Death Be Not Proud

6 April, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain: But if it dies it yields a rich harvest. John 12:24

When I mentioned to Davidson that I was going to do this Sunday’s sermon on death, he said, “Oh, so you want to be sure no one comes to church this Sunday?”

Well, maybe it would have been best to disguise my intent and let it be a surprise, but unfortunately, I am still just learning the tricks of the trade.

You can relax. This sermon is not going to address the question of whether or not death is merely a pause separating us from eternal life. This sermon is about being alive NOW, in the present, by coming face to face with death. “Trembling with an awareness of own mortality”[1] in order that we might find life more abundantly in our own lives and in the lives of those we touch.

I am reminded of years ago when my neighbor Peggy died, we were all shocked and saddened. I wanted to offer my condolences and assistance to her family so I made lots of food to take to their home. I had never done this before and didn’t know what to expect. Peggy’s sister-in-law invited me into the kitchen where she gratefully accepted my gifts and we talked in a whisper. Everyone was stunned by Peggy’s death. Had it been Milford, who was older and in poor health, we wouldn’t have been quite so shocked. Peggy seemed to meet death without warning. Sue took me to the cupboard to show me a large stash of home-baked cookies that Peggy had made the day before she simply died in her sleep. It all seemed so unreal. One minute she’s making cookies and the next minute she’s gone. How can that be? As I walked home I was struck with how fragile life is. How precious, and how we never know what tomorrow will bring.

And then, it hit me. Oh my God! If I should die suddenly, someone will be looking in my kitchen cupboards. My messy closets! When I got home, the first thing I did was to tell my family that if I should die suddenly they were to tell everyone that I hadn’t been myself lately.

Seriously, this is why I feel it is my moral duty as a minister to talk to you about death, in hopes that your own life can be recognized as a precious gift, and dying can be understood as simply a pause, a breath before Love eternal.

Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow – Unknown

That’s just one of the quotes on death I found in doing research for this sermon. There’s no shortage of verbiage on the subject of death, believe me. For example;

Woody Allen once said, “I’m not afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

I think most Americans liken their attitudes about death to that of Woody Allen or maybe Somerset Maugham, who said, “Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.”

Or we joke about it, like the mischievous Mark Twain who once said, “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”

A woman with metastatic cancer once said that through the experience of her illness she had discovered a basic truth. “There are only two kinds of people in this world-those who are alive and those who are afraid.” [2]

Our own Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat we say we have had our day.”

Here in lies the motive for this sermon. To have our “swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat” we must live deliberately and fully awake.

“Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.” [Gloria Steinem]

You may have seen the flyer in your newsletter for the workshop next weekend called “What Can I Do to Help?” This is a workshop designed to awaken our unconscious fears around death and loss, and to bring us fully into the present so that we are free to experience life in its full glory. My work at the Center for Attitudinal Healing during seminary was just that wake-up call for me. I had NO intentions whatsoever of coming in to contact with death. It just happened as I moved in the direction of my heart. I moved from a place of what appeared to be comfortable, but was probably more like “denial”, to an experience of the realm of the holy. Experience that lives up to one theologian’s definition of holy, as being both, “tremendous and fascinating.”

Up to that point, the only experience I had had with death other than when my next-door neighbor died suddenly in her sleep, was when my grandmother died unexpectedly when I was twelve-years old. The mourning at my grandmother’s funeral was treated as a very private affair. The immediate family was closed off from the rest of the mourners by a curtain. I learned that it isn’t appropriate to allow your tears to be seen. I saw my father cry for the first time in my life and it was the most painful experience that I had ever known.

“How do we befriend death? I think deep, human love-does not know death? Real love says, “forever.”[3] The same love that reveals the absurdity of death also allows us to befriend death.”[4] This is exactly how I got over my fear of death and discovered something about life that wouldn’t have been accessible to me otherwise.

I met Cheryl Shohan, the Director, at the time, of the Home and Hospital Program at the Center for Attitudinal Healing. I believe it was a stroke of luck for me that I was in the right place at the right time, when Cheryl needed a seminary intern to work with her, I was ready, willing, and able. I had just completed all the training workshops at the Center and my seminary was open to allowing the work to be counted as credit. I consider the wisdom I received from Cheryl and my work with the dying to be the major foothold to my personal understanding of life, and one of the most important things I have ever done.

Cheryl has become one of my dearest friends as well as a mentor. I am thrilled that she is coming to First UU to co-facilitate this workshop with me. Cheryl has also agreed to speak with the children’s RE class about Loss next Sunday, before they begin an upcoming curriculum on Lessons of Loss. I had a chance to look over this wonderful curriculum. It begins with looking at our own losses, because before we can move into “helping” anyone else, it is essential that we learn to grieve. The word “care” finds its roots in the Gothic KARA, which means lament. The basic meaning, then, of care is to grieve, to experience sorrow, to cry out with.”

