Life After Life

Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, January 30, 2011

            Once upon a time, there was a man. A man, running away from a tiger. Running away from a tiger, but toward a high cliff. And as the tiger is catching up, the man comes to the edge of the cliff, and stops; but then, he sees a long vine, hanging there, trailing all the way down to the ground. So he grabs onto the vine, and swings away, just as the tiger reaches the cliff, too, and stares off at the man swinging from the vine. The man breathes a sigh of relief; but then, he looks up, and he sees that mice are nibbling away at the vine, just above him.  Then he looks down, and he sees more tigers—a whole bunch of them—and boy, do they look hungry! The man seems doomed. And maybe he is.

            Then he looks straight ahead, back toward the cliff. And he sees there the most beautiful, luscious, bright red strawberry he has ever seen, inches from his face. He glances once more at the tigers below him, the mice above him, and he plucks the strawberry, smells it, savors it, and bites into it—and it’s the juiciest, most delicious strawberry he has ever tasted.

            When some people think of death, it’s as though they focus on the tigers; the inevitable ending; not just dying, but the suffering that precedes it, too—it’s no fun, certainly, being eaten by tigers. It’s no fun, certainly, thinking about being eaten by tigers. Thinking about death gnaws at some people like that; or, they focus on those damned mice, gnawing at our fragile vine. When are they going to be done with their work? When is the end going to come for us? How much time do we have left? Obsessing about our own deaths can be exhausting and depressing, as well.

            Which is why, I think, most of us put it out of our minds as much as we can. We avoid thinking about it. We avoid talking about it, even with those closest to us. It’s another of those elephants in the middle of the living room that no one wants to talk about. We pretend it’s not there. We go about our business as though we were immortal; as though we had all the time in the world; as though we had just signed a perpetual, unbreakable lease on this thing called life.

            Until we find ourselves hanging from that vine, with the tigers below us, and the mice busily at work above us. Until we face some major and severe crisis in our health. Until we have a close call, and only the hand of grace saves us. Until someone close to us, someone we love, someone intricately involved in our lives, passes away, either suddenly or after a long illness. Then, suddenly, starkly, in a flash, we come face to face with the inevitable truth of our existence: Each one of us is going to die some day. Maybe sooner, maybe later, but some day, inevitably, each one of us is not going to be here any longer.

            So, what does that mean to us? How are we to live our lives in the light of our own deaths?

            It would seem a good idea to savor this life while we can. To pick that strawberry and to taste it, really taste it, each and every bit of it. To live out the inspiring words of Helen Keller:

            “Use you eyes,” she wrote, “as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind; hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of the flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again.”

            Such is, usually, the way our particular faith approaches the great question of life and death. Not too long ago, our Association published a little booklet called “100 Questions that Non-Members Ask About Unitarian Universalism”, and one of those questions was “What do UUs believe about life after death?”

            The “answer” was (as though there ever could be only one answer to any question about Unitarian Universalists!):

            “Very few UUs believe in a continuing, individualized existence after physical death,” the answer began. “Even fewer believe in the physical existence of places called heaven and hell where one goes after dying. We believe immortality manifests itself in the lives of those we affect during our lifetime and in the legacy we leave when we die.”

            So, in the face of the burning theological question—“Where do we go when we die?”—Unitarian Universalism traditionally has responded: “Probably no place.” Physically, at least. Spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, interpersonally—that’s a more complicated matter.”

            Now, things may have changed a bit since that little book came out (we are an evolving faith, after all). So instead of a blanket “No” to the question “Do you believe in life after death?” many of us Unitarian Universalists (or, at least, some of us) might now instead respond with a resounding “I don’t know.”

            As Forrestt Church wrote shortly before his own death in 2009:

            “After death our bodies may be resurrected. Our souls may transmigrate or become part of the heavenly [host]. We may join our loved ones in Heaven. Or we may return the constituent parts of our being to the earth and rest in eternal peace. About life after death, no one knows.”

            We don’t know; no one does, if they’re honest about it. They may have faith that there is something more, and I don’t disparage faith, not at all; it can be a great source of comfort and inspiration and empowerment. But it’s not the same as verifiable data or rational proof (it may well be more than either of those, but it’s not the same). So, no one can prove that there’s such a thing as life after death.

