The Meaning of Life and Death

• Reading: Do Not Go Gentle by Dylan Thomas
• Sermon I: Accepting Death by Eric Luedtke
• Sermon II: Make Every Moment Acceptable as a Prayer by Emily Robinson

Reading

Do Not Go Gentle

by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Sermon I

Accepting Death

by Eric Luedtke

I am 22 years old, or perhaps I should say “only” 22 years old and, hopefully, I have many years of life still lying before me. Some of you may wonder what right I have to speak of death. I myself have doubted my ability to address the issue. Since Emily and I decided on the topic, in a moment of utterly ridiculous ambition, I have wondered how I, who have tasted so little of what life has to offer, can have anything profound to say about life’s end.

I might provide here a list of people I have lost. I could describe my fears, for myself or those I love. But I do not think I need to. I could say, simply, that death is all around us. It permeates our society, our culture. It is ever-present on the news, whether on the obituary page in the local paper or in television reports of wars in Iraq, earthquakes in Iran, plane crashes in Egypt, mudslides in California… the list is infinite. But I think this is beside the point. I have the right to talk about death because I am alive, and the two are bound.

Before I go further, let me say that I am about to make a number of sweeping assertions, and the little screaming Unitarian conscience within me begs me to offer an apology in advance. I am sure some of you will disagree with some part of this sermon, and I am equally sure that you will not hesitate to let me know exactly what it is you disagree with.

As Unitarians, I think we have a special problem with death. If we were true believers in a united credo passed down through our church, if we were not willing to discuss openly our beliefs, if we merely accepted, without thought, what we were told about the end, then we would not have such a problem. Faith can provide the most powerful relief from the fear of death. It allows people to confront death head-on, willfully, sometimes arrogantly, sometimes nobly. Utter belief in the cycle of birth and rebirth allowed a Buddhist priest named Thich Quang Duc to immolate himself in the streets of Saigon in 1963, in protest against the Diem regime’s persecution of his religion. Faith in a personal connection to God, and in the everlasting welcome God offers to martyrs, led the Quaker Mary Dyer to go to the Massachussetts colony to preach illegally not once, but three times, in the face of a law requiring the death penalty for heretics. As she stood on the gallows, she was offered her life if she would but leave the colony, and not heed her call from God, but she refused, saying, “In obedience to the will of God I came and in His will I abide faithful to death.”

But Unitarian-Universalism is unique in that it asks its adherents something other than unquestioning faith. We are asked only to accept the beliefs of others, to discuss our various theisms, agnosticisms, and atheisms honestly, openly, and without malice. Herein lies the problem, and here is where some of you may disagree. I think that truly accepting the beliefs of others, debating them honestly and openly, requires us to constantly question ourselves and our own beliefs. I think the creation of a community of diverse religious opinions means that we have to harbor, somewhere, a doubt in our own self-constructed theologies. I, like you, have come to my beliefs through long introspection and discussion with others. I like many of you, have not found a final answer. And without that final answer, I can not come to terms with death or fear of death through faith alone.

So I have arrived at a quandary. Death is a fact, and I fear it, and I must find some way to deal with it. There is an option, absolute acceptance of the teachings of a faith, but it is one I am unwilling to take. I am a liberal Christian, in the tradition of William Ellery Channing and of many other early Unitarians and Universalists. But my faith is not absolute, and can never be so. And standing up here in the pulpit today, I can not offer a simple answer. All I can do is offer options, for there are many ways to deal with death, many ways to respond to the cowled specter as it approaches, scythe in hand.

The reading today is one of my favorite poems, written by Dylan Thomas to his father, who was dying. I know many of you have experienced death in your lives, have seen it take a loved one slowly or quickly or somewhere in between. My own experience is one of sadness, and of confusion. How does one deal with death when it comes? What does one say to a dying loved one? How in the world can a person come to grips with the utter fact of mortality?

