Readings:
from Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest by Wayne Muller

I stumbled on emptiness one winter in Massachusetts. I was a visitor at a three-month silent meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society, a Buddhist retreat center in Barre. As a guest, I arrived after two hundred people had been sitting in silent meditation for nine weeks. When I first entered the meditation hall, I felt as though a warm wind was pressing on my chest, pushing me backward, forcing me to regain my balance. The silence of two hundred quietly breathing beings was viscerally palpable--silence that filled the air more surely than if it had been completely empty.

I took a place in the rear of the hall, and for a few days practiced in the company of these dedicated pilgrims. Vipassana meditation requires simply noting the rising and falling of the breath, and with it the arising and falling away of thoughts, sensations, feelings, returning to the breath again and again. One afternoon, completely unbidden, came emptiness. I felt a spaciousness beyond measure. For no reason I could fathom I felt how all things dissolve into nothingness, and arise again--people, buildings, the blanket covering my legs, thoughts, feelings, passion, ideas, my body, my loved ones, the earth itself, all simply forms that would, in their time, inevitably dissolve again into emptiness. The terror of the void was not there; I felt more liberated than frightened. In a way, everything was already over, all life destined to disassemble into emptiness. Suddenly, there was nothing left to worry about.[1]

"White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field" by Mary Oliver

Can't no one know at sunrise
How the day is going to end.
Can't no one know at sunset
If the next day will begin.[3]

This uncertainty is the ultimate reality of life. Most of us do a fine job most days living in utter denial of this reality. Maybe we have to. As the poet Wislawa Szymborska writes, "We're extremely fortunate/not to know precisely/the kind of world we live in."[4] Oh, a few people manage to shed the denial more than others: usually people like Job whose life events have reminded them more insistently and consistently about the uncertain nature of life. But most of us don't go to bed at night with the thought "Can't no one know If the next day will begin."

I would argue, though, that we need to have this thought more at the forefront of our minds and hearts. As the Twelve Steps recovery programs acknowledge, a requirement of living a spiritual life is breaking through denial and seeing the world as it really is. Spirituality--and the wondrous depth of living it offers--is built on paying attention to the world as it is. Genuine gratitude and appreciation and compassion can only come out of such attentiveness. Inattention is the foundation for taking everything for granted and the failure to reach out and help others in need. So living a spiritual life requires us to come to some acknowledgment--some understanding--of the reality of our mortality. Every spiritual path I can think of asks its followers to engage seriously with death, to shed the denial of death. Death is a basic part of life. It's part of the deal of being human.

Death isn't the only uncertainty at the heart of human life. There is another profound uncertainty, this one a close relative of death: What happens to us after we die. The reality is: "Can't no one know in life/What's going to happen when we die." This particular uncertainty sure doesn't keep us mortal human beings from speculating about it. We seem readier to talk about the afterlife than death. As I wrote in the newsletter about this sermon, year after year when I do the Question Box sermons, asking for your questions, several people always ask about the afterlife. Every year I'm surprised and, to be honest, slightly irritated. Not again, I think! Haven't we already covered this?

I'm sure it's an important question, but what continues to surprise me is how little I really care about it. I picked my sermon title today partly for the shock value it would have in our newspaper advertisement. (Wouldn't it be great on a sign along Calumet St. with this title, confirming to passers-by that unorthodoxy is welcome here?) But I also picked this sermon title because it accurately reflects where I am today (and where I've been for as long as I can remember): the afterlife really doesn't matter much to me. I really don't care. I know that many--maybe most--of you care, and that's fine. But I don't care.

Maybe it's my age. Maybe when you're on the younger side of life it's just easier to ignore and deny the reality of death and the follow-up question about what happens next. But I'm not that young any more, well on my way along that wondrous slide into middle age. Just last year I grew out of the official Unitarian Universalist Association definition of a young adult--and that definition is pretty generous if you ask me. What comes after the young adult stage? Something with the word "middle" in it, right? So I'm not sure it's youth that makes me not care about the afterlife. My line of work doesn't exactly help facilitate indifference or denial about the end of life, either. I've done enough memorial services for people my age to know in my bones that this death thing doesn't just happen to the elderly. I've seen enough sudden terminal illnesses and enough fatal accidents to know that death can come knocking at any instant.

So I've wondered: why don't I care about the afterlife? Maybe part of it comes from my hunch about what happens after death--namely, that nothing much happens other than our physical return to the earth. I have a hard time embracing the traditional Christian afterlife of heaven and hell. Even the more New Age belief in a mystical return of our spiritual energy to the great Source of all energy doesn't make much sense to me. Most of the time I believe that when we die, we cease to exist as anything other than the physical elements of our decaying body. I die, and the physical elements of my body return to the earth. No soul, no consciousness; only decaying atoms.

Well, if I'm right about this hunch, then when I die I won't be aware of anything. I won't know or feel anything. Death will just be nothingness, emptiness, void, silence. The good news is that I won't be disappointed in this because I won't be aware of it. To borrow a phrase from my favorite literary funeral director, when I die I think I'll just put up my feet up and relax.[5] No worries, no disappointment, no heaven, no hell: nothing. And I won't be aware of this nothingness. How can I be scared of this? How can I dread experiencing what I won't be aware of?

There's another factor at work here for me that I only figured out in writing this sermon. It's my now Buddhist-informed view of emptiness and silence. I realize that nothingness, emptiness, void, eternal silence really don't sound that bad or scary. Like Wayne Muller in the meditation hall, terror of the void is not there for me.

