We Are All Going to Die
Dave Weissbard
UURockford
10/26/03
[the assignment]
Today’s sermon is the delivery of the choice of sermon topic purchased at last year’s service auction by Pete Anderson. In his letter to me spelling out the assignment, Pete wrote:
The very earliest evidence of human history tells us that we are a religious people. We need it to give us answers: we need to believe in something. It is my tenet that our need to believe has no connection with reality. Said in another way, faith does not necessarily make something true. It is natural for us to want an afterlife, but our craving does not make it so. A minority of people believe there is no God and therefore no afterlife. It is my observation that atheists may be just as arrogant and bullheaded as the most fervent believers in a religion. I cannot say that I have the answers, but I must admit to myself that the possibility of nothingness after death cannot be discounted, as unappealing as the idea may be. I imagine that a very small percentage of people believe this way; they have the strong need to believe in something “better.” That need has no connection with reality.
[afterlife]
Pete is right about most people. A national survey of 1,000 adults just released shows that 76% of Americans believe heaven exists and 64% believe they are going to get in. Nearly half of the believers described heaven as “a state pf eternal existence in God’s presence,” while a third believe that “heaven is an actual place of rest and reward where souls go after death.” 14% said that they believe that heaven is just “symbolic,” and 5% said there is no afterlife.
It has always been hard for me to comprehend why, if people really believe in a heaven, so many are so afraid to die, and why survivors grieve so. It would seem as if they ought to be lining up to get to that “better place.” Death should not, in that context, be so terrifying.
In fact, belief in an afterlife is one way people have of denying the finality of death. I hasten to add, that does not make it untrue. I take on Pete’s challenge with the full knowledge that I can offer no authoritative answer to the question of whether there is an after-life. No one knows.
[near death experiences]
People who have had what we call “near death” experiences often come away from them with a high level of certainty that there is more to come. The fact is, however, that they did not finally die, so all they can talk about with certainty is the experience of almost dying. That experience includes feelings of peace and freedom from pain, an out of body experience, passing through a tunnel toward light, meeting with a being of light, a process of review of one’s life, and a reluctance to return to this vale of tears.
It may be, as Carl Sagan suggested in his book. Broca’s Brain, that the experience of passing through a tunnel to the light is a replay by a dying brain of the tape of the birth experience, caused by oxygen deprivation and the secretion of endorphins – the same experience can be induced by psychotropic drugs. For the most part, people who believe in an afterlife are reassured by those stories, and doubters remain unconvinced.
While I cannot speak with the authority of one who has personally experienced death, much less near death, or who believes that we have hard data on which to base our conclusions, I have, over the last 38 years, had many opportunities to talk with people who were dying, and on a few precious occasions, to be present at the time of death, one of those being the death of my first wife, Linda. My experiences have led me to some tentative conclusions, but left me far from certain.
[we are going to die]
We are all going to die. It’s true. We don’t like to think about it – we go to great lengths to deny it, including now the injections of poisons into our bodies to remove wrinkles, but the truth is that none of us will get out of this life alive. There are people who are in touch with this reality, but in this culture they are few and far between.
Virginia Morris, in her book Talking About Death Won’t Kill You, points out that:
Unlike our ancestors, who knew death intimately and were reminded of it regularly, we are so insulated from death that we sometimes forget it even occurs and are stunned when confronted with it. But we need this knowledge, that death is real and unavoidable. Futile battles and the awkward silences often occur simply because something in us refuses to believe that death can happen, that we don’t control it, we can’t stop it. We have to accept, in whatever way we can, the reality and randomness of death, before we can change the way in which it happens.
She goes on to insist:
There is no need to obsess about death or to sit in constant dread of it. We simply need to be aware of it. Not just as some biological fact, but as a deeply felt truth, as a part of our lives and who we are. We need to be aware that we will die and all the people who are important to us will die. Aware that, even as we color our hair and tone our bodies and try to smooth out our wrinkles, that this is a game, a pretense. We are mortal. All of us.
[history]
Some of the earliest human artifacts we have found are indications that our Neanderthal ancestors tended to their dead with rituals. This is seen by most scholars as the earliest indications of religion. When you cut through all the theology and trappings, one of the most fundamental tasks that religion has always had to face is helping people to find a way to live meaningfully in this world with the knowledge that death lies ahead.
