WHERE HAVE WE COME FROM?
WHO ARE WE?
WHERE ARE WE GOING?
Forrest Church
April 15, 2001
She settled uneasily into a chair in my ministerial study. Before posing the question that was preying on her mind, the young woman apologized. It was a silly question; impossible to answer; how embarrassed she was to be wasting my valuable time. All this came in little staccato bursts as she wrestled free of her coat.
Why are we so quick to apologize when things are nagging at us? Are we supposed to solve life's questions all by ourselves? Besides, I can think of no better way to invest someone else's time with value, especially a busy person's time, than to interject a bit of unanticipated perplexity into his or her day? In my experience, when we partner with one another on such occasions, one of two things happens. Either one person receives useful counsel from the other and both thereby feel better about themselves, or both are left bewildered, which leads each to feel less alone in his or her bewilderment. Besides, busy is an unpleasant word. It suggests the buzz of a fly trying to escape through a closed window. You can pity someone who is too busy to make time for your legitimate concerns, but please don't rush to berate yourself for presenting them.
On this occasion, the question our parishioner posed to me was a brilliant one. It came from her three-year-old daughter. Children don't know enough to refrain from asking magnificent, impossible questions. As it turned out, this particular question numbers among the best that I've ever had the privilege of pondering. What this curious child wanted to know is this: Where was she before she started growing in her mommy's tummy? In response, her mother did the sensible thing. She temporized. She sat her daughter down and said, "Honey, that is a very good and very hard question. I will think about it carefully and come back to you with an answer a little later." She could then have taken the easy way out. The attention span of a three-year old is limited. Once tabled, the girl's question would surely have removed itself from this woman's already full plate. But she took her daughter's concerns too seriously for that. So she went off in quest of an answer-however Quixotic, a right and noble thing to do.
Our children have a great, if unwarranted, sense of confidence in us. This little story underscores just how great and how unwarranted. The first place this young woman turned for an answer was the library. Acting on a hunch, she took out a popular book called The Magic Years, brought it home, and started searching for clues.
"What are you doing, Mommy?"
"I am looking for the answer to your very good, very hard question," her mother replied.
If you do not have this particular volume in your library and are interested in the answer for your own purposes, I can promise that you will not find it there. For the little girl, however, the book lived up to its title by taking on magical significance. Later that evening, her father found her reading it upside down in the bathroom.
"What are you doing, sweetheart?"
"Mommy told me that I can find out where I was before I was in mommy's tummy by looking in this book. But, Daddy," she said, "there aren't any pictures." At which point, this little girl's mother resolved to come to me in search of an acceptable answer to her daughter's question.
Two days later, I visited the hospital to say farewell to a long-time parishioner, a gentle but tough-minded woman who had been a member of All Souls for decades. We had a wonderful conversation, one from which I received much of the shared benefit. She was in good spirits, something I often find to be true of people who are dying. Nonetheless, given the trouble her body had been causing her lately, her hale, almost chipper manner surprised me. In any event, our conversation tripped along lightly. The church was fine, I thanked her. The snow should stop by tonight or tomorrow morning. She certainly hoped so. And then, sudden as a shift in springtime weather, she grew serious. "Forrest," she asked, "what do you think happens to us after we die?" In that instant, something struck me with the force of divine illumination. Not the answer, exactly. I don't know the answer to this good and difficult question either. What hit me was that these two questions, hers and that of the little girl, were very much the same. Where were we before we were born? What happens to us after we die? The former, if rarely asked, is of existential moment to the very young; the latter, which poses itself death by death throughout the course of our lifetime, assumes greatest significance when we know that we are reaching its close.
I don't have any idea what happens when we die. All I know is this: the universe was pregnant with us when it was born. In miracle and fact, our gestation traces to the beginning of time. Accidents abound, of course. One amino lapse or missed coupling and we would not be in the position to wonder why we are here. Nonetheless our gestation goes back far beyond our mother's "tummies." The seed of our being traces back through all our ancestral couplings to the ur-paramecium and beyond to the very beginning of time. There is not one moment since the beginning of creation until the hour of our birth that each of us was not in utero.
For me, religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are not the animal with tools or the animal with advanced language; we are the religious animal. Knowing that we are going to die, we question what life means. We ponder the creation, studying nature and human nature. We try to make sense of all we see, think and feel. Though people may reject it as a false science, for me theology is instead the highest form of poetry. Projecting our experience of love and power onto a cosmic screen, we create God in our own images. We also divine hints of the sacred from cosmic runes.
So does God come for to carry us home when we die, as the old spiritual puts it? Who knows. To bring God home to my life right here and now is enough for me. It is-as they say-to die and go to heaven. It may in fact be all of heaven we will ever know. As for hell, as a Universalist I don't believe in hell. However bad at times I may have been, the God I believe in is too good to sentence me (or any of God's creatures) to eternal damnation. I will venture this about heaven, as a state if not a place. In my book, when we die we all find peace. We all find eternal rest. The peace of extinction is different from the peace of fulfillment, of course. Yet-whether to fulfillment or extinction-when God brings us home it will be to an eternal restingplace. For me, no promise is more comforting and none more certain: when we die, God will carry us home. Having passed through the valley of the shadow of death, we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Wherever we are, you and I will be with Jesus.
