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Victoria Shepherd Rao
26 June 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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PRAYER: Prayer for the End of Things
May we find peace at the end.
At the end of a conversation with a friend or a stranger, may we find peace.
At the end of a period of hard work, when we have struggled to complete a task or tried hard to find an approach to work together with others, may we find peace beyond our fatigue.
At the end of an outing, or an event we have been looking forward to, or a vacation we’ve planned endlessly for and lived through in the seeming blink of an eye, when it is time to return again to the regular rhythms and routines of our lives, may we find peace in the ordinary.
At the end of the day, when we retire to our beds, let us reflect on the fullness of our being, recounting our moments of strength and failure, and may we seek peace beyond our stories- peace for ourselves and peace for our world.
And at the end of our lived, whenever our time comes to the still, breathless place where we must let go, let us find us beyond this life.
So be it.
SERMON: Farewell Musings
First off, I want to share a few impressions of GA – the annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association – that is taking place right now in Fort Worth, Texas. I attended for three days of the multi-day extravaganza. It is a lot like a film festival: there is so much going on – lectures, workshops, exhibitions, annual meetings, worship events – that you must decide what you want to do most, because you cannot do it all. It is a real exercise in expressing your priorities as a UU and it completely overwhelmed me at first. Then I decided: I wanted and needed to hear different UU theologies, and I did, everything from the universalism of John Murray-meets-Thomas Potter to Thandeka on the theology of land, water, food and place.
I wanted to participate in mega-church hi-tech worship with thousands of others, all singing together. I wanted to hear some award winning sermons being preached. I wanted to learn more about the credentialing process of ministers in our tradition. I wanted to get information about international liberal religious ministries and networks of interfaith ministries. And all of these things I did.
The offerings and possibilities of GA are many. I want now to encourage you all to make the pilgrimage for yourselves one year. One of the best experiences for me was to see old friends greeting one another. Possibly these friendships were built and have been sustained by the annual reunion. But to see peoples’ eyes light up, their enthusiastic waves, their running to embrace, it was such an upper! It was fun to meet with the folks from here among the crowd. There were about forty people from “our church” who went. I also met up with Hannah Wells (who is here among us today – welcome!) and I met Cathy Harrington too, both your interns before me.
It’s exciting to think that I’ll be one of the lucky ones running to greet old friends in the years to come. I treasure such a vision of belonging to the wider community of our faith, especially at such a time as this, as I prepare to take my leave from you.
This will be the last time I speak from your pulpit as your intern and I would like to take the time to address a couple of questions which have been asked of me in response to my sermons from the last few months.
These questions came from two long time church members, both former board presidents. One asked a question: What is so great about serenity? This came from a man who introduced me, the first time I met him, to the qualities of character he considered most definitive of Texan culture: resourcefulness and independence. He clearly valued these traits but he wasn’t so sure about serenity.
Serenity is like tranquility, and describes a calm or peaceful state. It is associated with serene weather – clear, fair, like a cloudless sky or a calm sea. In a person, serenity means to be free from disturbing emotions. I see serenity as a sign of an inner resourcefulness that can make some space in a person between their inner emotions and their outward demeanor. It makes the difference between being reactive and responsive: a serene person is a person who is aware of her emotions, not controlled by them; a serene person values her emotions, learns from them, but is not defined or determined by them. Then the emotions become a resource for such a person, not the source of their well-being, or lack of it.
So, what is so great about serenity? Well, maybe as someone trying to develop pastoral skills, I have been giving a sub-textual message that serenity is great – great for a minister or a chaplain, someone whose job it is to reflect others’ state of being back to them as a mirror. But then again, we come from a tradition of the ‘priesthood of all believers,’ and that means we all are called to show and demonstrate with our lives the love of God, or the benevolence and possibilities of Life. And we are all better able to do that from an inner landscape that is calm and undisturbed by stormy emotions. So serenity then is good for connecting to our own truth beyond our emotions, and for connecting with others. And I’ll own up to my bias that in life, it is connecting with others that seems great to me. It is a calling into significant, meaning-filled relationship with people, that’s what ministry means to me. So, what’s so great about serenity? It can facilitate real, deep connections between humans. That’s my answer.
The other question I wanted to deal with was a direct response to a particular remark I had made in a sermon wherein I wondered about the experience of being hit by a car and lying injured by the side of the road. I had said that I hoped I would be able to rest my cheek on the ground under me, whether it was dusty or greasy or bloody, knowing the earth as an inalienable mother, upon whom I might safely rest, trusting death as much as I have trusted life. It was this last idea that sparked the question, how? How do we learn to trust death?
Trusting death – that is perhaps a novel way to view death. We might intellectually accept the inevitability of death but chances are we’d rather not think about it if given the choice. No, we deal with it when we have to – when we are confronted by it, or stopped short in our tracks by it – and then our mix of emotions is heavy isn’t it? Shock, disbelief, anger, sadness, confusion, uncertainty, regret, anxiety, an overwhelming complex of feelings envelope us as we move along the series of events unfolding in bedrooms, hospital rooms, and funeral homes. Indeed, is there any trust there in that picture? Death is the unwanted visitor separating us from our loved ones and sometimes, from our hopes and dreams – how can we, why should we, trust it?