Thomas really only sees two options. His wise men, and good men, his wild men, and grave men, all rage against death. They fight it, for various reasons, with every power at their disposal. They stare death in the face with nothing more than sheer force of will to back them up. In the end, we know, their fight will be unsuccessful, but Thomas seems to be imploring his father to fight the good fight. To take a stand. As if the end of one’s life was but a hopeless battlefield, a courageous last effort in the face of an overwhelming enemy, as if we were all Spartans, facing the endless Persian horde at Thermopylai. Thomas, it seems, was a romantic, who believed in the nobility of death resisted. Rage is an option, but I don’t really think it to be an answer. If we rage all our lives against death what breath will we have left with which to live, to enjoy our brief respite from eternity here, on this earth.

His father, it seems, is taking the opposite tack. If rage, disbelief, defiance is Thomas’ choice, then the anti-Thomas would simply be resigned. Death, in whatever form it may eventually come, will surely come in the end. There are those who would lie down and wait for it to come. Yes, they would be unhappy with it, but what can they do? They can’t run away, death is a great sprinter. They can’t hide, because death will not only seek but will also find. So they lie down, and watch as the sun slowly sets on their lives, going gently into that last night.

This poem sets us on the horns of a dilemma, with two options before us. But, like most Unitarians, given a choice between A and B, I will usually take C on principle. I believe there is a third option, acceptance. To accept death is to acknowledge it, to look it in the eye and greet it, without fear. Acceptance is saying to oneself, “I do not know what I was before I was born, and I do not know what I will be after I die, but I know what I am now, and that is enough. Death will come, and I accept that, and my acceptance allows me in the meantime to try to make the most of my life.”

How one comes to accept death I do not yet know. I can not even fully define what I mean by acceptance. But I am learning and growing towards it. And even if I did have a final answer, devoid of the requirements of absolute faith, I don’t think it would work for anyone but me. This, it seems, is one of those intensely personal searches that never seem to quite come to an end. It is a path each of us must find for ourselves.

My father’s mother died after a long battle with a series of cancers. Twice she got past breast cancer, and became healthy again. Cancer appeared in her brain, and then in her colon, and she beat both of those as well. But when cancer spread through her liver, she could not win again. She raged against death, and became bitter with it, and, in the end, she spent more time fighting against it than in enjoying the last weeks of her life. I do not want to rage.

My mother’s father, after losing his wife to lung cancer, became almost a shadow of his former self. He missed his wife terribly, and powerfully, and his love for her seemed to pull at him from the other world. He became resigned to living until death came, and those last years of his life between his wife’s death and his own seemed empty. He was waiting, and nothing more. There was rarely much joy in him. I do not want to be resigned.

But I remember clearly my grandfather’s words to me and my brother before we left to go to his wife’s funeral. We were young, and unfamiliar with death, and he said, “I know that you might think that to be a man, you have to keep from crying. But that’s wrong. Crying is OK if it really hurts. Don’t be afraid to cry.”

My grandmother, who raged so against her death, was, I think, a little afraid for me to see her dying, so I did not get to talk to her much before she passed on. But the night she went, as she was fading in and out of lucidity, my father held the phone against her ear and she told me, ordered me, to ,”Have a good life.”

I do not know whether I will find a way to accept death. In the meantime, though, I won’t be afraid to cry in the face of it, because it is sad, and it is a little scary. I’m not sure that a time will come when I can look death in the eye, smile, nod in greeting, and then go about my business. In the meantime, I will try as much as I can to have a good life.

Sermon II

Make Every Moment Acceptable as a Prayer

Emily Robinson

For all of those people, like myself, who have not made their New Year’s Resolutions yet, I hope that discussion of this topic will give some good ideas.

For those of you who came today to find the definitive meaning of life, here it is: “Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fats, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”

Well, I’m done.

Actually, that was the meaning of life according to Monty Python, in their movie of the same title. On the whole, I think that is in concordance with much of what I will be saying, but I thought I’d go into a little more depth.

Another definition that might be more useful in church comes from the Rev. Richard Gilbert of the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, NY. He says that, “in short, life is the only chance to both grow a soul and repair the world. We cannot do one without the other.” For a very short statement, there is a lot of meaning packed in there.

