The Quest For Immortality
Rev. Daniel S. Schatz
BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
Nov 8, 2009
In the struggles we choose for ourselves,
in the ways we move forward in our lives and bring the world forward with us,
It is right to remember the names of those who gave us strength in this choice of living.
It is right to name the power of hard lives well-lived.
We share a history with those lives.
We belong to the same motion.
They too were strengthened by what had gone before.
They too were drawn on by the vision of what might come to be.
Those who lived before us, who struggled for justice and suffered injustice before us,
have not melted into the dust, and have not disappeared.
They are with us still.
The lives they lived hold us steady.
Their words remind us and call us back to ourselves.
Their courage and love evoke our own.
We, the living, carry them with us:
we are their voices, their hands and their hearts.
We take them with us, and with them choose the deeper path of living.
- Kathleen McTigue
In the White Mountains of California there is a tree, twisted and warped. It looks half dead, clinging to the mountain, many of its limbs all but bare, fallen pieces of wood scattered around like kindling. It isn’t a very big tree, and it doesn’t grow especially fast, and if you ever saw it you might be forgiven for wondering whether something so twisted could last another year. But bristlecone pine trees are survivors. This tree is well over four and a half thousand years old. Nearby are many more that are three and four thousand.
I learned about the bristlecone pine from a song by Hugh Preston, not long ago – yes, folksingers will sing about anything. And what touched me the most on hearing the song was one line, just this: “When Jesus was gathering lambs to his fold, the tree was already a thousand years old.”
I am thirty-seven. Judging from my family background, I can reasonably expect to live into my eighties, and perhaps even my nineties, barring accidents. To a bristlecone pine, my lifespan is as the blink of an eye.
Learning about a thousand year old tree – let alone a four thousand, seven hundred year old one – gives me a sense of humility about life and death. For all that I would like to live a good long time, in the end the difference of a decade is not that much. When I think about the oldest of living things, I realize once again that the value of a human life will never be determined by longevity, that death is the inevitable result of life, and that the worth of my years will be in their quality, and never their quantity.
Tom Lehrer perhaps expressed it best on one of his classic albums when he quipped, “When Mozart was my age, he’d been dead for two years.” What I find especially humbling about that remark is that when Tom Lehrer said it he was exactly the age I am now!
And yet. Somehow we still seem obsessed with the idea that we might live forever, and that it is only the bad luck of accident or poorly treated disease that will stand in our way. Headlines proudly trumpet a future in which we will live far longer lives, without any consideration as to the quality of those lives, the overpopulation of the planet, or anything other than the assumption that longer lives are better ones.
When I was a chaplain in Charlottesville, Virginia, the hospital administration occasionally made forays into Public Health work. This was good, but something about the way they stated their objective struck me as odd – “We want to get the death rate down,” said the hospital’s director. Afterwards, I remember asking one of my colleagues, “Isn’t it still one to a person?”
That may be, I was told – but they still want to get the rate down. I think in that moment I proved that I am far better suited to ministry than medicine.
I have no wish to reject the benefits of medical science. What concerns me is the way our culture sometimes relates to those benefits, as if we were machines rather then people. If we can only fix everything that is broken, we reason, then will live long enough that we will never have to deal with the reality of dying. Most people in medicine understand that this is not the case, but something about our culture still pushes the idea that even if we cannot attain immortality, we can at least stave off death long enough so that we never have to think about it.
It’s a profoundly hurtful way of living, because it separates us from the natural cycles of our lives. When confronted with the reality of disease or aging, the illusion of immortality becomes a form of denial, a way to put off ever having to think of leaving the people we love, of letting go of our lives. When faced with the death of people we love, the illusion of immortality leaves us utterly at a loss, with no tools to go through the natural process of grieving and bereavement, helpless as children.
Fortunately, most of us have not completely bought into that illusion. We do understand the realities of life, and especially as we get older, we think practically about wills, living and otherwise. Many of us plan for what kind of care we would want if we were to become terminally ill. Sometimes we have conversations with our families about what to do in that kind of situation.
But it’s easy to slip into the quest for immortality again, without even noticing – just look at how many people have reacted with real terror at the idea in proposed health care reform legislation that doctors should be encouraged to talk with their patients about living wills, powers of attorney, and what choices they would make if they should become incapacitated. Look at the horror of the Terry Schiavo fiasco a few years back – when the congress of the United States of America actually voted to reverse the private decision of a patient’s family and prevent her from dying with dignity.
And I can’t help but think that at the root of all of this – the denial, the campaigning, the culture not of life, but of living forever – is the simple truth that we just don’t want to let go. We don’t want to think about leaving the people we love, or about saying goodbye to the people who are leaving us.
So we find every way we can think of to avoid the issue. Whether we convince ourselves that God will heal all things if we pray enough, or that doctors could heal all things if would only do their jobs properly, we put off the difficult conversations and we hold on, and we don’t let go until we are forced.
Some of this, I think, is natural. It part of our instinct for self-preservation – we value life highly. And I would never want to change that instinct, or be part of a culture obsessed with death and dying. And in the end, we usually surprise ourselves with our ability to deal with death and loss – not always, but usually. It isn’t easy, and it takes time and the support of friends and a loving community, but it is amazing what human beings are capable of living through.
