I am intrigued with the Hassidic story about a 19th century tourist from the United States who visited a famous Polish rabbi, Hafez Hayyim. He was astonished to see that the rabbi's home was only a simple room filled with books. The only furniture was a table and a bench.
"Rabbi, where is your furniture?" asked the tourist.
"Where is yours?" replied Hafez.
"Mine? But I'm only a visitor here."
"So am I," said the rabbi.[1]
I thought of that story during our Unitarian Universalist Ministers Convocation early this month. Some 450 ministers from around the continent gathered to reflect upon and celebrate what has been called "the strangeness of this business,"[2] the ministry of religion. We heard from some of the veterans - older men and women who have been around a long time; and we heard from some of the rookies, who are just beginning their seasons of service. It was only yesterday, or was it the day before, that I was in their shoes - trying to make my way in my chosen vocation.
We sang our hymns lustily - often from memory. Singing the Living Tradition, the title of our hymnal, was fitting for that occasion - for any occasion. And so, on this Palm Sunday, when we remember the life and death of one who lived and died centuries ago, I reflect on the transitory nature of existence. After all, we're all "temps," climbing this "time-bound ladder" to a destination we know not. We're all really simply guests of existence.
That sense of transitoriness can feel a bit depressing. Recognition of one's finitude is not customarily not one of our favorite preoccupations. We need to move somewhere between outright denial and morbid acceptance of our role as temporary visitors in the cosmos.
A year or so ago I read about a California company which enables people to leave this world quite literally in a blaze of glory. The cremains of a person are placed in a receptacle which is then shot into the sky like a firecracker, with the same pyrotechnical effects. The manager of the company says "People are seeking alternatives to that downer of standing on a windy hillside looking at a hole in the ground. This way your final memory (of a loved one) is looking at a beautiful fire in the sky."[3]
My own preferences upon my demise are in some ways just as quirky and in some ways somewhat more pedestrian. I'd like to have some of my ashes scattered in our Memorial Garden, some off the beach at our cottage on Seneca Lake and some in Evergreen Cemetery in Bristol, where I grew up. I've always wanted to be in three places at once. It is a metaphor for my life.
While neither of these approaches might appeal to you, I do like the name of the company that colors the sky with cremains - "Celebrate Life." And the image of life flaring across the heavens so intrigues me that I unearthed an excerpt from a meditation I wrote years ago: "We are beacons of brief fire between the portals of life and death. Like shooting stars we flash across the dark sky giving light for a time, and then are no more."
Those words presume a disbelief in immortality - which, of course, is the traditional Christian hope of life after death. But I am a skeptic regarding that belief; I agree with playwright Arthur Miller who said that "Immortality is like carving your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July."[4]
Most of us are spiritually in kindergarten when it comes to contemplating death - and so I propose considering life - without which there is no death. The two go together - always. The idea that we are guests of existence conveys a beginning and an end with certain joys and responsibilities along the way.
Poet Mary Oliver wrote,
"When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."[5]
The poets are perhaps more helpful in looking at life whole than the scientists, but let us not forget that our knowledge of cosmic things gives our lives perspective in the great scheme of things. I recall a favorite Harry Golden essay in which he sits musing in a restaurant about the vastness of the universe - the stars and planets and galaxies and black holes and all the rest of our amazing heavenly home. He concludes by saying that in view of all that, it seems inconsequential that the waitress brings string beans instead of limas.
I like to read about the heavens - a heaven I can believe in - far more wondrous than the thought of my small self being made immortal. I've lost track of the figures - they keep changing as astronomers make their educated guesses on how old the universe is; I can't put my finger on how old creation is - surely manifold more than the meager 4004 years of church tradition. I can't remember if it is expanding or contracting. I can't recall how tiny the primordial mass was at the time of the Big Bang, or if we are in a state of ultimate entropy when the whole great cosmic ball of wax will come to an inglorious end.
Cosmic time puts human time in humbling perspective - and humility is a virtue greatly to be desired in our time. If I consider the clock on my office wall, I realize that humanity did not come along until about twenty minutes to twelve. And humanity as we know it today came in just the last minute. Even more amazing, civilization from the pyramids on is just the last seconds of the 12-hour clock. And, considering that this is Palm Sunday in the Christian world, the time since Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth, is less than two seconds. We are a brief, barely discernible instant, in cosmic time.
The Hebrew poets before Jesus, without our scientific understanding of time and space, nonetheless had a fundamental spiritual grasp of humanity's place in the great chain of creation: "When I consider the moon and the stars, the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, what is humanity that Thou art mindful of us, yet Thou has made us little lower than the angels and crowned us with honor and with glory."
