delivered to the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos
9 November 2008
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As training for the ministry, seminary students are expected to spend an early portion of their formation time in what is known as Clinical Pastoral Education – acting as chaplain in a hospital or prison setting, getting used to being around humanity at its most human, and getting used to it now before one got to far into the process. The message was clear – “If you cannot deal with human suffering face to face, you might want to consider another line of work.” And so, I spent the better part of 2004 interning as a hospital chaplain, an urban level one trauma center, to be precise. For nine months, I bounced back and forth between the chaos of the trauma center and the quieter and often more private tragedies of the hospital’s inpatient wards. Mostly, I worked amidst the chaos.
The chaplains job in this environment was to help families navigate the chaos. More often than not in the trauma ward, the families were dealing with the sudden and violent death of a loved one. The chaplain was there to answer the question, “Now what?” This is less of an existential question than you’d imagine.
So often, the answers I had to provide were practical ones – guiding spouses and children through the myriad forms required by the hospital and the state, helping deal with the coroner’s office, and always, always translating doctor and hospital speak into plain and simple English.
In the trauma center, one gets used to the idea of death. The chaplain is the tour guide for the living, those left behind. Each on-call day, I was less the spiritual guide than I was the sane and calm hands, eyes, and ears of the family – a temporary member – handling the practical nitty gritty so that loved ones could begin to grieve as they should. The existential follows fast on the heels of the practical.
The big question before us this morning is, “What happens when we die?” The me of 2004, surrounded by death and the chaos of the practical on all sides might have wearily and with some edge of gallows humor answered that question: “Paperwork.”
We’re looking for something a little deeper, this morning. We’re seeking the existential.
This question is probably the most important of the big questions we’ll cover in this series. I know I’ve said this about the others so far, but I mean it this time.
Forrest Church, Unitarian Universalism’s great public theologian, himself facing death at the hands of esophageal cancer, has famously defined religion as the very human response to the dual realities of being alive and having to die. Or, more morbidly, all theology begins at death’s door.
Death is the great equalizer. There is no one sitting here who has not been touched by the death of a friend or loved one. These experiences are at once a common denominator among us and also intensely personal and private. So private, in fact, that in many cases we cannot bring ourselves to talk about death. The subject, much like politics or sex, is taboo in polite company.
Think for a moment, how many euphemisms for death we have in the English language. At least as many as we have for sex, if not, in fact, more. Despite death’s place in the natural cycle of things, despite the fact that we are surrounded by death in some way or another every day, it is still life’s greatest X factor, the unknown from which, as far as we know, no one has reported back from in any great detail. We naturally fear the unknown, and there is perhaps no greater unknown than the end of human life. It has been said that human beings can no more face the realities of death than we can stare directly into the sun.
Every religion has given its answer to the question “What happens when we die?” in an attempt to draw back the veil from the unknown. Some form of belief in an afterlife has existed in human thought since as far back as written language has existed, and probably long before that. The idea of the underworld came into existence almost as soon as we began to bury our dead. From there evolved concepts of heaven and hell, realms of reward and punishment, and the notions of spiritual persistence and reincarnation.
Even science of late has begun looking for answers, studying patients reports of out of body and near death experiences. The concept of the afterlife is so prevalent in human culture that even the non-religious embrace some concept. I have sat at the bedside of more than one atheist in my brief career, who have spoken in their final moments of looking forward to reuniting with loved ones long since passed. I myself have wavered back and forth on the idea of the afterlife. Although I stopped believing in the traditional Christian heaven and hell a long time ago, I still catch myself in some of my worst moments still fervently praying, “Dear God, I hope Grandma’s not watching this.”
So, what happens when we die? As with our other questions so far, the truth is that I have no easy answer, at least when it comes to speaking for those who have moved on to the next adventure (there’re those euphemisms again). All I can speak to is what happens on this side of life, and there, I have some more concrete answers.
Let me present you with two contrasting stories.
Several years ago, word came around through a network of college classmates that one of our number, a bright young up and coming actor named Chris, had died, suddenly and horribly, in a swimming accident . I had never been particularly close to the man. In fact, while he was alive I really hadn’t liked him all that much, and held a rather stupid (and in hindsight, quite unfair) grudge against him for many years. But, the memorial service planned for him in the studio theatre at our university was an excuse to reunite with other old friends, and I didn’t want to appear to be speaking ill of the dead, so I attended. Sitting in a circle that evening, dear friends of mine gathered to recall their fondest memories of the man. It was a gift to his parents, who had flown in to attend our little gathering, and the room swelled with laughter and love. And as the night wore on, I felt smaller and smaller, for I had nothing to share, and I began to regret deeply that I had not really known this person of whom my friends spoke. I knew only the images I had, filtered through my own pettiness. I spent the next week in a deep blue funk, wishing I could turn back the clock and offer my apology to this soul that I had slighted.
Now this:
In college, my best friend, Chad, and his family were my home away from home. Time and money usually prevented me from flying home over holiday breaks, and so I was often their guest. One Easter, I had a chance to stay the long weekend at the family cabin in northern Wisconsin, and I jumped at the chance to take it, because it was going to be a “guy” weekend: Me, Chad, and his dad, Dick.
Dick was a titan among men. Someone you looked up to and who was completely approachable. He was the kind of guy who, as soon as he cracked a joke about you, you knew you were in the club. He was so cool that, without even knowing him, you want to be him right now.
