Living with Our Mortality
Sermon by Emily Burr
July 1, 2001
Living with Our Mortality
One of two curricula for our eighth and ninth graders is called R.O.P.E.S or "Rights of Passage Experiences" "How do we live, knowing we will die?" is one of the questions posed to these young people as part of that curriculum. During their "graduation" service in May, our minister Steve Edington said that the questions they had been considering during this coming or age program were ones they should revisit periodically throughout their lives. If we don't ask, think about and speak about such "big" questions periodically, they tend to pop up in an unnerving way when we aren't expecting them. They will often pop up when we are trying to deal with what I call a transforming experience.
We all have transforming events in our lives. Some are big ones, like a stroke, and some are smaller ones, like turning thirty. Some are all at once, like a parent dying suddenly and some happen over a longer period of time, like a child growing up and into independence. Some are seen as primarily joyful, like the birth of a child, and others bring more grief, but they are all events that we have to come to terms with in one way or another. One cannot go through a transforming experience without being transformed, being, in sometimes very subtle ways, a new and different person.
Having a "close call" is can certainly be a transforming experience. I had two this winter. The first was on Route 3 heading south toward my school from Nashua one Tuesday. A VERY LARGE semi-truck was driving beside me and there was a sudden, very loud noise. I immediately realized that a tire on the semi had blown and that I had no idea what the next few seconds might bring and that I had no control over what would happen. Well, the semi eased over to the side of the road and I proceeded, with adrenaline pumping and heart racing, to my class at Andover Newton. On the rest of that drive south and for the next few days I returned to that moment and wondered: What if?
Then about a month later, I experienced the other, more dramatic, transforming experience. As many of you know, on February 25th, I survived a leak in a cerebral aneurysm. An aneurysm occurs when a weak spot in an artery develops a bubble. When the bubble pops or leaks it allows blood to flow into areas where it is not supposed to be. The aneurysm I had was in my brain. It may seem strange, but I actually consider myself very fortunate. Most people who have cerebral aneurysms that burst or leak never wake up and those who do are often severely limited either physically or mentally. I am glad to report that my recovery has been rapid and is expected to be full. But even if I do have a complete recovery I cannot recover the same person I was before February 25th. I will be a different me. I look at the world and my life differently and I think I have learned to live with my mortality in a different way than I did before.
Today I will talk about some of the ways that my awareness has shifted because of this transforming event and how it has led to my asking myself one form or another of the question, "How do I live my life, knowing I will die?" I will talk about how my perception has changed regarding my life and its meaning in relation to the big picture. I will share how my goals have shifted and how I realize that, although I cannot control everything, I do have power over some aspects of my life. I can control some things even when I don't have ultimate control over the universe (which, of course, we'd all like to have - or at least think and act as if we do)
"How do I live my life knowing I will die?" The first part of this statement that caught me by surprise was the word "knowing." Of course I knew I was mortal, that I would die someday. At least I knew it in an intellectual way. That was much different than realizing at a deeper level that I could, except for a twist of fate, luck, or whatever you want to call it, not exist anymore right now, this moment. When my aneurysm burst, I could easily have ceased to be. About two month after the event, when I thought I had come to terms with what had happened to me this niggling question started to bother me. "Well, what then?" As one minister friend put it, I had run smack into my mortality.
I began to question the meaning of my life up to that point. If I had died, what would be left behind? What effect or meaning would my life have had? I hadn't saved the world or done anything magnificent like invented a vaccine for AIDES or solved the global warming problem. What difference would my life have made in twenty, a hundred, a thousand years? Even if I had an effect on this earth, what effect would it have on the universe? I realized I was less than a blip on the radar screen of the cosmos so what difference did it make what I did or didn't do? These were not happy thoughts. I was having a problem with perspective. Those of you who heard my "The Forest versus the Trees" sermon will recognize this as an example of losing the trees for the forest.
One of the ways I have found to deal with things that are troubling me is to find someone I trust with whom I can talk them out. I took this problem to my friend and mentor Marcel Duhamel, the minister of the Concord UU church. When I told him my realizations and feelings he said, "Yes, Emily, if you had died this winter we here would have missed you and felt sad, but the universe would have gone on." I continued by asking him how he helped people who came to him with similar concerns about their insignificance on a cosmic level. His response was, "Accept it." At first this seemed a bit harsh but, with time, I understood it to be the kindest answer he could give because there is no other choice but to do just that, if we are to have meaning in our lives. As I have worked on giving up feeling sorry for myself and accepted that human life is transitory and insignificant, I have turned to the good things about being alive and I find myself seeing everyday life from a new perspective.
