Rev. Susan Maginn
How Can It All End
February 15, 2009
Wy'east UU Congregation
Portland, OR

In her play, Eurydice, Sarah Ruehl tells the story of what happens to Eurydice after she dies and leaves the love of her life, Orpheus. When she arrives in the underworld, Eurydice does not remember very much of her life. The river Styx takes away all memory and you must pass through this river to get to the underworld. Eurydice's father is in the underworld and he still has his memory. He held his breath in the river. As he welcomes Eurydice and cares for her, he tells her stories of her childhood and helps her to regain her memory of the upper world.

Meanwhile Orpheus convinces the gods of the underworld to allow him to take Eurydice back to the upper world on one condition. She could go, but they could not look at each other until they were both in the upper world. If they look at each other, Eurydice would belong to the underworld forever. When Eurydice leaves the underworld to follow Orpheus back to the upper world, her father cannot bear losing her and so he chooses to immerse himself in the river so that he can forget Eurydice and rest in peace.

Orpheus and Eurydice walked the entire distance to the upper world without looking but on the cusp of the path's end, they turned to look at each other a moment too early.

Eurydice returns to the underworld, only to find her father by the river, collapsed in forgetfulness. In her own grief, she enters the river as well.

We human beings, as far as we know, are the only species to live with the burden of knowing that we are going to die. According to Ernest Becker, who wrote The Denial of Death, we avoid the despair of this reality with some well-constructed defenses.

When we humans defend ourselves from our fear of death, we often end up shrinking from life. The irony is that in order to be free from the fear of non-being we become fearful of being. As Elisabeth Kubler Ross wrote, "Our fears (of death) don't stop death, they stop life."

Our awareness of our finitude shapes the intensity of our love - for a person, for a place, for an experience. We hold those that we love more tenderly because we know this place and time are not forever. When someone dies, we might feel that the relationship is suddenly over. We might also feel that the person's presence accompanies us in a different way.

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice invites us to consider how our understanding of love shaped by our understanding of death? How does knowledge of our inevitable death shape our understanding of today's love?

Mary Oliver...
"To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go."

A man in his 60s spoke of how he keeps learning simple lessons far into adulthood. He said, "It is like the layers of an onion. I used to believe that when we die all the layers of the onion are finally peeled away and then will we be at one with God. I still like that image, but as I get closer and closer to death I am not so sure," he said. "Now I don't know if I will ever be at one with God during this life or any time and, it's funny. For some reason, now I don't need to know what happens after I die. I'm good with it. I'll just find out when I get there."

Two parents are struggling to explain death to their son. For years, they would say that when someone dies they "go back to the earth". Recently the father has encouraged them to switch gears and talk to their son about heaven. Both of his parents died before he was 40. As a grown man he can hardly bear to imagine that they have simply 'gone back to the earth,' that his parents are not somehow seeing him learn the bliss and heartache of parenthood. He can hardly bear that his parents do not somehow look upon their grandchildren with love. "I don't know if I even believe it," he said, "but let's just tell him there is a heaven, full of people who love him."

I used to visit a woman who was in the last weeks of her life. She spoke about her husband, telling stories of their decades together, about what a wonderful me he was, how she was not a perfect wife, how much she missed him in these years since his death. She said that she was a "realist", that she felt confident there was not a realm where she would be with him again. She got very quiet, looked longingly out the window as her face opened into a great smile. "I sure hope I'm wrong."

There are so many ways to envision what happens after death. There is reincarnation - our spirit lives on in different forms, learning and maturing through each lifetime until the spirit reaches the realm of pure consciousness.

There is resurrection - that all of our being goes to a divine realm after death.

We Uus have many beliefs about death but I think we tend to lean toward a naturalistic approach - that this is it and when we're gone we're gone for good. We tend to focus on the here and now, not on the hereafter. This perspective has us value the life that we have now as precious and significant.

It makes sense to me that people who do not believe in an eternal life have been responsible for great accomplishments in social justice - creating public education, caring for people with mental illness, fighting for the environment. If you believe in the here and now and not in the hereafter, then there is a mandate to care for what we have and to leave it as a gift to future generations.

This way of living can be a way of appreciating every moment, but the shadow side is that this way of believing can also put pressure on the here and now, on our relationships and our life's work. We might expect some person or some experience to be the sole accounting of our entire life's meaning. This pressure may be too heavy and cause the relationship or work experience to fall apart under the weight of so much expectation. We can drive away the very relationships we have centered our lives upon. Many of us can benefit by cultivating a sense of humor and lightness about our personal significance.

One day last fall, I found out that my beloved Great Aunt Ro was dying. She was 89. We all knew her liver would fail her eventually and the time had come. When I found out I called her and we laughed about how shocked she was when her doctor told her she had two weeks to live. Irish families find a way to laugh at the damnedest of times. I told her that I could either fly to St. Louis to see her now or I could come to her funeral. She said, "Come now. I don't think I'll make it to the funeral."

I told my six-year-old daughter, Ro's great great niece, that I was going to fly to St. Louis to visit with Ro-Ro, that she was dying and that I am going to say good-bye to her.

She tells me how sad it was that Ro is dying and that she wants to send her a card.

