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Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Sunnyvale, California
Comments, Essays, and Sermons (Collection 1) |
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The Afterlife, or This Life?
Roger Jones, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Sunnyvale, California
A sermon preached March 4, 2001
Several years ago I was approached by a sweet boy of about 8 years old. He was all dressed up and accompanied by his mother. He had a question for me. He held up in front of him a copy of the Watchtower, a magazine published by the Jehovah's Witnesses. The headline on the cover said: "Where will you spend eternity?" The boy asked me if wanted to talk about this question. I said, no thank you, and we went our separate ways.
I don't spend very much time on the subject of the afterlife. Perhaps many of you don't either. Given the hectic pace of most of our lives, I think that most of us are worried just about managing the time we have, rather than hoping for an infinite supply of time.
But I think it's a worthy question. The question of what happens after we die has intrigued and excited and worried people for a very long time. It still does. So it's pretty likely that people will ask you this question sooner or later. A question about whether or not there is an afterlife is really a question about what our death means. Thinking about what our death means can spur us to consider about what our life means.
In researching this topic in the library catalogue I was surprised to find that there is no subject heading called "after life." Instead of "after life" the U. S. Library of Congress cataloguing system uses the heading, "future life." This term seems to imply that there is some kind of life in the future, whereas "after life" is a bit ambiguous.. I know that many Unitarian Universalists place more faith in the Library of Congress than they do in the Bible, so this subject heading may provide some comfort to some of you in thinking about the other side of death.
One of the oldest ideas about a future life is the idea of reincarnation. Reincarnation is the concept that an individual soul appears in several successive lifetimes. Each soul evolves through repeated embodiments on earth. In each earthly life, whether in a human form or in some other life form, the soul gains experience toward its development. Though reincarnation is generally thought of as an idea from the Far East and Middle East, the concept has captivated many westerners. In the 1700s the German playwright Gotthold Lessing asked: "Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge?"
A few years ago in one of our congregation's adult religious education classes we wrote down our beliefs about the meaning of death, and read our answers to one another. One person said she that she wasn't sure she believed in reincarnation. "But just in case someone's paying attention," she said, she would like to "come back in the next life as a dolphin or a porpoise." As with her, reincarnation is not part of my own belief system. I base my belief on the f act that I don't recall any experiences of being any one or any thing other than who I am right now. But Gotthold Lessing didn't believe that this could disprove the idea of reincarnation. He said he was lucky not to know anything about the former condition of his soul. Remembering his past life, he wrote, would cause him only to make bad use of the present life.
Some so-called psychics and spiritual advisors offer to lead you through a past-life regression. I have never gone through this process. I don't want to deny the experience of those who have gone through it and who feel they have benefited from it. To them, the experience is genuine. However, I have a different interpretation of such an experience. I believe that if a past-life regression reveals anything, it reveals something that has to do with this life, not a past life. I think the images and stories from such an experience are similar to the material that comes up in our dreams. It may be full of meaning, just as dreams are said to be full of meaning. It is said that in our dreaming, our psyche brings something to our attention. However, I suggest that the meaning we make of our sense of a past life has to do with how we live this life.
In western religions, the two most common concepts of a future life are heaven and hell. I'll talk about hell first, because it's more colorful. The Christian New Testament introduced the idea of hell as punishment. The Christian church took this idea into its theology and really went to town with it. Catholic theology in the Middle Ages elaborated a complex system of divine punishment. As described in the poetry of Dante, the inferno of hell had several circles to it. Medieval and Renaissance paintings depicted devils in dungeons, handing out a diversity of punishments. Your particular fate depended on how bad you had been. Some people ended up in purgatory when they died-sort of a holding tank before getting your final assignment for eternity. In Medieval Europe there were so many spiritual snares that getting to heaven seemed like a long shot. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "In heaven all the interesting people are missing." And I believe it was Mark Twain who said he would choose "heaven for comfort, hell for society."