And so, it was a “guy” vacation. Drink beer, grill out, shoot pool, and play cards. For two days, we all enjoyed the camaraderie and lack of responsibility. Unfortunately, it was a four day weekend. I don’t remember where the trouble started, exactly, but nerves were beginning to fray. Egos were bruising. Cutthroat cribbage had deteriorated into full contact, Australian rules cribbage. My friend and I had taken to opposite ends of the cabin, each wrapped in our own private ego dimensions, with Dick watching us from the outside, getting madder and madder at the both of us.
Dick stood glaring us from the doorway to the cabin, the keys to his Blazer in hand.
“Get in the truck.”
My friend and I stopped trying to hurt each other with telepathy long enough to realize that we might have made a small tactical error in not resolving our own differences. Now we had an angry titan on our hands. And we were trapped in the middle of nowhere with him. And he wanted to take us for a ride.
We had hesitated a second to long. “Both of you get in the truck,” he growled. “I’m sick of being cooped up in here with you two. We’re going shining.”
Chad decided that this was a better fate than the one he was imagining, and went to get his coat. I being pure city boy, however, looked even more confused. I looked to my friend for a sign.
“We’re looking for deer,” he said.
“OK,” I say, grabbing my coat, just trying to be one of the guys. I’m not sure what I was imagining at this point. I knew deer were out of season, and I knew I had never fired a gun at anything other than paper bull’s-eyes.
Considering our present moods, I was relieved to find out that there were no firearms involved. Dick had a high wattage spotlight, like the ones on police cars, that he plugged into the cigarette lighter in the Blazer. Every so often, he would stop along the unpaved wood trails, take out the light, and shine it into the trees, looking for the reflection of deer eyes. We would find one or two, and I would smile, marveling at the process of uncovering the hidden. Dick was unsatisfied, however. He was looking for something specific.
About a half an hour into the trip, we pulled into a clearing in the woods. The road ran through a slight valley, small foothills rising on either side, almost completely clear of trees. It was absolutely, disorientingly dark. The moon and stars did nothing to illuminate the path.
And then Dick turned on the spotlight. It lit up the path around us and the immediate surrounding of the clearing.
He pointed into the clearing on our right. Against the silhouette of the rising hill, one pair of deer eyes began to glow. Another closely followed, and then another. Soon one whole side of the hill was covered in the reflected glow of deer eyes. I could not count them all. They all stood stock still, merely registering our presence. It was as if the clearing had been replaced by a still, clear pool that was reflecting the stars above us. I don’t know how long I stared at them. For a long time I was aware of only myself and the deer, and I felt more connected to the whole of creation than I had ever felt before that moment.
I stepped back from my reverie, and looked into the faces of my companions, Chad seeming to feel some of the same awe that I was. Dick, who I’m sure had seen this sort of thing hundreds of time before, deriving no small joy in sharing this treasure he had found. He looked at each of us in turn, and smiled as if to say, “Now don’t you two feel just stupid.” We got back in the truck, returned to the cabin, and spent the rest of our long weekend in relative peace.
Over the years I’ve maintained my close friendship with Chad, but my encounters with Dick became fewer and far between. Our families ran into each other a several years ago at the annual Great Circus Parade in downtown Milwaukee. That was the last time I saw him.
About a week later, Chad called me at home. “Dad’s collapsed at work. I’ll be in Madison for a few days.” Another week passed, and I found myself attending the funeral of my best friend’s father. The day was an unusual one. Here was a group of college friends barely cognizant of their own adulthood, still getting over the arrogance of adolescence that told us that we were immortal, coming together to bury the parent of one of our own. It was not an idea that was easy to grasp at the time.
Once everything had settled down a bit, Chad returned to Milwaukee. He and I were able to sit down over a few drinks, and he was able to unload the whole story of the past few weeks: how the family was able to gather at the hospital and say goodbye, how the presence of the local pastor had been such a comfort, about the ordeal in making the arrangements.
And he told me about the wake, which I had missed. It seemed the entire world had shown up to pay their respects to the titan. Everyone had something to share about Dick, and in turn was able to tell the gathering about their experience of him. It was as if in place of the physical loss of him, people were able to clone the pieces of his spirit that they carried with them, and reassemble it that night as a gift for those who loved him most. I could tell by the way he told the story how much that night had meant to him. I knew that I needed to give to him the piece of Dick’s soul that I carried with me.
“Remember deer shining at Easter?” After that, nothing else really needed to be said.
What happens when we die? At the very least, we live on the hearts and minds of those we have touched who continue to live on. In me are pieces of the souls that have touched mine and shaped it. My grandmother’s cooking, my uncle’s never-ending and boisterous wonder at all life, Dick’s big heart, and his finger pointing towards God in nature, countless others whose names I may have forgotten, but whose spirits still shape me.
If we are open to the possibility, we become the living memorials to the lives around us. But we must be open. That’s the lesson I take away from my encounter with Chris’s death. In closing myself to his soul, I could not carry him with me. While others could come together and give new life to the pieces they carried, the picture was incomplete, for in that one instance, my own fragile ego had refused to let another’s life touch mine.
What happens when we die? The world goes on living, much as we might like to think that it can’t survive without us. It’s not much of an answer, but it’s what I’ve got, and, for me, it’s enough. More than any promise of heaven, or any reward in some unknown hereafter, the knowledge that life continues, that I am a walking memorial to others and that others will be mine is the undergirding of my moral compass – To honor the pieces of the souls I carry, living and dead, and to not be stingy with the gift of my own soul.
What happens when we die? We live on through the lives of the souls we have loved. I quoted earlier the passage from Forrest Church I’ve used so often: that religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. But Church, facing his own death, does not end there. “Whether or not there is life after death,” he writes, “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.”
That’s answer enough for me. May it be so.
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