“Unless we learn to grieve, we may need to live life at a distance in order to protect ourselves from pain. Grieving may be one of the most fundamental of life’s skills. It is the way that the heart can heal from loss and go on to love again and grow wise.”[5] Grieving can give us the courage to “reframe” our experience as opportunity. It’s a gaining of wisdom and growth.

How wonderful that our UU RE Curriculum begins these lessons in childhood. Unfortunately, I think that most of us grew up in a time when grief wasn’t talked about or understood. Loss is inevitable! The Loss curriculum begins with this sentence,

“Let’s face it, life is risky business. In every week, if not every day, we all face a multitude of losses.”

“We can make our sorrows, just as much as our joys, a part of our celebration of life in the deep realization that life and death are not opponents, but do, in fact, kiss each other at every moment of our existence.”[6] [Henri Nouwen]

My job as intern at The Center for Attitudinal Healing involved working with life-threatened and dying persons and their families. The Center, having become known for its valuable service to local hospitals and doctors, received referrals from patients that often had just received the news of a life-threatening diagnosis and sometimes we worked with individuals for months or years. Sometimes it would be only days before death occurred. The support groups proved invaluable, and if and when someone became too ill to come to the group meetings, we sent trained volunteers to support them at home.

The initial interview often fell to me, first on the phone and then in person. In the beginning, I accompanied Cheryl to observe and learn. I remember one of our first calls. We were called to a nursing home to meet with a woman who had renal cancer. She was in the final stages of her illness and her discomfort was being alleviated with dialysis treatments. Because she was receiving dialysis treatments, she was ineligible for hospice care due to government regulations. A tragic loss for far too many. Hospice care can make all the difference to a patient and their families in the difficult days of terminal illness.

When we arrived, the woman was fearful and horribly uncomfortable. Cheryl and I spent almost two hours listening to this very sick woman share her story and confide her fears. She somehow had maintained a sense of humor. As we listened, I had the privilege of gently massaging her feet with lotion as Cheryl held her hand. I felt the presence of something indefinable. A palpable sacred presence that I have learned to trust. As Cheryl spoke with her, I listened in amazement. She seemed to know exactly what to say. This woman had lots of questions about dying and she was consumed with fear and guilt and had some difficulty talking about it. She finally confessed that when her husband of many years died three years ago, while there was some sorrow, she had felt relief. It had been a strained marriage with many years of unhappiness. Suddenly there was room in the bed for her and she felt like she could breathe. There was peace in her life for the first time in years, and she had been feeling guilty about her feelings ever since.

Cheryl asked, “Is that it?” She nodded gingerly, and Cheryl replied, “Well, it sounds pretty normal to me!” The woman smiled and started to laugh, and then we all three got the giggles. The most amazing thing happened, her face relaxed and her breathing slowed. A transformation occurred right before our eyes.

The next morning, she died peacefully. I remember thinking what a gift it was to have met her and for her to have had the chance to talk honestly and openly with someone who could truly hear her and understand. I had my first encounter with the holy that day. There were to be many more.

My first solo experience with death was a call for help from a young woman whose mother was dying of lung cancer. Anna had called the Center for help and we had tried to arrange a visitor for her mother, but because she lived so far away, we couldn’t find anyone. I sent her some referrals for other services and two tapes of peaceful music to play for her mother. Anna had taken her mother into her home to care for her in the last months of illness and in addition to caring for her dying mother, Anna was taking care of her three year old daughter who was ill with leukemia. This tough young woman was coping with a lot and when she called to say that hospice told her that her mother could die at anytime, she sounded frightened. I asked her if she wanted company, and she was so relieved when I said that I was on my way.

When I arrived, Anna took me into her mother’s room where a tiny figure that used to be a vibrant woman was curled up on the bed. She appeared to me to be very close to death. Anna climbed up on the big four-poster bed and cradled her mother’s face in her hands. She told her that she wasn’t alone anymore and it was ok if she was ready to go to be with Jesus. Anna’s mother was a deeply religious Christian and I agreed to sit with her and read Bible passages to her.

Anna took Gracie in the other room to spend some quiet time with her and calm her down and I sat beside the bed and began to read Sara’s Bible out loud. As I read the passages underlined and dated, I was editing because some of those verses are downright frightening. Judgment and hell-fire. As well used as that Bible was, I figured Sara knew what I was doing if she could hear me, and I hoped she would forgive me.

I noticed a glass of water with a sponge on a stick beside her bed. I decided to see if she would like a drink.

What happened next is something I will remember for as long as I live. As I placed the moistened sponge between her lips, this cadaverous human being curled up in almost a fetal position clamped down on that sponge with amazing strength and quenched her thirst with a deep sigh. It took my breath and for that moment, as she held on, it was as if we had joined somehow because as that stick came alive with her energy I felt quenched as well. Her body was dying but her essence was very much alive.

Sara died within minutes of that moment and shortly after Anna’s best friend arrived. We sat beside Sara’s bedside and the two girls told me stories about Sara and their years growing up together. We laughed and we cried and we prayed. I thank God that I had to wisdom to answer Anna’s call for help that day. That I somehow had the good sense to show up to life.