Old Christian images of hell persist in cartoons in newspapers and in magazines like The New Yorker. However, it is important to note that hell is not depicted this way in Judaism. In most of the Jewish scriptures, hell is not a prison yard operated by red devils. The Hebrew word sheol is translated often as "hell" in English Bibles. However, sheol really means the dwelling place for all the dead, not just some of them, not just the wicked. It means something more like the grave, or the pit. Of course, as the dwelling place for all the dead, it doesn't sound that cheerful. Consequently, the later books in the Hebrew scriptures do use sheol in a figurative sense. So, the name of the place figuratively came to stand for a condition of sadness or a gloomy state of being. In Jewish theology, a figurative hell is the pit of wretchedness, the abyss of suffering, or the aloneness of spiritual sickness. That's in Jewish theology. In Christian theology, however, hell became a real place-a place where many unfortunate people were going to end up.
In the late 1700s, a movement called Universalism objected to the idea of hell. The Calvinist Puritans had long been preaching that God had decided before every person was born whether that person would go to hell. That is, only the elect few would be saved for heaven, and there was nothing we could do to change God's mind. The Universalists argued that God was a loving parent. No loving parent would create children only to toss some of them into a fire of endless punishment. Puritans and other conservative Christians resisted this idea. They said that without the fear of God's wrath people would not be good, we wouldn't behave. The Universalists argued that Calvinism depicted God as a tyrant, without any ethics. How could the most perfect being have no ethics?, they asked. They pointed out that fear was a bad tool for guiding people to the ways of goodness. It never worked. (Still doesn't!)
Love is the better tool for making people good, the Universalists said. Love, not fear. This is why Universalism spread rapidly through the new United States. This is why it became one of the largest denominations in the 1800s. To those who had grown up fearing the burning fire of God's angry breath, the doctrine of God's unconditional love was a breath of fresh air.
This doctrine of love led the Universalists to join social reform efforts. Universalists worked to improve health care, to reform the prison system, to reform insane asylums, to abolish slavery, to fight for women's equality, and to promote peace around the globe.
I can't remember this person's name, but one of our Universalist forbears said: "Universalists have never disputed the existence of hell. We have merely argued about the location of it."
Universalists saw that many people did live in hell on earth. There was no need for a future life of suffering-we had too much of it here. In my own life, in those times when I endured the greatest emotional anguish and despair, I never really thought about the afterlife. For a very long time in my early life, I felt worthless. I was fearful, and I didn't like myself. But in all those years it didn't occur to me that my worthlessness might mean that I would go to hell. I already felt as if I was in hell. It may have been a figurative hell, but it was one from which I could see no way out. In the past 20 years, however, I've climbed out of hell, thanks to help from others and to my own efforts to gain wholeness and serenity. Now my hell seems like a faraway place, though I know it still exists. I hope I never end up there again. Many people experience a hell on earth, at some time or another. For some people, hell takes the form of loneliness or despair or self-hatred. For others hell is a terrible illness, whether physical or mental. For some people, hell comes from not having shelter or enough food. Sometimes hell is imposed on us by others. Violence is a hell on earth. Every week we can read of a new episode of cruelty in our world. With hell taking shape in so many ways in human life, who needs an actual location?
One of the most important aspects of our Universalist heritage is this: we are called to comfort those who suffer, to end unfair social conditions, and to bring about true community among human beings.
Unfortunately, in the last century the number of Universalist churches plummeted. What used to be one of the largest Protestant denominations is now part of a small one. There are several reason for the decline of our churches, and I won't go into all of them. But a major reason for the decline of the Universalists is that they were a victim of their own success. The universalist idea spread throughout society. That's universalist with a small "u." You can see evidence of this today in other churches. I have visited many mainline Christian churches, and they are clearly universalist in their theology. Liberal, mainline ministers speak of God's love for everyone, regardless of one's religion or behavior. Of course, you can find plenty of churches that will tell you that God's grace is limited and conditional, and that punishment awaits you if you don't accept it. But mainline Christians do not accept that, by and large. They promote a universalist Christianity.
