A Fate Worse Than Death: An Easter Meditation
Sermon by Steve Edington
April 4, 2010
"Something's lost and something's gained in living every day." It's been well over forty years since Joni Mitchell wrote those words in what is still her best known song, as popularized by Judy Collins, Both Sides Now. But as long as they've been around, the words have come back to me quite often over this past church year, which is still not over. Some of our members and friends have experienced very painful, even devastating, losses over the last number of months; and the effects of those losses have rippled throughout much of our congregation. And we've celebrated some wonderful gains, some real highs, in our common life as well.
It has been a year of peaks and valleys for us, then; and I think--as we now come to Easter--that we are a stronger congregation for having experienced both. And we do strive to be alive--really and truly alive--every day as our losses and our gains come and go.
Within our larger UU family, we also knew the loss of someone--a friend and ministerial colleague of mine--whom I consider to have been the most articulate and engaging spokesperson for our liberal faith in the latter part of the 20th century; and that would be the Rev. Forrest Church who died last September, at the age of 61, following his battle with esophageal cancer. Forrest was, for over 30 years, the minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City, which, during his ministry, became one of the largest congregations in our Association. I'm using the opening piece of my Easter sermon this year to give him a salute.
At the last of our annual General Assemblies that Forrest attended, in June of 2008, he gave an address titled Love and Death, which also became the title of yet another of the numerous books he published on liberal religion during his lifetime. In both the GA address and later book Forrest, in speaking very forthrightly about his approaching death, drew a distinction between what he called ongoing business and unfinished business. No matter when you take leave of your life, he noted, there will always be ongoing business associated with it:
"All of our lives end in the middle of the story," as he put it. "We leave the stage before discovering how the story will (finally) turn out." But then he went on to say, "In the meantime, however, to help ensure a good exit, one thing is fully within our power. We can take care of unfinished business. We can make peace with ourselves, reconcile, where possible, with our loved ones, and free ourselves to say 'yes' to the cosmos..."
"Death," he continues, "may come as a thief in the night, but it cannot steal from you the love you have given away, the strength you have shown in facing life's hardships, or the courage you have proved in quelling your own demons."
Forrest cites those three qualities as things that even death cannot steal from you. I think they also identify what may well be the three most worthwhile, things you can do with your life--or have to say for yourself about your life: You freely gave you love away; you showed strength in facing hardships--even, I would add, which also owning your vulnerability; and you showed courage in quelling your own demons.
I think Forrest would agree, were he still amongst us, that you do not have to be facing death in as immanent a way as he was when he offered these words, to still live by them. It was his being made aware, in a rather precise kind of way, of his finitude that led him to put forth those three most worthwhile things in the way that he did. "Death...cannot steal from you the love you have given away, the strength you have shown in facing life's hardships, (and) the courage you have proved in facing your own demons." He was really talking, and writing, about how we choose life, and say yes to life, in the face of death.
His final charge to his listeners at that General Assembly was to live a life worth dying for. I would say that in order to do that one has to find ways to keep coming back to life, and to a deeper affirmation of life, particularly after those times when we feel we've lost a part of our lives, a part of ourselves. The return to life after a time of loss or diminishment is indeed the larger theme of this Easter-time and spring-time season.
This acknowledging of death, and then calling--or recalling--ourselves back to life is actually a recurring theme in many, if not all, of the various religions that have come and gone and still remain as part of the greater human story. The psychiatrist and author, Robert J. Lifton, is certainly correct when he points out that practically all religions contain or are built around certain images or stories or symbols of rebirth or regeneration. This is so, Lifton maintains, because "concern with the problem of the meaning of life in the face of death is common to all religious traditions. This is why themes of resurrection, the renewal of life, the presence of hope, and the resilience of life--in the face of the frailty and transience of life--are common themes in the many religions and faith traditions of humanity.
As I've pointed out on previous Easters, for our earliest human ancestors, their lives were very closely tied to the rhythms of the earth and its changing seasons, which gave us the earliest celebrations of the season we are now in. Since their relationship to the world of nature was, by and large, considerably more immediate than ours is today, those early ancestors may well have felt a greater urgency in their welcoming of life back to a seemingly dead earth. For if the earth did not find a newness of life--in a very literal way--then neither would they. So when they sang or chanted or danced to their own version of "Lo the Earth Awakes Again" they were addressing matters that had to do with their very survival.
