First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
March 9, 2003

More than 50,000 years before the beginning of the common era in human history, an adult male Neanderthal died somewhere near the Shanidar cave, in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq. We do not know how he came to die; life was extremely precarious for our early ancestors and their competitors. What we do know is that when his remains were excavated in the 1950s, soil samples taken from the burial site contained an extraordinary quantity of pollen from summer blooming flowers such as yarrow, grape hyacinth, groundsels, St. Barnaby's thistle, and 24 other species of plants. Some archeologists have attributed this remarkable concentration to the habits of a small rodent known as the Persian jird, (meriones persicus), which likes to store nesting material and food, including seeds, flower heads, leaves and other vegetable material in its colony burrows. But others have suggested that the pollen is there because this early hominid was intentionally laid to rest by his small community amidst a breath-taking tribute of flowers. If so, it is one of the first indications we have of humanity's ancient concern for the honor and well-being of the dead; a link that connects the funerals of today and tomorrow with the furthest reaches of the prehistory of our kind.

Did Homo sapiens neanderthalis share with their cousins of the present day the understanding that other individuals' deaths necessarily implied their own? At what evolutionary twist in the reasoning capacity of our species' brain did that appalling awareness dawn? I suppose it must have flickered off and on through many generations before the capacity for the realization of universal mortality established itself as some sort of genetic advantage. Whatever the advantages of the ability to make that logical inference - and there may be several - hand in hand with it, throughout our genetic and social evolution, has gone a deeply insistent impulse to deny it as well. It is that impulse, the perennial attraction of the idea of immortality, that Art Higinbotham, this year's service auction sermon topic high bidder, has asked me to consider today. What is a humanist to make of the abiding confidence throughout human cultures and history that this life as we know it is not the end of us? Are there ways of understanding immortality that we can appreciate, and even engage with? How do the many ideas that have been suggested about preparing for the next life serve human good and happiness?

One of the earliest ideas about the possibility of a future life was that being able to have it depended upon having handy the physical objects necessary for life in this world, including an intact body. This was the theory of the ancient Egyptians, who built the elaborately safeguarded repositories for their royalty that we know today as the pyramids. They also invented sophisticated techniques for the prevention of decomposition of corpses, though the process of mummification was practiced with varying degrees of intentionality and effectiveness in many or even perhaps most primitive cultures. We know more about the Egyptians partly because they were methodical about it, and willing to invest huge resources in it, and also partly because climate and geography favored their success. What both artifacts and written records tell us is that they imagined a partly organic and partly magical process of awakening into a world closely resembling the one in which they had died. Tools and items of value were buried with the deceased, as provision for his or her needs, and indications of the kinds of places and activities that one had previously enjoyed were made as lavish as one had the resources to achieve. Perhaps the most interesting consideration about this culture is that those who could afford such burials were expected to provide for themselves and their immediate families. Each king, at the beginning of his reign, started at once to create and furnish his own magnificent tomb. The duty of survivors was to follow through with the mummification process, but not to supply the provisions. Indeed, there is evidence that unpopular dignitaries might have been hurried through the preservation procedures, and their supplies or even the tombs themselves appropriated to others. The less affluent, who could not afford expensive graves and embalming, were not expected to have a future life at all. It was a rather mechanical and contingent sort of immortality, variations of which are seen in Viking and early Chinese and any number of other societies.

A second approach to the idea of immortality which goes very far back in human culture is that of collective survival or ancestor worship. Ancient Hebrew mythology speaks of souls in Sheol, a kind of pointless and colorless existence which contrasts with the on-going life of the community. Immortality was achieved by being part of a group which persisted in this world over generations through the faithfulness of its offspring. Much of modern Judaism continues to be agnostic about the idea of an individual afterlife, but stresses the importance of families and communities giving memory and honor to the dead. Classical Confucianism founded a significant strand of its social order on practicing the duty of tangible remembrance to a long chain of ancestors; so long as your descendants continued to make offerings in your name, your existence was thought to be preserved. Obviously, in a genetic sense, this perception is not inaccurate; our long term reproductive success is perhaps the most practical interpretation of the impulse toward immortality. Yet it fails to satisfy our desire for an individual consciousness that survives our physical dissolution.