Part of this new perspective is a realization that worrying about the future is futile. Knowing I was perfectly healthy one minute and could easily have been dead the next, either from a collision with a semi-truck or an aneurysm, makes the future less rigid, less sure and therefore less important in some ways. There is a saying that I've read and heard a couple of times recently. I was unable to find the source or the exact quote, but it summarizes my feelings on this topic so I'll try to explain the gist of it.
The future is in the future and it will never be here. The past is past and it is over and done with. The present is all we really have. It is a gift and that is why we call it the present.
This is not to say that we don't need to plan for the future or learn from our past, both individually and as a culture, but it does mean, to me, that right now is what is most important and we can miss a lot of important moments in the present by spending mental time and energy in the past or the future. There are several outcomes from my paying more attention to the present. I have a feeling that what I am going to say next will have more meaning for some people than it does for others. For many years I heard people talk of a new appreciation for nature and of seeing the world around them for the first time. I was not able to hear what they were saying in a way that made sense to the way I had experienced life. I thought, "Of course nature is beautiful. What do you mean see it in a new way?" I think you have to have had one or more of the transforming experiences I spoke of earlier or maybe just be aware of your mortality, at the deepest level, before you can appreciate the miracle of simply being alive, as well as appreciating all the miracles around us in this incredible world. A stunning sunset or mountain vista has a different meaning for me than it did a year ago. I haven't figured out all the why of it yet but I know it has something to do with an appreciation of the limited time I have to experience such things. I am also more aware of all my senses. I delight in a truly scrumptious chocolate cheesecake. Music has a more powerful effect on me. The smell of the forest as I hike lends itself to thoughts of all the components that make up the smell.
There was a singer who did a service and concert at a UU church a couple of years ago and one of his songs speaks to this from the point of view of a recovering catholic who was raised with a different kind of "miracle." It's called "Everything is Holy Now" and the verses I like the best go"
When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don't happen still
But now I can't keep track
'Cause everything's a miracle.Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But fining where there isn't one
Along with a new appreciation for nature has come a realization that what is of primary important to me and what gives the most meaning to my life is not things. Certainly it is not things like fancy cars, expensive jewelry etc. but it is not even abstract things like those beautiful sunsets and mountain vistas. What gives my life the most meaning is my connection to other people.
Martin Buber, an early to mid-twentieth century German theologian, speaks of the difference between I-Thou and I-It interactions. He addresses the difference in quality of picking up a chair and picking up a child, relative, lover or good friend. The something extra that is there when you connect through a person's eyes or the special connection that is there when you hold hands with another human being, even a stranger. Buber explains the I-It as experiential and the I-Thou as relational. You can experience a rock or chair but you can't have a relationship with it. I have come to believe that what is important for me in my gift of the present is to be in relationship with others. I think the something that is special and different about I-Thou is that we each have in us a piece of that "spirit of life" that connects us all and that if I can't even be a blip on the radar screen of eternity, what I can do is make the world a better place in the here and now for other people and that that is enough because it has to be. One way I can make the world a better place is to concentrate on my relationships with other people and make them as honest, open and caring as possible.
Another experience I will share has to do with attitude. It was very frustrating at first to realize that I had no control over what would happen to me in many ways. I did not control the truck that did not hit me nor did I control the aneurysm that burst in my head. There are many things I cannot control in this world. One thing I can control is my attitude to what does occur. There was a time early in my recovery when I found my world particularly difficult. I think it was when I realized that what was happening to me was not a bad dream. It was real and would have unknown repercussions for my future. I felt powerless and scared. I didn't want to see anyone and I wasn't particularly pleasant to the people who were around. Then I remembered another time I had been in a difficult place in my life and a friend had said, "What is the worst that can happen and what would you do if it did?" That question had helped me feel more in control in the past and it helped this time too. I realized that even if my recovery was incomplete, many people complete college and graduate school completely blind and I was far from that. If I really wanted to become a minister I could. I could have people read to me. I could learn Braille if I had to. My condition did not change in a day but my attitude toward my condition did. I welcomed the people I had driven away a day earlier, making possible a strengthening of those all-important I-Thou connections. In many ways the world is what we make of it by our attitude toward our situation.
I hope that by sharing some of my experiences today, I have created a bit more of a connection between us. I hope that when you are faced with events, big or small, sudden or gradual that make you ask yourself some variation of the question, "How do I live, knowing I will die?" you will see them as opportunities to be here in the present and not be overwhelmed by the bigness of it all or get lost in the past or the future. I wish for you the ability to adjust your attitude so that you view the positive rather than the negative side of things. I wish for you strength to accept what, at first, may seem impossible and I wish for you an understanding that the I-Thou connections between people are of special importance and somehow connected to the spirit that is greater than us all.
