Transcript for May 24, 2009 by Ian Lawton

There is a Cherokee saying, “When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.”

Pause to honor the dear departed in your life. As you reflect on the lives and good memories of those you have lost, may your loss and grief empower you to live a life you can be pleased with, a life that makes a difference. There is only one thing that death won’t take from you and that is the love you have planted like seeds throughout your life. Cultivate your seeds of love in honor of those who have inspired you and you keep their spirit alive.

The fact is that death is more certain than life. Death will certainly come upon you at some point. You neither know when nor how. Life on the other hand is a choice in each moment and it’s an invitation that many people decline. If you accept the invitation to live fully, your life will be worth dying for and it will survive you. The love and goodness you leave behind will be the children and grandchildren of your life’s work.

My great hope this morning is to unmask death so that you are free to live more fully. Unfortunately, religious teaching about an afterlife often keeps people in bondage to death.

Religion, Afterlife and Living Fully

The Hopi people have a rite of passage for their children. When they are young, the children experience a ritual during the corn harvest. Kachinas, masked holy men, parade into the tribe’s circle, bless the corn and bring gifts to the children. Between the age of 7 and 10, the children are taken to an alternate harvest festival. During this occasion, something surprising happens. Instead of dancing, the Kachinas stand directly in front of the children and remove their masks. These men, whom the children had always thought were gods, are revealed in fact to be their uncles and neighbors. It’s a coming of age ritual, where otherworldly magic gives way to ordinary miracle.

Keep in mind that the Hopi believe in spirits and a supernatural being. The ritual is not doing away with the deeply spiritual beliefs of the people. Rather, this is a ceremony where the kids realize that the sacred exists in the people around them. The adults manifest the energy of the spirits. It’s an internalization of primal and literal beliefs. It’s a way of showing the kids that all of life, even the most ordinary people and situations, are full of divine wonder.

Sadly, the Christian church has no equivalent ritual. We expect adults to believe stories in a literal way, like children. There is no coming of age ritual where teenagers can move from literal belief in external divine forces to the possibility of a divine indwelling in all things.

Now apply this to the afterlife. Adults are expected to believe in a literal heaven and hell, rather than being given the possibility of believing that heaven and hell are realities that exist, and we often create ourselves, in the midst of life. You create heaven in your life and in the world around you.

You don’t have to choose between a belief in a literal afterlife and nothing. Now you can experience the spirit of those you have lost in your life. Otherworldly superstition gives way to ordinary miracle. How does this apply to the loss of those you love? Do you imagine (or hope) that they live on in some form? I heard a story about a student who asked his teacher, “What happens to those we loved who are no longer with us?” The teacher thought for a moment then answered, “Do you think that when we think of them, that is their way of speaking to us?”

Maybe that’s a way for you continue communicating with your lost loved ones. Every time you think of them, they are speaking to you as a voice from beyond.

Liberated from the Fear of Death

One of the dangers of the literal belief in an afterlife is that it holds you captive to death. Death becomes a matter of fear or reward. You live your life tentatively as if you are on show or as if it’s some sort of a practice for the real thing in heaven.

Belief in an afterlife may leave you in denial about death.

There were three people standing at the Pearly Gates of Heaven when Saint Peter met them and asked, “What would each of you like to hear your relatives or friends say at your funeral?” The first answered, “I am a renowned doctor and I would love to hear someone say how I had been instrumental in saving someone’s life.” The second man, “I am a family man and a school teacher. I would like to hear someone say what a great husband and father I was and that I had made a difference in some young person’s life.” The third said, “Wow, those are really great sentiments but I guess if I had my choice I would rather hear someone say, ‘LOOK!!! HE’S MOVING!!!”‘

Just like the Hopi tribes, its time to unmask death. Every thought, word and action is a chance to manifest heaven in your life and in the world. You need neither fear death nor deny it; just accept it and let your love loose in the world while you have time.

Death Defies Categorization

The truth is that all of us, religious and non religious people, have so many complex reactions to death. Some of us don’t mind the idea of dying. We just don’t want to be there when it happens, as Woody Allen says. For some it’s the fear of dying, and for others it’s the fear of not knowing what happens next.

