship between life and death. Stephen Levine, a wonderful Buddhist writer who has worked with death and dying most of his joyous life wrote the book One Year to Live in 1997 in order to help us to reflect on how our value systems and life choices would be applied if we knew, beyond a shadow of doubt, that we had exactly one year to live. Here is an excerpt about the process of death itself which, like Rumi, chips away at the fear of death and illuminates the peaceful process it may, indeed, be…

Those who know the process directly do not speak of death as a single moment before which you are alive and after which you are not. They refer instead to ‘a point of remembrance’ in which the holding to life transforms into a letting go into death. It is, just a little way into the process, the moment when something is suddenly remembered that it seems impossible to have forgotten. We ‘remember’ how safe death is, we recall the benefits of being free of the limitations of the body, and we ask ourselves somewhat incredulously. How could I have forgotten something so important, and what was it again that made me want to stay in a body? Death takes on an entirely new context. At that moment, just before we feel the lightness lifting us from our body, while we are still trying to capture each molecule of oxygen just to stay alive another instant, we suddenly remember we are not the body, never have been, never will be! Resistance vanishes into a glimpse of our long-migrating spirit. We cut the moorings and dive into the ocean of being, expanding from our body, the mind floating free. I do not know if this is ‘the moment of death,’ but I do know this insight changes everything. No longer holding back, we feel ourselves dissolving safe and sound into an increasingly joyous, even youthful, sense of heading home.

From this boundless perspective we can appreciate, beyond all worldly reason, how perfect a teaching even death can be, and how immense and intricately woven is the miraculous process of our evolution.

Let’s take a moment and try on Stephen’s proposal of taking a year to live as if it were our last. As you are willing and able, please quietly close your eyes and allow your mind’s eye to take you to a safe place. There consider… you have just received the news that you have one year to live. You will have the energy and health up to the last minute to do everything you wish to do before your death in one year. How will you live this year? What will you do? Where will you go? Who do you want to be with you? How do you wish to be in relationship with those you love? Then bring them back.

I know from doing this exercise in the past, my choices lead me to better know what I truly desired and what brought me fully alive. From this measurement, the worst outcome would be to remain unconscious, to never have the experiences in life we truly desired before the end of that life. Listen to Mary Oliver…

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Would an accurate summary at this point be, in order to die well, we need to live well? As in the beginning of this sermon? But we haven’t captured yet what it means to “live well,” what it means to be fully alive.

Certainly one part of being fully alive is to be free of the demands made by the emotional and spiritual wounds, scars, left by life in our bodies, minds, and spirits to this point. The daily unconscious demands that our journey from womb to adulthood make on us. And the defenses that we hold up to the world to fool it into thinking we are fine, in no pain, and in fact, perfect, though, in fact, deep in our selves we feel anything but “fine, thank you.” The transformation of these wounds into strength, insight, wisdom, and true spiritual being is the stuff of life. Of finding the road to full aliveness. It is what we are charged with in this life. It is our earthly work, if you will. Earthly work that includes coming to terms with that which is within and without. Determining what, to us, is holy in this world, how to connect to the divine, how to realize the awesome scope of the universe and the mystery that lies at the center of its being, and come to terms with our own version of God, of spirit, of whatever we call this great mystery just beyond our grasp which has loved us “since before the beginning.”

Once we have done this work to the extent we can, for it is never completely done, never perfectly finished, once the fearful boundaries have been let go from within, and our truth about what lies just outside us arrived at, then we may come fully alive. We may then end old feuds and false distancing so we are free to fully love those close at hand. Then we can love those farther away, take actions to bring healing to the world, pray for and assist others on their journey, celebrate life with dance and song, laugh often, meditate deeply, have awesome adventures, teach, learn, and open our hearts fully to all the joy and dread that life offers.

Then, then, when death comes and “snaps his purse shut” we will be ready. Ready to calmly “free our breath from the restless tides” and move on to the next great adventure.

Fully alive, AND ready for our lives to come to an end.

May it be so for us all. Amen.

Readings:

Most of us go to extraordinary lengths to ignore, laugh off, or deny the fact that we are going to die, but preparing for death is one of the most rational and rewarding acts of a lifetime. It is an exercise that gives us the opportunity to deal with unfinished business and
enter into a new and vibrant relationship with life.

~Stephen Levine, A Year to Live

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

~Mary Oliver