I had been given a sacred gift of being invited into the holy space of another human being. Another gift of the holy.

There were to be many more. Far too many to tell. But enough that I am convinced that Love is more powerful than death. In every case, I found a peace that passes all understanding, in circumstances that for all visible evidence that appeared to be tragic and horrifying, I found a peace that can’t be explained or defined.

Henri Nouwen, a Catholic priest who taught theology at both Harvard and Yale, spent the last years of his life living and working in a house with six handicapped people and four assistants. In his own words, “I moved from Harvard to Daybreak, that is from an institution for the best and the brightest to a community for mentally handicapped people.”

Nouwen writes of his experience with that peace that passes understanding that I’m talking about. He tells about his relationship with Adam, his gentle teacher who taught him what no book, school, or professor could have ever taught. [7] He writes:

Having never worked with handicapped people, I was not only apprehensive, I was afraid. Adam was a twenty-five year old man who could not speak, could not dress himself or undress himself, could not walk alone or eat without much help. He didn’t cry, or laugh, and only occasionally made eye contact.

His back was distorted and his arm and leg movements were very twisted. He suffered from severe epilepsy and, notwithstanding heavy medication, there were few days without grand mal seizures. Sometimes as he would grow suddenly rigid, he uttered a howling groan, and on a few occasions I saw a big tear coming down his cheek.

Nouwen goes into great detail of his lengthy and tedious routine of daily care for Adam. Not to give a nursing report, but to share something quite intimate.

“After a month of working with Adam, something started to happen to me that never had happened to me before. This deeply handicapped young man, who by many outsiders is considered an embarrassment, a distortion of humanity, a useless creature, started to become my dearest companion.

Out of this broken body and broken mind emerged a most beautiful human being offering me a greater gift than I would ever be able to offer him. It is hard for me to find adequate words for this experience, but somehow Adam revealed to me who he was and who I was and how we can love each other. As I carried his naked body into the bathwater, made waves to let the water run fast around his chest and neck, rubbed noses with him and told him all sorts of stories about him and me, I knew that two friends were communicating far beyond the realm of thought or emotion. Deep speaks to deep, spirit speaks to spirit, heart speaks to heart. I started to realize that there was a mutuality of love not based on shared knowledge or shared feelings, but on shared humanity.

Nouwen had enough training in psychology to raise the question of whether he was romanticizing, making something beautiful out of something ugly, projecting his own hidden need to be a father to this deeply retarded man. He asked Adam’s parents when they came for a visit, “During all the years you had Adam in your house, what did he give you?” The father replied without hesitation, “He brought us peace, he is our peacemaker, our son of peace.”

The gift of peace hidden in Adam’s utter weakness is a peace rooted in being, Henri Nouwen wrote. How simple a truth, how hard to live. Adam is teaching me something about peace that is not of this world. It is a peace not constructed by tough competition, hard thinking, and individual stardom, but rooted in simply being present to each other, a peace that speaks about the first love of God by which we are all held and a peace that keeps calling us to community, to a fellowship of the weak.

Henri Nouwen used this story of Adam to illustrate his point that the seeds of national and international peace are already sown on the soil of our own suffering and the suffering of the poor, and that we can truly trust that these seeds, like the mustard seeds of the Gospel, will produce large shrubs in which many birds can find a place to rest.

The Gospel also offers the wisdom that one who loses his life will find it. In acts of service to the weak and the poor in body and spirit, we begin to find our lives and bless the lives of others.

I believe this is what Jesus meant when he said that the kingdom of God is all around us and we simply can’t see it. It remains hidden in the broken bodies of the weak, the silent suffering of our neighbor, ourselves, waiting to be revealed, to be lifted out and distributed throughout the world. It is that peace that defies explanation or understanding.

Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife. The first question was, “Did you bring joy?” The second was, “Did you find joy?” [Leo Buscaglia]

I would like to leave you with two questions to carry with you as you continue your journey in this life.

First: If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call to make, who would you call and what would you say?

Second: Why are you waiting? [Stephen Levine]

For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world. – Wittgenstein

Desire is half of life, indifference is half of death. – Kahlil Gibran

Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat we say we have had our day – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. – Clarence Darrow

If man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. – Unknown

What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal. – Albert Pike

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity. – Seneca

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come. – Rabindranath Tagore

[1] Church, Forrest. Lifelines. Boston, MA. Beacon Press. 1996. P. 15.

[2] Remen, Rachel Naomi. My Grandfather’s Blessings. New York, NY. Riverhead Books. 2000. P. 169.

[3] Nouwen, Henri. Seeds of Hope: A Nouwen Reader. Edited by Robert Durback. New York, NY. Image Books. 1997.P. 190.

[4] Remen. GFB. P. 190.

[5] Remen. MGB. P. 145.

[6] Nouwen, Henri. Seeds of Hope: A Nouwen Reader. Edited by Robert Durback. New York, NY. Image Books. 1997. P. 87.

[7] Nouwen, Henri. P. 254-267.