My first realization of death came when I was 6 and my friend died after getting stuck inside an old fridge. His empty chair at school the next day is imprinted on my memory, a stark reminder that death is real. Even as a six year old, I knew this was unnatural, unlike the deaths of my older grandparents that were a mixture of sadness and relief. Then there was the first time I was present with someone as they died, and it was such an ordinary miracle. He took one enormous last breath. The next breath never came.

There was the funeral I conducted for a woman without a single person present, because she didn’t have anyone in her life by the end. Imagine life coming to that. I have so many mixed feelings about death and more opportunity than most to reflect on it. What are your thoughts about death?

Julian Barnes is a British author. As a young man he was an atheist, now as a 60 year old he is agnostic. His latest book is called, Nothing to be Frightened Of. It’s a book about death. He speaks about the experience of his parents dying, and his relationship with his brother, the philosopher, as each of them deals with death in their own way. The book opens with these words- “ I don’t believe in God. But I do miss him.” His brother thinks that’s “soppy” but for him it’s the God that connects him to his roots. For Barnes, God is somehow an idea that grounds him even while confounding him. The God that he misses is “The Christian God of western Europe and non- fundamentalist America. I don’t miss Allah or Buddha, any more than I miss Odin or Zeus. I miss the New Testament God rather than the Old Testament one. I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses.”

It’s a wonderful book, full of honest reflections on God, religion, death and dying.

Barnes tells the story of a French priest who said to him one day, “You don’t think I’d go through all this unless there was Heaven at the end of it, do you?” As Barnes says, “I was half impressed by such practical thinking, half appalled at a life wasted in vain hope.”

It seems a limiting perspective on life, and another example of how the religious view of an afterlife can be an escape from this life.

He tells another story about a successful business man who thinks he can control death the way he has controlled his life. He arranged all the particulars of his own death, including the entire funeral planning in advance. He even admitted that he planned to succeed at death as he had in life.

If our various reflections on death teach us nothing else, surely it is the uncertainty of life. When you stop trying to control life and death, you can live more fully in the moment.

Unmask your assumptions about death. Release the grip of death over your life, and instead allow death to be a force for life.

Cultural Baggage Concerning Death

This is not just a religious problem. In the west, we have some profound baggage around death. I sense that it’s preventing us from living as fully as we might. So I also want to unmask the western attitude to death.

A movie came out last year called “Memorial Day”. The movie draws a parallel between torture and western party culture. Memorial Day has traditionally been a celebration of those lost in war, but today it is more often marked as the beginning of summer party season. The movie begins with a group of young people in the midst of Memorial Day festivities. The interactions turn from joyful and fun to violent and abusive within minutes. Teenage girls are blindfolded and force fed beer. Then half way through the movie, the same characters are seen in Abu Graib style prisons water boarding hooded prisoners.

It’s a stark movie that shows that some treat war as a party, and some treat partying as war. Both are symptoms of the same disease; a deep disrespect for life. The juxtaposition between blindfolded westerners and hooded easterners shows that this is the same problem turning up in wildly different contexts. It is the fear of death and impermanence that fills us with the urge to control life and dominate other people.

Torture, by any name, is the ultimate dishonor to the many soldiers who have by their bravery modeled a healthy attitude to life and death. They live a life, and serve a cause that is worth dying for. In so doing, their bravery outlives them.

I think those at the highest levels who authored and sanctioned torture should be brought to justice. They should be brought to justice not just because of the immorality of their actions, but because they are partially responsible for the “Girls Gone Wild, Spring Break” culture that mimics the same lack of perspective about life and death.

Its only when we learn to respect death that we will be free to live life fully.

Bridging Life and Death with Love

I end with a hypothetical situation posed by Dostoyevsky in Brothers Karamazov. I hope this hypothetical might bring together the themes of life, death, torture and service.

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature – that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance – and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.

For me, the answer is no and I can only hope I would have the integrity to follow through on that ideal. For me the answer is no because the memory of the brutal death of one baby would prevent any genuine happiness in my life.

There can be no freedom for a culture that confuses wars with parties, and parties with war because the scars of torture cut deep. They cut into the victim, and they cut deep into a perpetrating culture that confuses life with death.

Freedom that is built on the edifice of injustice and violence is no freedom at all. Life that is built on confusion about death is no life at all.

You know the reality of death. You have lost loved ones, and the pain will never completely disappear. The way you honor their lives is to build a bridge from your life to them on the other side, whatever the other side is. It is a bridge of love. Life rises up from death. They have died. Now you must live.