Another answer to that yearning is found in the concept of reincarnation. It is easy to make an analogy from the cycle of the earth's seasons and the biology of plants, and imagine that the unique consciousness of each human being might take many physical forms, so that one who dies is reborn in a different body and circumstances. Such a conservation of personality might, of course, be arbitrary, but our mythologies have not been content to see it so. The idea of karma in the religious traditions of India and later China suggests that the privileges and opportunities of future lives depend upon the morality of our conduct in previous incarnations. One can have a good or bad rebirth, according to the kindness, honesty and industry one practices now. This idea is to some extent congruent with the traditional notion in western Christianity of a judgment that will determine one's fate in the world to come; either the paradise of heaven for those who qualify, or the eternal torments of hell for those who do not meet the standards. The Universalist strand of our own religious heritage originates in the refusal of this division, and the notion that the surviving souls of all who die will eventually be brought together into a heavenly kingdom, purged of whatever their earthly faults may have been. Unitarian Universalists today have a variety of interpretations of the concept of immortality, but there are two common threads that tend to run through our ideas. The first is that we must take one world at a time, as Emerson supposedly advised when he lay dying. Since we do not and cannot know anything for sure about what happens after we die, we must focus our interest and our efforts on the world that we do know, here and now, and not on vain speculations. The second part of our common ground is that we refuse to be intimidated in our present values by threats from the imagined afterlife. If there is any future personal consciousness at all, either the moral rules which govern it will be the same as the ones that apply to our present situation, in which case we must expect to be rewarded for doing what we ought to have done anyway; or else some different set of rules will apply, and the only way to conform to them, if we knew them, would be to do what seems to us wrong in the here and now. We are committed to doing what we understand to be right in the present, and let the consequences in any unknowable future life be what they may. This, I believe, is the proper interpretation of Henley's "Invictus"; that neither present misfortune nor threats of future punishment ought to deter us from following our authentic and considered moral imperatives, for otherwise we make someone or something else into the masters of our fate, and the captains of our souls.

In 1923, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote this meditation on the difference between religious perspectives on immortality: "To the death-based religion, the main question is, "What is going to happen to me after I am dead?" - a posthumous egotism. To the birth-based religion, the main question is, "What is to be done for the child who is born?" - an immediate altruism. The death-based religions have led to a limitless individualism, a demand for the eternal extension of personality... The birth-based religion is necessarily and essentially altruistic, a forgetting of oneself for the good of the child, and tends to develop naturally into love and labor for the widening range of family, state and world." Unitarian Universalism has always aspired to present itself as a 'birth-based religion', emphasizing the needs and duties of the present world, rather than expending our scarce resources on planning for the preservation of our individual consciousness beyond the natural lifespan. And yet, there may be a certain elemental wisdom in the urge to seek some kinds of immortality.

Sidney Hook, a professor of philosophy at Yale, once enumerated five ways in which people often seek to create a sense of immortality in this existence. The first, he suggests, is to live on through your children and descendants, in the classical genetic form of immortality. The second way has to do with finding spiritual peace, serenity, or blessedness in some form of enlightenment or oneness with god, so that this sense of connection transcends your individual death. The third possibility is making a lasting contribution of some kind of creativity or discovery that will outlast your own particular lifespan. The fourth option is to be remembered with love and gratitude by those whom your life has touched; not necessarily biological descendants, but those on whom your actions have had a meaningful influence, whether they knew you personally or not. This is the essence of George Eliot's poetic aspiration to become part of 'the choir invisible'. Finally, Hook proposes that we may seek to realize a sense of immortality by availing ourselves of as much of the opportunity for self-realization and the fulfillment of desire that life sets before us as we possibly can.

Do these things actually grant us immortality? Speaking personally, I doubt it. No matter what we build or accomplish, or what influence we wield, I suspect that eventually, soon or late, all our efforts end like the statue of Ozymandias, king of kings - shattered upon the obscure and blowing sands. But I want to suggest, growing out of Sidney Hook's fifth option, that the aspiration toward everlasting life is a human fancy that we might be able to both outgrow and benefit from, in much the same way that we do the image of Santa Claus. Grown ups do not believe that Santa really lives at the North Pole, runs a toy factory staffed by elves, or drops down chimneys on Christmas Eve. And yet we recognize that the idea of Santa Claus tells us something profoundly true about human nature and the capacity for generosity and joy that lives within each of us. By the same token, the idea of immortality may have something to teach us about what it means to be human, a wisdom that remains even when the literal idea is no longer persuasive.

A month ago, my colleague Jan Eller-Isaacs shared with us a sermon on the nature of happiness, and she suggested that happiness is not something that can be created or sought directly; rather, she said, it is a by-product of our commitment to various human endeavors, and she made some suggestions as to what those kinds of endeavors are, that have happiness as their indirect benefit. These include, and I am summarizing what she said, the commitment to live with virtue and morality, to practice self-control and even possibly self-sacrifice, as well as participation in worthwhile and meaningful causes, creativity, nurturing the next generation, being connected in positive ways with other, the achievement of serenity, and having a wide and deep experience of life's great possibilities. There is something eerily familiar about this list, don't you think?