With the coming of both the Judaic and Christian faiths, they set the holiest of times in their yearly cycles at approximately the same time as those of some of the earliest of seasonal celebrations in our hemisphere as the time to tell their own stories or myths or legends about new life emerging in the face of death.
The time of Passover, the celebration of the movement from bondage to freedom--as we remembered the story in our annual Seder this past Friday evening--corresponds to the celebrations of the release from the bondage of winter and the deliverance into the hope of spring.
When the powers that be--or were--in the Christian church set the date to observe the resurrection of their founder, Jesus of Nazareth, as told in the accounts, stories, and legends of the Christian gospels, they used not only a variation on the name of a Pagan fertility goddess--Eostre--to name their holiday; they also tied the date to the movements of the earth, the sun, and the moon. The Christian Easter, today, is observed on the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the vernal equinox--just in case you were wondering.
So what we call Easter is really a universal event, a universal celebration that has always been observed at this time of year under a variety of names and using a variety of stories, myths, and narratives, all under this universal affirmation of the return of life after a time of seeming death.
Behind all the stories and all the various celebrations I see a dynamic, a back-and-forth, that needs to keep recurring over the course of our lifetimes in order for us to have any kind of meaningful living at all. To get at this point I'd like to offer you a line by the late Norman Cousins who once observed, "The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside us while we live."
Whether he was aware of it or not, Cousins was echoing some words by Henry David Thoreau who, over a century prior to Cousins, said, "I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived." Each in their own way, Norman Cousins and Henry David Thoreau, are pointing to what I consider to be a fate worse than death, which is to lose touch with life, and with any sense or hope for a newness or renewal of life, while one is still living and breathing.
To pick up on my opening note of this sermon, over this past year some of us have taken some pretty hard hits, even some devastating--at times--hits. And the point is not to deny the pain and the grief that these deaths-in-life visit upon us, and that will never completely go away; not that we could do that anyway. But rather we must strive to not allow or permit these deaths-in-life to completely define our lives for as long as they remain ours to live. Otherwise we do fall prey to the warning Mr. Cousins offers us.
A quick rejoinder, or caveat, here: I know that you cannot rush a resurrection or a rebirth, anymore than we can rush the springtime. It comes in its own time and on its own terms. Life wounds and life heals, and generally does so on its own terms and in its own time. It is an act of faith, no less, to be willing to allow life to renew itself for you; even when it seems like such a renewal is not going to take place.
Alongside the words I've just offered from Cousins and Thoreau, let me add these from the works of the Latin American novelist and short story writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who writes of one of his characters, "he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers gave birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over to give birth to themselves."
This is the response, or the antidote to Norman Cousins' warning about what we let die inside of us while we're still living. The way to avoid that fate--which I call a fate worse than death--is to remain open to the many rebirths that do come our way if we'll let them.
I think this is what actually happened in the traditional Easter story, or legend, as told in the Christian scripture. The earliest of these accounts, as told in the Gospel of Mark, ends, in its original version, with the disciples of Jesus being scared--in the aftermath of the execution of their leader--and wanting to just run off and hide. That's a pretty typical human response to any kind of a great loss, or death-in-life; hunker down and hide out.
But then something--we'll never know just what--but something happened to make those disciples, whoever they were, think, well no we still have something worth living for; we still have a message worth carrying forth; we still have experiences to share, that have not died--even if the one who gave us a new lease on our lives is dead.
My humanistic take on this story, which is being told in Christian communities around the world on this day, is that what became mythologized as the resurrection of a man who had been cruelly executed, was really about a resurrection that took place in the lives of those who knew and loved him deeply; deeply enough that their lives found rebirth, and found a new sense of commitment, which then allowed them to go forward.
That, I feel, is the kind of rebirth that Marquez is writing about as well. It's about coming to those times in your life, especially when you've taken a pretty hard hit, but can still say to yourself again; yes, I still have something worth living for, I still have my convictions and my values to live out, I still have my story to tell; and that's what I'm going to do. "Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers gave birth to them; but life obliges them over and over to give birth to themselves."