When I was ten years old, my father presented me with a copy of the Jefferson Bible, which he had received as a gift two years earlier upon his election to the U. S. Senate. Three nights in 1803, when he was in the White House, Thomas Jefferson cut up the gospels, excising all the miracles and arranging the passages (in English, French, Latin and Greek columns) into a single narrative. He entitled his personal Bible, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Jefferson's Bible (my first) led me, if unknowingly, to take my first tentative steps down the path to Divinity School and into the Parish Ministry. And my discovery that Jefferson was a Unitarian opened the door for me into the Unitarian Church. What Jefferson omits is any hint of Jesus' higher status among all other mortals. Jefferson opens his Bible not with the Annunciation, but with Jesus's birth; its final words are these: "There laid they Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed."
What an extraordinary revelation for a ten-year-old boy, a boy who knew how the story was supposed to turn out. The resurrection was missing. The tale of God's son preaching salvation and proclaiming the advent of the Realm of God, ended in the ordinary all-too-human way: having for a brief time lived, even having loved and served so well and so memorably, the hero died. This realization is the first of many awakenings that have shaped my understanding of religion. Knowing that we are going to die not only places an acknowledged limit on our lives, it also lends a special intensity and poignancy to the time we are given to live and love. The fact that death is inevitable gives meaning to our love, for the more we love the more we risk losing. Love's power comes in part from the courage required to give ourselves to that which is not ours to keep: our spouses, children, parents, dear and cherished friends, even life itself. It also comes from the faith required to sustain that courage, the faith that life, howsoever limited and mysterious, contains within its margins, often at their very edges, a meaning that is redemptive. That was demonstrably the case for Jesus. He lived in such a way that his life proved to be worth dying for.
When tragedy strikes, our tendency is to forget our kinship with mortality and suffering, imagining ourselves as somehow unfairly set apart, unlike all others shouldered with a unique and unbearable burden. Admittedly, it is hard to answer the why of death or illness with a simple because; we have difficulty accepting that, in the main, our loved one died because death is natural, not the exception but the rule. We resist admitting that she contracted a rare disease, because some small percentage of us simply will. Few of us reconcile ourselves completely to the haphazard yet axiomatic laws that pertain to human suffering.
Nonetheless, to be at home with life, we must make our peace with death. Death is one of two hinges on which life turns. In fact, without death, life as we know it could not be. Each individual is the unique combination of gametes, not a copy replicated by division. For this reason, every time a woman gives birth, she gives death. Or to put it more gently, death is our birthright, perhaps life's only guarantee. At birth, we each receive a life sentence that is also a death sentence. The particulars of each will differ, some aspects being mandatory (fated by the accidents of birth), others subject to parole for good, often even for courageous, behavior. Yet, immortality notwithstanding, though we may receive pardon and forgiveness during the course of our lifetime, the earthly sentence of mortality we receive at birth cannot be lifted. Accordingly, we can never fully celebrate life's feast, as long as we deny death's place at our table. Until we are at home with death, we cannot bring God home.
Not that we should romanticize death. In my own adolesence, I firmly believed that I would die at twenty-five. At the same age, my father was given six months to live. I was a baby then. He survived his first bout with cancer, but I seem somehow to have interiorized it. Perhaps-melodramatically and self-importantly-I viewed my own impending, tragic death as a sacrifice to the gods in exchange for my father's life. More likely I merely enjoyed basking in the pathos of my mortality. Besides, since I was going to die at twenty-five, in the meantime I could live a life of abandon, untethered to future responsibility. Abetting my fantasy of death was the Late Romantic composer Gustav Mahler. I remember once (in a marijuana induced reverie) listening to my casket being lowered into the ground during the first movement of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. It was so beautiful that I almost cried.
For most of us-at least once we survive the philosophic temptations of adolescence-to make peace with death is simply to accept death as the fated end of every earthly journey. Not only does the angel of death wait by our sickbeds in hope of transporting us to our eternal rest. She also reminds us that all our earthly cares are nothing when measured against the privilege of having them. We remember that any day in which we do not acknowledge how blessed we are in our loved ones, in the tasks we are called to do, even in the burdens we bear and trials we face, is a day squandered. Nothing could be more important. Yet, without death and the angel of death to remind us, we might forget to remember.
Does that mean angels really exist? Not in the sense that we may imagine. In fact, it is impossible to prove the existence of angels without leaving their realm. Like God, angels are beyond proof. Once we start arguing about whether or not angels exist, we have already missed the point. The knock of the angel of death is but another term for God knocking on our door. Since we can't keep the angel out, we might as well extend our blessing to life by inviting death in when the angel calls. Not that we must, for the door will open on its own. Whether we bless life as we leave it or not, at our death we will join our departed loved ones; we will be with Jesus; we will rest at peace; God will carry us home.
So, after my awakening at the hospital, I called the young mother and told her I had a tentative answer to her child's question. It is an answer as ancient as recorded thought, yet as fresh as its most recent discovery. Before we are conceived ("in our mommy's tummy") we dwell in God; after we die we return to God. In between, during the span of days represented by that little dash between dates on our tombstone, we hold the key to God's home in our pocket.
How easily we forget.
Amen. Happy Easter. I love you. May God bless us
all.