So where's heaven? What is heaven? Is there a future in paradise for everybody? Contemporary writer Kathleen Norris says this about heaven: "A foolish concept to be sure, and apparently irresistible to the human spirit."1 Norris says that her "favorite definition of heaven comes from a Benedictine sister . . . As her mother lay dying in a hospital bed she . . . ventured to reassure her by saying, 'In heaven, everyone we love is there.' The older woman . . . replied, 'No, in heaven I will love everyone who's there." Norris says she is tempted to believe "that the power to imagine such a heaven is almost heaven enough."
I agree. Heaven is not a place to me, but a vision. It's a vision of life on earth. It is a vision of the kind of earthly community which we could achieve if we all could recognize our connections to one another. Human beings are more dependent on one another than we often realize. We are dependent on those who came before us, and the children to come are dependent on what we do today. If we could live deeply out of this sense of connection, we'd have heaven on earth. If we all could recognize that we are sustained by a web of inter-dependence, we'd have heaven on earth. We would love everyone and everything that's here.
In a figurative way, heaven describes experiences we can have here and now. What I mean is that sometimes, the ordinary moments of life can seem more than ordinary.
In the past decade I've had the honor to be with several people who were suffering in the hospital or facing the end of life. Most of them showed serenity and peace, but a few were anxious and miserable. I came to learn that their degree of serenity did not relate to theology. Whether they died peacefully didn't seem to depend on whether they were believing Christians or confirmed skeptics. Whether they were ready for death depended on how they lived life. If they had habits of trying to control things, trying to hold on to things and people, it could be hard to let go of life.
But if they had faced life's ups and downs honestly, they could face death. If they had met life with words of gratitude, then they could meet death with a sense of grace. Nothing is more ordinary than death, because it happens all the time. And sooner or later, it happens to everyone. Yet in the moments I've spent with people facing the end of life are glimpses of heaven.
When I was in theological school, I came to know a young man who was dying of AIDS in the hospital. I was 33 and he was 31. We met about six weeks before he died. His parents had wanted someone their son could talk to, someone who was not a family member or a doctor. So did he. They also wanted to line up someone who would later conduct a memorial service for him. A minister friend of mine had referred them to me.
He and I had a handful of conversations in his hospital room, during his last six weeks of life. Eventually we talked about what kind of service he wanted. We also talked about the meaning of death. He asked me what I thought happened after death. I asked him to tell me first what his thoughts were. He said he believed that when life was over, it was over, and there was nothing else. I told him that his answer made sense to me. I added that if there is something else, I believe it will be either a positive experience or a neutral one. If there is some kind of future life, I am sure it is not a bad one. And I believe that all of us will be in it together. Nobody will be left out.
I was touched by how honestly this 30 year old could talk about his own death. By this point in his life, he seemed to be at peace with the idea of leaving it. It became clear to me that he had lived life deeply and fully. Our honest conversation was an ordinary thing, but it was much more than ordinary. I didn't realize it at the time, but now I feel that the honesty of that moment was a glimpse of heaven.
If there is a real location called heaven, I trust that it is a crowded place. I trust that, if there is a God, God is enough of a universalist to take me in. God would even take in people whom I would prefer to leave off the guest list. If I do end up there, I will be pleasantly surprised. I'll be happy to be there. I'll be grateful that I will be able to see everybody I love and be able to love everybody I see.
But if I do get to spend the rest of eternity with some kind of conscious awareness, I'll be even more grateful if I can say that I didn't take this side of eternity for granted. Whatever the future life might look like, I hope I can say that I did what I could to appreciate this life.
Let us remember to live with appreciation of the moments that we are given. Let us live in the present with gratitude. Let us give thanks for life. Amen, and blessed be.
—The Rev. Roger Jones|
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Sunnyvale, California
Comments, Essays, and Sermons (Collection 1) |
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