In the Book of Job we encounter a similar perspective. After Job complains about his suffering, the Lord's voice thunders out of the whirlwind: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? . . . Who determined its measurements . . . . on what were its bases sunk. . . . who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?"[6]
The Lord's voice - in this literary masterpiece - goes on for two whole chapters dressing down Job for complaining about his human lot. Who does he think he is, anyway? But then the Lord remembers Job is not the Creator, merely a creature, just a guest of existence - and admonishes him to "Gird up your loins like a man . . . deck yourself with majesty and dignity; clothe yourself with glory and splendor."[7] Being a guest of existence in this cosmos is no insignificant matter - it's just that it is helpful to keep our cosmic status in mind. The cosmos is not all about us.
All of this stretches my mind - and my heart - and my spirit - to be a part of such a miracle. And I think of the conversation between the astronomer and the theologian. The astronomer said, "Astronomically speaking, humans are negligible." To which the theologian replied, "Astronomically speaking, we are the astronomers."
We are a "temporary expression of the forces of the universe. . . . obliged to make our contribution to what has been called "the boundless sweep of being."[8] But we are temps who know what we are.
Robert Ardrey, in his remarkable book African Genesis, pulled together this infinite and eternal reality and our finite and limited existence in time and space with these memorable words: "Time, death, and the space between the stars, constitutes the substance of the woman who made your breakfast this morning, and of the man who got off the train as you were getting on it."[9]
In the nitty-gritty of our day-to-day existence, we most often forget we are players in a great cosmic drama at which biblical writers and subsequent poets can only hint - at which the early astronomers with their naked eyes and contemporary astronomers with their powerful telescopes can only marvel. We may be bit players, but great drama consists not only of the stars, but also the bit actors who play their parts and play them well.
It is the task of religion to help us understand that in being cosmic "temps" we are an essential part of the picture, that being a guest of existence entails a certain response from us. The prayer of the dying, as Annie Dillard suggests, is not "please," but "thank you."
That is the spirit of our memorial services when we honor our beloved dead. We acknowledge their death as a normal and natural part of life and we grieve at its end; we celebrate their life in all its uniqueness of triumph and defeat, joy and sorrow; and we remind ourselves that life goes on - that we are part of a living tradition.
At such occasions I often share a modern parable told by the great black preacher Howard Thurman, "Planting for the Ages:"
I watched him for a long time. He was so busily engaged in his task that he did not notice my approach until he heard my voice, then he raised himself erect with all the slow dignity of a man who had exhausted the cup of haste to the very dregs. He was an old man as I discovered before our conversation was over, a full 81 years. Further talk between us revealed that he was planting a small grove of pecan trees; the little treelets were not more than two-and-a-half or three feet in height. My curiosity was unbounded. 'Why did you not select larger trees so as to increase the possibility of your living to see them bear at least one cup of nuts?'He fixed his eyes directly on my face with no particular point of focus, but with a gaze that took in the totality of my features. Finally, he said, 'These small trees are cheaper and I have very little money.'
'So you do not expect to live to see the trees reach sufficient maturity to bear fruit?'
"'No. But is that important? All my life I have eaten fruit from trees that I did not plant. Why should I not plant trees to bear fruit for those who may enjoy them long after I am gone? Besides the person who plants to reap the harvest has no faith in life.'
Having faith in life is hard sometimes. We are from time to time battered and beaten - with physical ailments, with emotional turmoil, with spiritual dilemmas. And from time to time we are confronted with our own mortality - for some it is still a distant abstraction; for others an imminent reality. We'd like to be a little more than temporary actors on the stage; we'd like to enjoy being a guest of existence for quite some time longer.
It takes a leap of faith sometimes to say "thank you" instead of "please." But as we probe deeper into our souls, as we plunge deeper into the great mystery of things, there comes a dawning that, in the end, all is well, and we are grateful.
As the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote,
"Between life and death there must somewhere be a harmony;
Otherwise the world could not have borne it through the ages,
Smiling such a cruel deceit, and all the lights of her stars would have darkened."[10]
My five days at Convocation with my colleagues reminded me that we are part of a glorious living tradition that did not begin with me, nor will it end with me. It is about me and it isn't about me. I have one and only life to live; I live it in a vast cosmic drama.
However, we needn't speak only in grandiose language. In the words of Alice Walker: "Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it."[11]
Ultimately, life is good. But death happens. It is a part of life. We die in the middle of things, but in that interval between beginning and ending we forge our meanings or find them in the stars. It is ironic that our meanings may never be known until life is done.
Poet John Holmes says it best:
"But I have lived too much to guess of dying
That death's a garden, or to rhyme its fears,
And lived so long - a twelvemonth in a minute -
I think time goes by heartbeats, not by years.
Here in my heart I hold such strong abundance,
I do not care what lies beyond that door.
Life is enough. There is always music,
Always more love, more sun, and always more.
And if the green door opens on tomorrow,
And every friend still answers to his name,
A little death makes eloquent the daylight:
It will be glory that the world's the same.
And we have all been dead, who now are living!
Speak out the secret thing we're certain of:
We're back, we've all come back, we've all been given
A longer time to look, and touch, and love."[12]
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