When I went to Sri Lanka sixteen years ago, I remember being baffled by the Buddhist notion of paranirvana. Paranirvana is the state the Buddha finally attained at the end of his life journey. Buddhists believe that the Buddha, like all of us, had been reborn countless times. During his life as the Buddha, he got it completely right and achieved final Enlightenment--paranirvana. His death marked his complete departure from the cycle of birth and death and rebirth. When the Buddha died, he was finally dead for good. He wouldn't come back as another life form. Upon his death, he attained final Enlightenment, and the lights went out. The image for paranirvana is that of extinguishing a flame--a positive image for Buddhists.

Paranirvana is the ultimate goal of the Buddhist path; it is the state all Buddhists strive to move towards. It is a state of total emptiness and void, a state of complete and utter nothingness--both physically and consciously. Getting into a state of temporary emptiness is the goal of Buddhist meditation. It offers a glimpse of the ultimate Emptiness the dead and departed Buddha attained. In Buddhism, then, pure emptiness and silence are not bad things; they're the goal. Sixteen years ago, I thought: What a strange idea! The goal of the spiritual life is final death and emptiness? The goal of the spiritual life is extinguishing the flame of our life? How different can you get from our Western understanding!

Well, somewhere along the way, without me quite realizing it, this Buddhist idea began to make sense--not necessarily that we are reborn numerous times until we attain the nothingness of paranirvana, but the idea that death can be emptiness, void, silence, and these qualities are good. I think I really believe this now.

Recently I watched the movie What Dreams May Come. At one point, the guide to the recently dead Robin Williams character says, "You're losing your fear that you disappeared. You only died." Well, I realize I'm not really afraid of disappearing. Disappearing doesn't sound bad; it sounds like the Buddhist goal of ultimate emptiness and silence. It sounds like the idea of eternal rest. It sounds like the "scalding, aortal light" of the Mary Oliver's white owl. I guess I've lost my fear of disappearing.

Oh, I know that for awhile after I die I won't have just disappeared. There will be traces of me--in the people and other parts of the web of life I've touched. But soon enough, maybe, say, a couple generations, I will be all but forgotten and anonymous--nothing more perhaps than an obscure name on some obscure family tree. In the good parlance of Wisconsin, I can only say: Not a problem.

Now, I have to admit that not believing in the afterlife gets harder when I think about loved ones who have died or will die. Nothingness and void may be fine and dandy as I think about my own demise. It's much harder to think of my loved ones venturing into the void for good, their candle permanently extinguished like the Buddha's. But then I remember that people I loved who have died are still alive in so many ways, still part of me now and for as long as I live, still part of everybody they touched. When I look up at this glorious fabric ceiling, I realize Emily West is still here. I feel her here--not as resurrected body and spirit. Not even as a spirit. I feel her memory. I feel it tangibly. And you know what? It's enough. It makes me realize that my memories of her are a tangible part of my life. She's a part of me, a part of everybody and everything she touched. Her death did not change this reality one iota.
 

Wayne Muller writes:

But we must ask this question: What if we are not going anywhere? What if we are simply living and growing within an ever-deepening cycle of rhythms, perhaps getting wiser, perhaps learning to be kind, and hopefully passing whatever we have learned to our children?...What if our life is simply a time when we are blessed with both sadness and joy, health and disease, courage and fear--and all the while we work, pray, and love, knowing that the promised land we seek is already present in the very gift of life itself, the inestimable privilege of a human birth? What if this single human life is itself the jewel in the lotus, the treasure hidden in the field, the pearl of great price? What if all the way to heaven is heaven?[6]

This is the same question I asked in a different way a couple weeks ago. What if the refreshing, still waters and the green pastures of the Twenty-third Psalm are not pictures of death but pictures of life--pictures potentially of the here and now? What if all the way to heaven is heaven? What if heaven is in Iowa (among other places)?

This question has led me to another insight about my own spiritual journey. I have long been bothered that Unitarian Universalism is such a positive, optimistic religion. Sure, there's beauty and goodness and happiness in life, but what about all the bad stuff that happens? Well, I still think this is a good thing to ask, but I'm gaining an appreciation for the optimistic side of our faith. Unitarian Universalism, with its optimistic, this-worldly perspective, relentlessly turns our attention to this place, this time, to the possibility of transcendent beauty and truth and goodness in the very imminent here and now. Our UU faith reminds us to seek the Eternal in our everyday lives. It seeks to help us notice. This more than anything else is the Good News of Unitarian Universalism.

These beautiful fall days my son Ian and I are keeping an eye on the oak trees at Schaeffer Park. Just about exactly a year ago, we went to the park to play one Monday after Ian's morning kindergarten class let out. We were planning to swing and run and climb around, just like we always do. But after a short time, I noticed that the oak leaves were really letting go in the light breeze. I ran after one and tried to catch it. Then I ran after another yellowed leaf falling in the breeze. And another. Soon Ian joined me in trying to catch the falling leaves. It wasn't easy: the wind would suddenly take hold of a leaf we had zeroed on and it would rush right past us. Other times the wind would suddenly die and the leaf would fall straight down, causing us to dive like an outfielder diving for a shallow fly ball. Between us we probably caught less than fifteen leaves. But it didn't matter. We were having a blast. Before we knew it, more than an hour had gone by.

Who needs an afterlife? Who needs heaven? Chasing leaves at Schaeffer Park is heaven enough for me. And it's just half a block from home! Like the memory of Emily West alive in this fabric ceiling, it's enough. It's enough.

Copyright 1999 by Roger B. Bertschausen. All rights reserved.

[1]Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest (New York: Bantam Books, 1999), pp. 51-52.
[2]Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 19992), pp. 99-100.
[3]Ysaye Maria Barnwell, "Spiritual," on Still on the Journey by Sweet Honey in the Rock (Redway, CA: EarthBeat! Records, 1993).
[4]Wislawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997 (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1998), p. 258.
[5]Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1997), p. 8.
[6]Muller, p. 79.