People of conventional faiths may trust that death is the beginning of eternal life, ‘dead in Jesus, alive forever with God,’ or that death is the transition point from one life into another as within Hinduism or Buddhism with the tenants of reincarnation. Atheists may also share a kind of faith in death as a merciful nothingness where there can be no pain because there is no thing at all. Other, even less conventional views, wonder about the after-death experiences reported by people who have actually been clinically dead but who have returned to life: the whole white-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel scenario; the your-whole-life-flashes-before-your-eyes; the feeling of encompassing love. Such compelling stories as these can enchant open-minded religious liberals, encouraging an understanding of death as some kind of a passage between worlds or realms of being. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, no less, became such a believer, who, at the end of her career, twelve books after her famous 1969 book, On Death and Dying, asserted that death did not exist, but was merely “a portal” to another stage. She said, “Death is only a transformation from a physical field of energy into a psychic field of energy.” (Globe and Mail obituary, Aug.26, 2004) And so, there are many ways to trust death and our worldviews or religious views matter to our understandings. And they always have.
We can look at whole heritages surrounding the care of souls at the end of life. I refer to the ancient traditions as revealed in various ‘books of the dead.’ The ancient Egyptians were entombed with such books. Theirs were like instruction manuals to help navigate the journey from life to death. The Celtic tradition of death mid-wifery, which influenced later monastic infirmary practices around Europe at the turn of the first millennium, was a set of practices for giving active care to the dying based on the understanding that people needed coaching a the end of life in much the same way as women need coaching through the process of childbirth. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which has become quite popular recently in the West, there are detailed instructions for the dying and for their companions and care-givers at the end of life including many prayers to be read to the dying person during the different stages of their transition from life to death to life, to help confront especially fearful emotions, and facilitate a calm and clear state of consciousness throughout the process.
There is a collective wisdom on the universal experience of dying to be found in these traditions. Their varied cultural and religious roots do not point to different but to recurring approaches to death. And we can learn from the repeated patterns in the teachings that have helped past generations to trust death. So, let’s review the principles which emerge.
First, there is the basic idea of a good death. That would be a peaceful death and it is achieved through close attention to the actual process of death through its many stages. Kubler-Ross identified the stages of grief in the dying process, you probably know them, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In hospices today, care-givers recognize the final “active dying” stage. In the Tibetan tradition, there were over forty different stages identified and each stage was met with particular sets of practices, prayers and rituals, all designed to support the dying person as well as their companions. A good death included constant care-givers so that the one at the end of life would not be alone in approaching death.
Another consistent teaching in these traditions was that it was necessary to prepare for death throughout the course of a lifetime. That the art of dying was not radically different from the art of living but brought with it some powerfully transformative opportunities to review our lives with new perspectives and to heal our souls. “Dying is nothing to fear,” echoed Kubler- Ross in our day, “It can be the most wonderful experience in your life.”
The earliest hospices in Europe, the scattered monastic infirmaries, were places where people from all walks of life, and religious traditions, went to die. They were treated with a variety of physical and what we might call psycho-spiritual techniques. Music was used extensively- in fact, there is some evidence that the West’s musical scale emerged from these institutions, medicines were used to control pain and maintain lucidity, chants were used to regulate breath through pain and discomfort, and psalms were used to give expression to the full range of the dying person’s emotions – including anger at God.
Death was consistently viewed as a sacred end-of-life transition, and it presented a unique opportunity for significant spiritual healing. The vision of the good death was in play then and it is in play still – 82% of Americans would, upon being told they had very little time to live, prefer simply to go home. They want to die in their own beds, surrounded by family, in a setting that feels natural.
But because we don’t dwell on [death], and because we haven’t thought about it, the system that has sprung up to care for the elderly and the terminally ill is neither medically nor ethically consistent. In different regions of the country – even among hospital rated the best- there are huge variations in the kind of treatment given to dying patients. It seems that the most important factor in determining whether a particular region has a high rate of medical intervention on behalf of the terminally ill – risky operations, respirators, artificial feeding – is not local religious practices but the local availability of hospital beds and the number of local doctors. (Washington Post editorial by Anne Applebaum, Mar 31, 2005)
So, how then can we learn to trust death?
Well, we can be proactive about all the practical concerns: make our wills, make sure we give legal rights to folks who understand our wishes for our end-of-life care. This congregation has a great resource for such tasks with AMBIS, the Austin Memorial and Burial Information Society, a church-affiliated consumer organization dedicated to a consumer’s right to meaningful, dignified, and affordable end-of-life choices. We can join the new movements towards at-home funerals and after-death care in the home. We can take the radical step of beginning to attend to each other, our families and friends, at the end of our lives – to sit with one another in death vigils, and attend to the profound experiences of caring for the dying, learning the lessons they can teach us about living.
We can take seriously our own spiritual pain before death’s shadow falls, asking ourselves: Is my life filled with meaning and purpose? Do I have a sense of reconciliation within myself and with others? Do I have a deep sense of connection with the people and things that matter most to me? The answers to such questions are in us, and they can guide us in seeking out the spiritual healing that will build lives worth living and set us up for a good death – a peaceful, conscious letting go- surrounded by a circle of friends, or lying by the side of a road. We can then take the courage we’ve cultivated in living fully into the end-of-life experience, whatever we conceive it to be, claiming for ourselves a good death that we can trust. “Dying is nothing to fear,” said Kubler-Ross, “It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you have lived.”
But let’s face it, none of us know when we will die, it could be tomorrow, it could be tonight. So, we need to make an effort to trust, life and death, and to live in the only moment we can- in the now- in the now, and with each others’ blessings, let us endeavor to trust, as people of faith, we are called to nothing less.