Here is what she told me to write in the card:

Dear Ro-Ro,
I will never forget about you.
I really miss you.
And I wish you wouldn't die.
But I'm gonna let you go.
I really miss you.
I really don't want you to let me go.
I'm really sad about you.
Love,
Grace

When I was making my flight plans, Grace insisted on going with me saying that she wanted to say goodbye to Ro-Ro, too. I hesitated but I'm really glad that I took Grace along. So few of us get to see the miracle of life enter the world or leave the world. So Grace came with me and I read her goodbye card to Ro-Ro while Grace sat on her lap.

My family surrounded Ro in those final days. We all talked openly about planning her Catholic funeral and what she would like most in these last days of her life. Two days before she died, I was holding her and telling her about how beautiful Oregon is. I joked with her saying that when she was on her way to heaven she should really fly over Oregon to see it. I said, "When you get to heaven, you'll have to let us all know how it is." She looked at me and said, "You mean to tell me you don't know? And you call yourself a minister..."

There are enough accounts of extraordinary things happening to those who are in the dying process - before, during and after. People who have had near death experiences tell their stories and the many stories have striking similarities - the tunnel, the weightlessness, the peace, the inherent goodness in all. Those who have returned from such an experience often come back without a fear of death.

I haven't had a near death experience, but I have been with a good number of people who are dying, enough to see that this living and dying business is bound up in a great mystery that none of us can fully understand.

For weeks after Ro died, my mother could not sleep. She felt the profound anxiety that any moment my mother could be called for an emergency. My mother was Ro-Ro's power of attorney and her primary caretaker in Ro's final years. This was an intense responsibility, especially the final weeks of her life. It was not grief that kept my mother awake at night after Ro died, it was a feeling that she was still responsible for Ro's well being. And then one night the feeling was suddenly gone: my mother could finally sleep again and her mind was at rest.

In some religious traditions, death does not happen in the instant that the body dies. Death is rather a process that can take weeks. Perhaps my mother was still helping Ro's spirit die in those weeks after Ro's heart stopped beating. Perhaps on that strangely restful night, Ro's spirit was finally at peace.

So here is what I think happens after we die. I believe that we return from whence we came. I believe that we return to a dimension where all is one. There is no discernable 'me'. There is no discernable body. There is oneness.

As Octavio Paz said...
"where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined"

Part of the beauty of this oneness, as I imagine it, is that we are at one with all we have loved in this life. Our deepest moments of intimacy in this life are the closest glimpses that we have to what this consciousness is like.

In the dying process, we let go of all that is not of this oneness, our egos, our need for control and power, and of course we let go of our physical body. This letting go can take a while - before, during and perhaps even after the body dies. We let go until we are at one with this calm and intimacy.

It can take a while, but like any good Universalist, I believe we all get there.

But for now, we are here. This is a place for us to learn to love well and to live well with life's many uncertainties. May our finitude, our humility and our vulnerability lovingly guide us toward that which connects each to all.

Prayer

By Michael Schuler

Lord of all being, the longer I walk upon this great green earth the less do I understand my purpose in being here; the less am I able to fathom the reason of my birth and span of life.

But strange though it seems, the task of finding solutions to the riddle of me and the mystery of you seems less urgent these days. It's not that the question has lost significance, but that slowly I am learning to have faith -- faith that if I live my life intently, reverently, self-consciously, moment by moment, your universe will slowly unveil itself, in its own good time.

And so I do not force the issue -- and so within life's splendor I am at peace. Amen.

Readings for February 15, 2009

I Praise My Destroyer
How can it all end,
the moon making foil of the blueblack sea,
at twilight the sandbars holding lavender
among turquoise shadows,
pastels of water lidded by pastels of sky
and, at angle, moon shimmer snaking to the horizon?
By the dockside, a diver kneels at his tank,
to test the regulator, as if taking communion.

***

How can it all end,
the cabbage whites aflutter
like tissue-papers
lofting to Heaven in a Japanese temple,
the yellow roses numbingly fragrant
and even the spiky conifer
whispering scent.
I praise my destroyer.
The sea turtle's revenge
is to dwell at equal measures
from the grave. Our cavernous brains
won't save us in the end,
though, heaven knows, they enhance the drama.
Despite passion's rule, deep play
and wonder, worry hangs
like a curtain of trembling beads
across every doorway.
But there was never a dull torment,
and it was grace to live
among the fruits of summer, to love by design,
and walk the startling Earth
for what seemed
an endless resurrection of days.
I praise life's bright catastrophes,
and all the ceremonies of grief.
I praise our real estate - a shadow and a grave.
I praise my destroyer,
and will continue praising
until hours run like mercury
through my fingers, hope flares a final time
into the last throes of innocence,
and all the coins of sense are spent.
~ Diane Ackerman ~

"Breaths" by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop:
Listen more often to things rather than beings.
Hear the fire's voice,
Hear the voice of water.
In the wind hear the sobbing of the trees,
It is our forefathers breathing.
The dead are not gone forever.
They are in the paling shadows,
And in the darkening shadows.
The dead are not beneath the ground,
They are in the rustling tree,
In the murmuring wood,
In the flowing water,
In the still water,
In the lonely place, in the crowd:
The dead are not dead.
Listen more often to things rather than beings.
Hear the fire's voice,
Hear the voice of water.
In the wind hear the sobbing of the trees.
It is the breathing of our forefathers.