In fact, I wonder whether we don't often instinctively know that happiness is not something that can be pursued directly, despite our nation's founders declaring that project an inalienable right. At a certain basic level of spiritual maturity, we all discover that going after comfort, pleasure and self-gratification doesn't actually make us happy at all. Instead, it leaves us with shallow, brittle, discontented lives, and we learn that we are going to have to aim higher in our aspirations if we are to attract genuine happiness as a spin off from our endeavors in the world. And so I wonder whether those projects that human wisdom has traditionally associated with our efforts to attain some sort of immortality are not in the end really just the paths that lead to the possibility of our true happiness. 'Eternal life' may be a kind of spiritual code we use to talk about what experience shows is actually, finally worth doing in life; perhaps it is only by trying to look beyond this world that we learn to aim our lives high enough to do justice to this world. And I even think, oddly enough, that this is not a fraud, but rather the soul's poetry, for it seems to me that when we achieve real, genuine happiness, our search for immortality becomes irrelevant, and fades away. A future life is most crucially necessary to the person who knows that he or she has significantly wasted or been robbed of this life; when we sense that we are seizing life to our fullest possibility, getting out of it perhaps not everything that is there, but at least as much as our finite beings can hold of it, then we may know that it is enough; we do not need eternity, we only need to find the real fullness of the here and now.

"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon," wrote Susan Ertz in 1943, and a century earlier the sage Henry David Thoreau affirmed, "I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived." It is that dread, that we might end our days having avoided life's great demands, great adventures, and great experiences, that makes the thought of a life yet to come so enduringly alluring. But I submit that when we are living the days as they pass by with zest and commitment and passion; when we are engaged in doing those things that make for immortality, such as nurturing future generations, and finding our balanced spiritual center, and expressing ourselves in creativity and discovery, and maintaining the web of interconnection with generosity and compassion, we are not thinking about eternal life for we are absorbed by the life we have right here in this very world. It might even be that this is a kind of test for true happiness; when we are so engrossed in the possibilities of this world that we forget to speculate about others, and immortality ceases to appeal to us, perhaps that is the sign of the greatest fulfillment of which we are capable.

Norman Cousins writes of his life-threatening illness: "Death is not the enemy; living in constant fear of it is. The way we choose to live and the depth of our feelings, our ability to love and be loved and to take in all the colors of the world around us - these determine the worth and true extent of whatever time we have. The clock keeps ticking away. Our job is to put as much meaning as possible into the intervals between the ticks. A minute can open out into a vast realm in which all our senses, finally attuned, can come into full and splendid play - or those same senses can be shut down, imparting nothing to our years except numbers. What makes time so valuable is that it is convertible into nourishing memory. Memory is where the proof of life is stored. It offers material for stocktaking and provides clues about where our lives are going. Serious illness can be redemptive, if it opens the sluices of vital memory, sharpens the focus, transforms the improbable into the possible, and imparts a quality of high art to the gift of time." Our job is to put as much meaning as possible into the intervals between the ticks, and impart a quality of high art to the gift of time.

There is an ancient tradition - some say it originates in the Talmud, others say in the wisdom traditions of China - that advises, if you wish to be immortal, plant a tree, write a book, and raise a child. On the surface, this saying recommends those endeavors which will persist beyond our individual lifetimes; presumably, long after we ourselves are dead, others will sit in the shade of the trees we planted, read the pages of the books we wrote, and our children will carry on both our genes and our values. But I think there is a deeper level to this advice. I think that when you fill your days with the living patterns of the earth, with intellectual adventure and creativity, with the love of family and children, you discover a better wish than living forever; you discover the abundance of this life, in all its finitude and mortality, and you find that when it is lived fully and fearlessly, the reality of this day's happiness is worth more than any promise of endless, changeless eternity.

The poet John Holmes described this discovery and his response to it when he wrote,
"Now give heart's onward habit brave intent" - heart's onward habit; isn't that a wonderful description of the high aspirations of the human spirit? Give that aspiration brave intent.

"Hammer the golden day until it lies a glimmering plate, to heap with memory"- memory, where Norman Cousins says that the proof of life is stored.

Salute arriving moments with your eyes" - watch, says the poet, as your life unfolds from moment to moment; be alert, and notice.

"We live; we are elected now by time" - this is our instant, and it will soon be gone.

"Few, out of many not yet come to birth, and many dead" - of all the generations that have been and will be, only we few are alive in this unique span of time.

"To use the daylight now; to stand beneath the sun upon the earth" - in this unique moment, on this unique world.

"Then break the silence with a voice of praise," he summons.

"Before we fall asleep, before we die" - for that is what awaits us, each and all.

"Press mind and body hard against this world; open the door that opens toward the sky."

It is not a familiar tune, but the poetry is so beautiful; let's try it together.