            But, on a purely rational and verifiable plain, if (again) we’re being fully honest, we can’t disprove it, either, can we? I don’t think so. There are just too many cases of rational, normal, everyday people—maybe people you know—maybe even some of you—having “out of body” experiences, “near death experiences”, call them what you will; experiences of being close to death, perhaps even clinically dead, and gaining just a glimpse of that ‘”something more”, that “other place”, that something else that awaits us on the other side of sleep’s dark and silent gate.

Such anecdotal evidence may not be enough to constitute “proof”; but it is enough, at least to me, to keep the door open to truly amazing possibilities. As Hamlet said to Horatio (when they see the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, by the way): “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And I know for me that as I get older, and as the infirmities of the body press in a little more closely, and as one’s own age group takes its place at the front of the line of generations, the question of what (if anything) is next assumes at least a little more import in my life. I will also admit that the thought that there might, possibly, be something more after this life, that all doesn’t end with the grave, is something of a comfort to me; it provides a bit of solace.

I remember when the blockbuster Titanic came out back in 1997, and there’s a scene near the end where the main character, Rose, now an old woman, lies in bed, perhaps near death, and the flood of her memories engulfs her, culminating with her seeing her one true love, Jack (that was the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio), at the foot of the Titanic’s grand staircase, waiting for her again, to come down the stairs. I started to weep—not at all the people drowning in the North Atlantic; not at the mighty ship going under, with 1500 women, children, and men. But at Leonardo DiCaprio standing at the foot of the stairs! “Why?” I asked myself.

            Even the possibility that such might be so is something I will cling to, even if countless voices of reason tell me otherwise.

            It is almost as though this one life—chock full as it is with joys and sorrows, with laughter and pain, with so many precious gifts which demand our gratitude—as though this one simple life is not enough to contain all the soul and spirit which a life fully lived entails. When we are truly alive to life in all of its exuberance and power, it is as though the cup of life runneth over, and we yearn for somewhere more to capture it all. Out of eternity we have come, and back to eternity we will return—star dust to star dust; atomic ash to atomic ash; spirit to spirit. All existence hurtles forth from the moment of creation to right now; all eternity coalesces and abides in the very moment we hold, this very moment. 

            Life is an interdependent web, a single garment of destiny, a seamless garment of all existence; the form our life takes now and the form it will assume when our physical existence on this planet ends is integral, continuous, whole. “Why wait for death?” wrote William Blake. “Thou art immortal now.” We are immortal now; and perhaps all the heaven or hell we will ever know are right here, right now, as well. Perhaps they are what we make of them, and our immortality lies in what we do, right now.

            We die, each one of us. And yet, we live forever. Not necessarily in some future realm. But in the reverberation of the actions we take within these (relatively) few brief years given to us here on this planet. Knowing that those tigers are down there can, paradoxically perhaps, set us free—free truly to taste the strawberries; to smell the flowers; to love one another. As one of my colleagues has written: “Holding the inevitability of our death in our hearts, I believe that we are more likely to live mindfully each experience we have, slowing down to [experience] all the subtle flavors and textures … in our lives and be grateful for them.”

            It is like a stone dropped in a great pool, these lives of ours. Our actions ripple and expand, and touch others in ways we probably never know. However modest our lives may be, even the smallest of our actions has this way of reverberating in time and history. Our actions, our very being here, inevitably change the world. This is where we know we are immortal: in how we change the world while we have been here. Did we make it a better place, or not? That’s the fundamental question our lives have to answer.

            “Whether or not there is life after death,” Forrestt Church wrote, “surely there is love after death; the one thing that can never be taken away from us, even by death, is the love we give away before we die; the purpose of life is to live in such a way, that our lives will prove worth dying for.”

            In their near death experiences, some people say that, even after they have died, even after they have “seen the light” or have “gone through the tunnel”, they hear a voice calling them back to life; they have a sense that their lives are not yet finished, that they need to return again to this earthly coil, and finish what they’ve done so far.

            Even now, while we’re still alive, may we hear those voices calling us back to life—those precious experiences, those dear souls, those blessed memories, that all remind us how precious (and how brief) our days here are. May we be called back to life—back to this immortal life of love and care— as we wait in joyful expectation the wondrous blessings life always has to offer.

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