We believe that our ancestors may have related dying to their experiences of dreaming. There was a part of them that was able to travel great distances and have unique experiences, without their bodies having left their places of slumber. Perhaps death was the failure of that non-corporeal part of them to return to the body. They saw death as a threat, and thus saw bodies as threatening. Hence the placement of stones over graves – to keep the bodies down, lest they wander. There was, over time, a shift from fearing the dead to seeing them as sources of help, if their spirits were placated.
We know that the ancient Hebrews had little concern about an afterlife. That changed during the Babylonian Exile. They came into contact with the followers of Zoroaster, who taught physical resurrection of the dead, following the final battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. The Saducees objected to this as it had no scriptural basis, but the Pharisees, who had been troubled about the way that the good sometimes suffered and the evil prospered, saw an afterlife as offering the solution. There will be a judgement and the good will finally receive their reward and the evil their due punishment.
Jesus said little about an afterlife. When he spoke of the Kingdom of God, he was talking about a major transformation of the earth itself – the coming of a new way of living which he believed was imminent. All the theology about his having had to die to ransom us because of Adam’s sin was Greek theology that came in with Paul, who was faced with explaining how Jesus, if he was who they thought he was, could have died. The emphasis shifted to a time in the future, as in Zoroastrianism. All of the stories about the levels of heaven and hell and purgatory are from folk culture – they are not found within the Jewish or Christian scriptures.
The church became the key to entry into eternal life, which was a powerful tool indeed. It even led eventually to the selling of indulgences. There have always been Christian leaders who have insisted that without the promise of eternal life, the church would be meaningless, kaput!
[Freud]
Switching to a modern religion, Sigmund Freud saw sexuality as lying at the root of human troubles. In fact, it is clear that Freud had some major hangups in dealing with the possibility of death and so he tended to change the subject when anyone brought it up. When he ultimately did incorporate Thanatos - the death wish, into his therapeutic scheme, it was not well thought out. His successors, particularly the existential psychoanalysts, have shifted the center of their concern to the reality of death. It is their belief that much of our human energy goes into denying death, because we are so fundamentally afraid of it. They center on Freud’s teachings about Transference and suggest that in order to create or maintain the feeling of security in the chaotic world, people identify with beings or people or movements which will have the power to protect them.
David Loy writes:
The need to find security by subjecting ourselves to others persists, transferred from parents to teacher , supervisors and rulers. This is not simply an emotional mistake but a matter of experiencing the other as one’s whole world, just as the family is for the child. In this way we tame the terror of life, by focusing the power and horror of the universe in one place.
Loy suggests that this is why we identify with sports heros and teams, national leaders, flags, and religious leaders. He writes:
What ties all these together into a nearly universal phenomenon of the human mind is more than our desire to tame the terror of death: it is our need to organize the chaos of life by finding a unifying meaning-system that gives us knowledge about the world and a life-program for living in it, informing us both what is and what we should do.
That’s the positive side. Loy goes on to suggest that negative transference is also essential. We take all our fears and project them onto enemies that we can conquer in wars. We create “evil empires” or nations with “weapons of mass destruction” that we are sure are aimed at us.
Loy, who is the Zen Buddhist professor I interviewed on Fusion a couple of weeks ago, in his book, Lack and Transcendence, which is subtitled “The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism and Buddhism,” believes that even more fundamental than our fear of death, but related to it, is our sense of lack. In his view, we have constructed an artificial world based on the lie of individualism, when we are all truly a part of being itself. Our greatest fear as he sees it is that we are not real, and we work hard to flee from that realization. But that is a digression deserving of its own sermon.
[avoidance mechanisms]
Arnold Toynbee, the great historian, looked at the mechanisms we use to try to hide from death, and found eight.
Some people choose the hedonistic approach that since we are going to die anyhow, what we should do is experience the maximum amount of pleasure while we can. Perhaps that pleasure will keep us from contemplating the coming of death.
Some deal with death pessimistically, concluding that death is the lesser evil. It was Sophocles who proclaimed that “it is best of all never to have been born, and second-best –second by far– if one has made his appearance in this world, to go back again, as quickly as may be, thither, whence he has come.” Suicide is, of course, the ultimate expression of such pessimism.