Some of us find comfort, too, in the thought that perhaps the people who we have loved now continue to live in some spiritual realm – Heaven, perhaps, or a spirit world, or maybe their souls live in the new babies born today. But as powerful as these beliefs can be, they do not take away the truth of our human mortality. None of us can know what, if anything, comes after life, but we do know that this life, on this earth, is limited, that part of what defines us as human beings is the briefness of our years.
I remember attending a funeral once for a good man, a young man, who was killed in an automobile accident out on a country road on a foggy Minnesota day. And I remember the message of the minister at that service, spoken in front of this man’s sobbing wife and three small children, that we should be happy and celebrate that this good man had died, because now he was in Heaven, with Jesus, and in great bliss. And I remember being angry, and wondering what his children thought of this, and whether for anyone who had truly loved this man, the minister’s words were anything more than empty platitudes.
The problem wasn’t the minister’s belief in Heaven. The problem was the way he used it, to avoid having to deal in any way with the broken-heartedness of real grief. It was as if mortality was not real, and somehow we were wrong to feel sad.
Whatever our beliefs about a life beyond this life, we know this much. This life is temporary. That we are mortal takes away nothing from the value or quality of our living; indeed, I believe it enhances it and gives it fire.
Nobody lives forever, no human or animal, not the world’s oldest tree. One day even that old bristlecone pine will fail, and its wood will fall to the ground. When it does, it will nourish the new life that comes after it, as its discarded wood and needles have already done through the millennia.
This is the closest to immortality to which any human being can aspire – that we nourish the people and the world around us with our living.
Every moment we are on earth, every conversation, every action, everything we choose has some small impact on those around us. We might feel a piece of that impact in this moment, but in reality we shape the future far more than the present, as the effects of our choices ripple through time and across community. Who we are shapes the world in ways we will never know.
For no one is that impact more present than the people we love the most and are closest to. In our companionship, we change one another, and some small part of each of us becomes absorbed into the people we love. There is nothing extraordinary about the process, though I believe it is deeply spiritual – it simply happens. I am influenced by the people I have loved, whether by their wisdom or their mannerisms, or their perspectives, or their bad habits. It isn’t all good, you know.
But it is all real. I think of people like my grandparents, or my stepmother, and sometimes I recognize a little of them in me. I think of friends, gone and present, and I see the influence they have had on the person I have become. And I look at my friends, and my family, and my son, and every once in awhile I can see that I too have given part of myself to the people around me.
And this is as close to immortality as I desire. I know that those I have touched, and those you have touched, will, in their turn, touch others, and give of themselves, and in that whole will be some small piece of us, and that in this small way, our spirits will continue, joined with others, long past the time when our names have been forgotten.We may not know the gifts we have received or those we have given, but they are with us nonetheless, a multitude of spirits joined with our own, guiding us in all that we do.
This is why in Unitarian Universalist memorial services, we emphasize a celebration – not of death or resurrection, but of life, the life that has now ended. This is why we tell stories at moments like that and at other times, too – because it helps to preserve not just the memory of a life well lived, but also some of the spirit. The stories remind us of the ways in which we have been touched, and in which we may touch others.
Last Sunday I sat with our Sunday school children – some as young as five or six – and talked with them about All Souls Day. We don’t celebrate All Souls Day much here, but there are Unitarians who do, especially in Transylvania, where in some villages every citizen in a Unitarian. On All Souls Day the members of the Unitarian churches go to the cemeteries, sweep clean the graves, leave flowers and garlands and tell stories of ancestors long dead and loved ones who have left only recently.
We spoke some of our spiritual ancestors – people like David Ferenc, who brought Unitarianism to Transylvania, and the king he converted, John Sigismand, who issued the West’s first edict of religious tolerance. And we spoke of people here at BuxMont too, people like Shirley Josephson, who had taught children in the very room in which we sat.
And I asked the children who they might remember – and was startled by how forthcoming and comfortable they were, how they told the stories, whether they were remembering an ancestor, a grandparent, or pet. It reminded me that the children know what I think we have forgotten, that stories are truth, and that they really can change us and shape us.
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate a life, and to preserve what is best about that life, than to tell stories like that. I can’t think of anything more hopeful than to think of someone who mattered to you – not a hero, not a saint, just an ordinary person who you loved – and tell their story.
And if, in the telling, we find some inspiration, some piece of wisdom or some lesson, then we are so much the richer. Then we have been touched anew and again, and the spirit of those who have come before us will once more be melded with our own, and we too may nourish others with our living.
Each of us has a gift of spirit. We all carry the spirits of those who have come before, and something else as well, something uniquely us. And each of us, in all our living, gives of ourselves to the world. Like the tree which stands through the ages, or the insect that lives only a day we shape the world around us and the world after us with our presence.
It is a gift, and it is a responsibility, the responsibility of life that will go on long after we have passed from this world. When we have learned to embrace our living, in all its glory and hardship and love and mortality, then we will know what it is to celebrate life.
Because of those who came before, we are;
in spite of their failings, we believe;
because of, and in spite of the horizons of their vision, we , too, dream.
Let us go remembering to praise,
to live in the moment,
to love mightily,
to bow to the mystery.
- Barbara Pescan