Before I go any further in giving my thoughts on the topic, I’d like to point out that I in no way believe that I am doing even a decent job of balancing the growth of my soul, and my efforts to repair the world, but the good news is that life is a journey and hopefully I have a lot of miles to go. This sermon was Eric’s idea and I was pretty nervous at first about getting up in front of the congregation to give my views on a topic that I’m so unqualified to speak about. But I’m glad we’re up here doing it; not because I think that I am imparting some great knowledge to everyone here today, but because thinking and writing about this helped me to clarify what I really think my purpose is and what I can do to better carry that out.

Back to the meaning of life. The quote I gave before is so short, yet so full of meaning, that Rev. Gilbert, in his book The Prophetic Imperative, actually creates several diagrams and charts to fully explicate all of its nuances. I have differing views about the content and order of the elements in the charts, so I will just try to explain what growing a soul and repairing the world is all about for me.

I’ll start with the hard part: the soul. While I can’t describe exactly what soul is, I can make some assertions about what has an effect on it. Most people, myself included, come to church every Sunday for our weekly “soul fix.” The scriptures, sermons, reading, ritual, and communion we feel puts us in touch with that deeper part of ourselves that often gets lost in the hustle-bustle of everyday life. Before I became an UU, I thought of soul only in connection with religion and church. I’m slowly learning to see the soul in a broader context.

I like to think of the soul as the battery that powers my life: a rechargeable battery. The juice that keeps it going consists of interpersonal relationships, intellectual stimulation, and meditation and reflection.

Like most UUs, I’m good on the intellectual stimulation front. Because I’m sure that you don’t want to hear me drone on and one, I will leave that one to Monty Python and say simply, “read a good book every now and then.” But I am sadly lacking in the other two areas. That is not to say that I don’t ever meditate or reflect, or that I don’t have interpersonal relationships; I do. It’s just that in my soul-development process, I have not prioritized these as I should have. The soul-development process has usually come in second place to the repairing the world part of my meaning of life, with many negative consequences.

It’s hard to say exactly what meditation and reflection is, it encompasses so much. So I’ll use the definition that the practice of meditation and reflection makes me a centered and whole person, someone able to face the challenges of life in a calm and collected manner with a clear sense of what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and why what I do is important. There are many other terms for what I’m describing: one could call it practicing mindfulness, another might call this prayer. Whatever one calls it and however one performs it, I think the most essential product of the practice is quite eloquently expressed by our Director of Religious Education, Mandy Keithan. When I was meeting with Mandy about the RE class I’m working with this year, she said, “Every Sunday I walk through the classrooms and I see magic moments happening, and so often the teachers miss it and that makes me sad.” I am one of those people who miss magic moments, and not only in RE, because I’m preoccupied, stressed to the max, or anxious about what I’m not accomplishing. And that is sad, because if I’m not recognizing and giving thanks for magic moments, then what are I here for? Being able to identify and acknowledge magic moments not only gives you an immediate warm and fuzzy feeling, but it informs and motivates the work that you do everyday to make the world a better place.

The second problem area I mentioned was interpersonal relationships. An illustration: over Christmas, I went to Tampa to visit my family. We had a lovely time until the last day I was there, when we got into a big argument, which was entirely my fault. Although there were other issues, the main gist of the altercation was that I had placed my volunteer commitments above my family. My sister’s 21st birthday is next weekend and I had told my family that I would fly to Houston to be there. When I found out that my parents had not made flight reservations for me yet, I told them that I couldn’t go to be with my sister because I had a volunteer commitment at church that weekend. My sister’s response to this was surprising to me to say the least. My sister and I don’t talk all that often, we don’t have much in common, and a few years ago we had a lot of problems that we never really worked out. Therefore, I honestly didn’t think she would want me there for her birthday, so I was shocked when she broke out in tears and told me that I was so selfish. I think her exact words were, “You’re so selfish, not the usual selfish, because you give up your Sunday mornings to be with a bunch of 5th graders, and that’s great, but you think they’re more important than your own family. It was really important to me that you be there, and you didn’t even think about that.”