I have one more direction I want to take before closing on these thoughts for today. I've been talking about rebirth and renewal and a resurrection of life as something that comes after a time of loss, after a time of what I've called a death-in-life. But there's another means of rebirth, another antidote to Norman Cousins' fate worse than death; and that is in finding ways--knowing you're not always going to do it--to pay attention to the preciousness and the sacredness of life that is right there in the midst of the ordinary and the seemingly mundane. I find this message, difficult as it is to fully grasp and fully live out, in another passage from my personal sacred scripture, which is the Third Act of Thorton Wilder's play Our Town.
Wilder was living over in Peterborough, New Hampshire in 1937 when he wrote his best known play, and Peterborough is his prototype for the fictitious, 1930s American small town of Grovers' Corners. The first two acts are about the general comings and goings of the town as overseen by an omniscient Stage Manager who supplies a narrative thread while also interacting with the characters from time to time. He's a one man Greek Chorus in this play.
One of the play's several story lines is the developing relationship between young George Gibbs and his girlfriend Emily Webb which eventually results in their marriage. The third act takes place after Emily Gibbs dies while giving birth to her and George's second child when she's 26 years old. Emily's character still lives on, however, since the third act takes place in the cemetery up on the hill overlooking Grovers Corners, where the deceased, when they have the cemetery all to themselves, can converse with one another while looking down upon the town where most of them lived their lives.
The Stage Manager, who is something of a God-like figure, can also go up to the cemetery and join in the conversation himself, which he does. Wilder was a gifted enough playwright that he could actually make this shift in perspective work on stage.
As this final act unfolds the Stage Manager tells the recently deceased Emily that she is allowed to see, or revisit from her after-life perspective, any day of her life that she wants. The other deceased souls tell her not to do it, but Emily cannot resist the Stage Manager's offer and asks to see again the day of her twelfth birthday.
She remembers it as being a special day in her life--as it was--but when she is allowed to see it again, from the angle she now has, and knowing all that will come afterwards until her death fourteen years later, she experiences mostly sadness and even anguish. Because what she sees is how taken for granted everything is. She realizes how precious, how sacred even, so much of life is; and how human beings--herself included from when she was a human being--completely miss it while going about the tasks of their lives. Her lament is that people do not really look at one another when they have the chance to do so; do not really realize life while they live it. She tries to talk to her mother as she sees her mother on that 12th birthday: "Just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another..."
Of course, neither her mother, nor anyone else can hear Emily now. The deceased Emily quickly recognizes this and tells the Stage Manager she's seen enough, and the replay of her 12th birthday comes to an end. And as that scene/memory goes away Emily delivers these lines to herself, to the departed souls she's recently joined, and to the Stage Manager:
"It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed...Oh earth, you are too wonderful for anyone to realize you..." And then, directly to the Stage Manager she asks, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" The Stage Manager answers, "No," and then after a pause he adds, "The saints and poets, maybe they do some." And then Emily says "I'm ready to go back." Back, in this case, to whatever there may be on the other side of her earthly life.
Wilder's Stage Manager is most likely right when he says that we human beings do not realize life "every, every minute." I wouldn't argue that point. But I like to think, and I do believe, that there's just enough of the saint or the poet in each of us so that we really can look at one another, and really can realize life while we live it; that we can do that at least enough times and in enough ways to let us know that we are in the midst, in the presence of something precious and sacred and holy--as well as something very fragile which is only ours to hold for a time. To have these kinds of moments, Easter moments if you will, is to know about rebirth. And, conversely, to completely miss, throughout our lives, the truth that Emily Gibbs was allowed to see, really is a fate worse than death.
Stay open, then, for your Easter moments; for your own times of rebirth and renewal and resurrection. Forrest Church, to return to him in closing, calls these Easter moments times of Awakening. Here's how he put it, shortly before his own death:
"Awakening is life returning after a long journey and seeing the world--our loved ones, cherished possessions, and the tasks that are ours to perform--with new eyes. Think of little things. Reaching out for the touch of a loved one's hand. Shared laughter. A letter to a lost friend. An undistracted hour of silence, alone, together with our thoughts until there are no thoughts, only the pulse of life itself. Imagine an afternoon spent free of worry about the things we have to do, or the tasks we have avoided. We may not understand any better than before who we are or why we are here. But for this fleeting moment--the only instant we can bank on--our life becomes a sacrament of praise."
Life a sacrament of praise, on that note--a blessed and happy Easter to each of you.
Stephen Edington
April 4, 2010