The third approach that Toynbee points to is the circumventing death by physical countermeasures. By this he means, for example, the practice of the pharaohs to be buried in a lavish tomb with food, riches, and servants at the ready. Mummification is another attempt to maintain a semblance of life after death, which of course has kept Lenin on display in Red Square. I would suggest that plastic surgery and the use of botox and hair transplants are modern attempts to fool death into thinking we are too young to be taken.
One of the major ways to try to defeat death is by fame. Those who have more than 15 minutes of fame hope that their memories will live on, even if their physical bodies do not – we will come back to this.
One of the most constructive approaches to immortality has been through investing in making the world a better place for future generations. When the Hebrew God, Yahweh, makes a deal with Abraham, it is not that he will make Abraham immortal, but that “I will make of thee a great nation,” “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the sea shore.” This approach is what moves the reformer to try to leave the world a better place than she or he found it.
Toynbee’s 6th way of reconciling to death is merging oneself in ultimate reality. This is related to both the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. As I mentioned before, David Loy believes that when we realize that the self is a fiction, and recognize that we are a part of all life, then our fear of death is resolved.
Next comes the kind of spiritual immortality that a portion of those Americans who attested to a belief in heaven, had in mind – it is about having a sense of a portion of the self reside in a relationship with the Holy.
Finally comes the kind of afterlife that Mark Twain was talking about in his Captain Stormfield story, where heaven is a place where people are physically resurrected and expect to be sitting on clouds, playing harps through eternity, even if they hated harps while on earth. This is the heaven in which people expect to encounter their loved ones who dies before them, and get to be with them again.
I realize that Toynbee did not address the belief in reincarnation, which is the hope which some cherish.
Each of these ways of dealing with death: hedonism, pessimism, circumventing by physical measures, seeking fame, doing good, merging with ultimate reality, spiritual immortality, physical resurrection, and reincarnation, are ways in which people through history, and in our time, have tried to cope with the knowledge of death.
Some of them seem less promising than others.
[facing death head on]
I want to speak for a moment for those who face death with a measure of equanimity. There are people who cling to a belief in an afterlife who are convinced that when the rubber meets the road, those of us who have no such expectations will crumble and plead to be saved. I can tell you that I have never seen it happen. What I have experienced is people who looked at their lives as a privilege they experienced, facing death as a part of the package without concern about what might come after. If it is nothing more than eternal rest, that’s ok with them.
Lyn Rund, our beloved member who died in September after a brief illness, met the word of her impending death with her usual compassion – she was concerned about how hard it must be for the oncologist to have to deliver such news. She determined that she would spend her remaining time with family and friends, and she did just that. She had no sense of certainty about what would follow, but she viewed death as an adventure. She didn’t know what was coming when she came into this world, and she had no real clue what would follow it, and that was not a concern for her. Her focus was on the joy she had experienced and the family she was leaving to carry on.
People who accept death as an integral part of life, can and do face death without fear. We cannot hide, we cannot escape, we cannot control what will happen. Perhaps we will be blessed with a measure of control over our final days, on how we meet death.
[immortality of influence]
What many Unitarian Universalists believe to be the real immortality is the immortality of influence – that the people whose lives we touch, touch the lives of others and out like ripples in a pond. Our names will last only so long, but the impact we have had on others can carry on long after we are forgotten.
George Eliot expressed it in her famous poem, May I join the choir invisible:
O May I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again,
In minds made better by their presence: live
in pulses stirr’d to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man’s search,
To vaster issues.
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing as beauteous order that controls,
With growing sway the growing life of man.,
So we inherit that sweet purity,
For which we struggled, fail’d, and agoniz’d,
With widening retrospect that bred despair.
Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued,
A vicious parent shaming still its child,
Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolv’d;
Its discords, quench’d by meeting harmonies,
Die in the large and charitable air.
And all our rarer, better, truer self,
That sobb’d religiously in yearning song,
That watch’d to ease the burthen of the world,
Laboriously tracing what must be,
And what may yet be better,—saw within,
A worthier image for the sanctuary,
And shap’d it forth before the multitude,
Divinely human, raising worship so,
To higher reverence more mix’d with love,—
That better self shall live till human Time,
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky,
Be gather’d like a scroll within the tomb Unread forever.
Which martyr’d men have made more glorious,
For us who strive to follow. May I reach,
That purest heaven, be to other souls,
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffus’d,
And in diffusion ever more intense!
So shall I join the choir invisible,
Whose music is the gladness of the world.