There are many things I should have done and shouldn’t have said, but for the purposes of the topic at hand, there are two connected things that I want to focus on, because I think they are chronic problems in my life. The first is that I am uncomfortable really getting to know people. In this case, I didn’t really want to deal with all of the problems my sister and I have had for the past 3 years, and I didn’t want to deal with asking her if it was important that I be there for her on her special day, because I didn’t want to hear the answer. So I never talked about it, I never asked about it and that has cost me. It turns out to be a good thing we fought, because it forced those issues to the foreground and we cleared them up and since then, we’ve had more phone conversations than we’ve had in the last 2 years.

The second was stated rather bluntly by my sister that I prioritize what I see as my “commitments” above my relationships with friends and family, even my dog. I’ve always thought that leading a good life meant making a difference in the world, leaving it a better place than I when I entered it, which I still think is true. But I’ve never been one to see the argument that you make the world a better place one person at a time, starting with yourself. It’s much easier to think of it in terms of measurable progress towards a goal, committee meetings attended, causes I’ve been involved in. At least since I entered high school I have chosen jobs that “make a difference and filled my non-working hours with volunteerism-Special Olympics, Key Club, Best Buddies, NARAL, and now church activities. But without special deep bonds between those I serve, my friends, and my family, and without a real center created out of deep meditation, reflection, and knowledge, I often find myself tired, frustrated, and angry when I go to try to help other people. I so rarely feel that what I’ve done makes a measurable difference, which leads me to believe that my life up to this point has been a failure. This is exactly what I think Rev. Gilbert is referring to when he says that we need a soul to repair the world and we need to repair the world to help us grow a soul.

I included the reading by Steven Smith because I have let some of the tendrils I once held snap or at the very least fray. I am not ashamed to admit that I need help from this congregation and those closest to me to let me grasp those that I have left for all I’m worth. Only then can I truly be successful in my efforts to repair the world.

Well, I’m glad that part of the talk is over because now I can speak on something I’m far more comfortable with and that is how to repair the world.

Rev. Henry Meserve once said, “If you were arrested for being a UU, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” He’s speaking specifically here about social activism and its central role in Unitarian Universalism. Rev. Gilbert even goes so far to say, “I believe that the Unitarian Universalist movement lives under a prophetic imperative, a religious mandate for the corporate address of the church to the systemic problems of society.” I can think of no better term to describe the importance of social justice work than religious mandate. However I would expand the statement to say that each individual Unitarian Universalist lives under a religious mandate to address the problems of society. There are very few churches where 100% of the congregation belongs to the Social Action Committee, indeed, I am not a member of that committee here at the church. But every member of the congregation can and should be a part of an effort to change the world. If we really do believe that we are all connected to the web of life, that every life is full of worth and dignity, then how can we justify to ourselves not working to end the suffering of others? Looking around the room, I don’t think that this particular tenet is a problem for those present.

So I do not urge you to take on more social activist commitments, but to stick with what you are already committed to. One valuable lesson I’ve learned is that unlike the Sunday morning service, social action work is not very often exciting. Most of the time its hard and sometimes tedious.

In writing this sermon, I took another look at the essay I wrote for my application to seminary. On the role of social justice work in Unitarian Universalism, I said, “working in the non-profit world as a volunteer and professional, I can attest that translating good wishes into reality is usually a messy business. I have worked to overcome the obstacles of apathy, a minute budget, and the limitations of a very small group to affect positive change. I have accomplished my goals because I simply won’t give up. I am willing to make a thousand phone calls, stuff envelopes, show up for every meeting, knock on doors, and beg for donations and volunteer time. Most importantly, I maintain a positive outlook, even when the situation looks bleak. I know that the business of social change requires a can-do attitude and the strength to actually follow through.”

I stick with what I said in that essay, making a difference is mostly about being there and doing the work, even if it is licking envelopes. But beware of the magic moments that sneak up on you when you least expect them, when someone lets you know how much your efforts have meant to them, when you find another activist to share your enthusiasm with, the good feeling you get when the work is done.

I’ll close with a quote from Rev. Theodore Parker. “God send us a real religious life that shall go with us where we go, and make every home a house of God, every act acceptable as a prayer.” For 2004 my New Year’s Resolution is to make every act acceptable as a prayer, whether that’s in seeing and being grateful for magic moments, striving to be closer to those around me, or working to repair our beautiful world.