LOVE AFTER DEATH
by Forrest Church
Easter Sunday, April 20, 2003
The first Shakespearean soliloquy I ever had to memorize was mostly lost on me, Jacques’s eloquent, if grim, "Seven Ages of Man" from As You Like It.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.I was only in the second act back then:
. . . the whining school-boy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.Far too young to take to heart how the story ends–in
second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.But now I know, if Jacques is right, then Easter is a fairy tale.
My father was a politician, I am preacher, and my eldest son is an actor and aspiring chef. Being performers, the stage is an apt metaphor for each of our lives. By Shakespeare’s measure, however, it is no less apt for my grandfather, a small businessman, or his father, who weighed gold in the boom years following the gold rush. The stages on which they played their public lives (Church’s Sporting Goods Store, the Idaho State Assessor’s Office) were less public perhaps but no more intimate than the U. S. Senate chamber, All Souls Church, or the Williamstown Theater Festival. They too, in "their exits and entrances" played their parts as best they could, sometimes poorly, sometimes well.
An introvert, my grandfather loved nothing more than to sit by himself on the porch at night and blow smoke rings at the moon. Yet he also loved the festive town displays on the fourth of July, taking particular pride in having supplied the fireworks. My great-grandfather went West as a young man to Idaho from Maine to seek his fortune. He spent his professional life counting other people's money. He also watched them lose it. The five of us each have a story, beginning as all stories do with a birth and ending with a name chiseled into stone, the name we share: Frank Forrester Church. Beneath our name, the story of our life unfolds during that little dash between dates on the marquis of our final resting-place.
When our play is ended, it becomes evident how unique each of our stories is, how rich in specific character and plot. The French feminist and social philosopher Simone de Beauvoir recognized this clearly when her mother died. As the parish priest intoned her mother’s name at its appointed place in the liturgy of the funeral mass, "Emotion seized me by the throat," she writes. "’Francoise de Beauvoir’: the words brought her to life; they summed up her history, from birth to marriage to widowhood to the grave. Francoise de Beauvoir–that retiring woman, so rarely named, became an important woman."
By my definition, religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. Knowing we must die, we question what life means. Final answers may elude us, but by living the questions, we create and discover meaning where we can. Every year about this time, Easter invites us to live the questions. Is oblivion life’s goal or is resurrection? Unlike Jacques, though, with him, taking it poetically, I opt for the latter. Our lives will prove worth dying for only if something remains to mark our sojourn here after we have gone. However you read it’s runes, Easter makes this promise: Love remains. As my five-year old son, Frank, said to comfort me, when my fifty-nine-year old father, Frank, died, "God is not the only one who lives forever, Daddy. Love lives forever too." Resurrection or not—and I don’t believe that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead—every Easter sermon could be titled, "Love after Death."
In the Christian liturgical calendar, Easter is the eternal Epilogue to the greatest story ever told, "Jesus the Carpenter’s Son." Two thousand years after his curtain fell, more people view their own life’s meaning by the light of this story than by any other. Yet, it is a story without any of the markings by which the world measures success. No riches. No earthly power. Not to mention that the hero dies young, branded a criminal, nailed to a cross. In light of his own story, almost every time Jesus’ name is uttered by the powers and principalities of Christendom, irony is elevated to paradox. We fight wars in the name of the Prince of Peace. True believers in the one who told the rich man that, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, he must sell all that he has and give it to the poor, amass riches. Prelates and priests dedicate bejeweled altars to him who cast the money changers out from the temple. In its two millennia old retelling, the gospel of Jesus reads more like a fractured fairy tale than a reverent representation of eternal reward and saving grace. We Unitarians and Universalists may long ago have changed the words to Jesus’ hymn, but the potentates of Christendom have done us one better: They’ve changed its tune.
We still must ask ourselves why we are here this morning–here instead of an orthodox church to witness Jesus’s resurrection or–and more likely given the patinas of skepticism that enamel our minds–home in our pajamas drinking a Bloody Mary and reading the New York Times? Is it to pray for Spring, sympathetically invoked by flowered patterns and pastels? I truly hope not. One thing I can say with some confidence is that we are not flowers.
Helping to keep us honest, this year Spring and Easter Week have only begrudgingly cooperated with one another. Theology aside, we should welcome the wild shifts in weather. They gave us something to wonder at that doesn't really matter. Something for hawks and doves to commiserate over with full mutual sympathy, as we shiver through the streets or shake out our wings in lobbies and elevators.
But Easter brings us back to a deeper place of meeting. We are not perennials, whose death, when it comes, is only apparent, not truly real. Our departed loved ones don’t burst forth in remembered splendor at the sun’s urging, brushing our tears away, telling us that everything is fine again. That is not what the greatest story ever told is about. It is about real death, death that could destroy all meaning, but doesn’t. Jesus really dies. And then he lives again, reborn, made new, not in his earthy body but in divine form, free of all exigency, eternal, immortal. This is neither a fairy tale, nor a fractured fairy tale. It is the universal story of love after death.
The story begins in the scriptures themselves. Jesus lives on in Peter’s heart. And then in the mind of Doubting Thomas. He saves the Apostle Paul, who never met him in the flesh. I don’t take the resurrection story literally. Taken literally, the gospel narrative is almost crude, a cheap magic trick that has been kept alive by slight of hand and human credulity for two millennia. Yet, taken to heart, it can save even those of us who will never be able to sign our names on a doctrinal dotted line. God is love. And love is where the heart is. Meaning simply—as a fallen, once prideful poet wrote—"What we love remains, the rest is dross." (Ezra Pound)
The ancients remind us never to judge a person’s life a success or failure until it is over. How did Jesus judge his own life as he hung there on the cross? "It is finished," he cried. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He almost never quoted scripture, but here we find Jesus, dying, quoting not the 23rd but the 22nd Psalm. Not, "I shall walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil for thou are with me," but "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me?" Forget about those comforting words that usher in the close of the 23rd Psalm, "My cup runneth over." Jesus moans, "I thirst."
Where in this drama is the bridge from one life to the next? Jesus crosses it when he says, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." For a moment in his agony, he thinks not about himself, but about others, and God is with him. The bridge is Love. Love before death. Love after death.
"How do we get to Heaven, Rabbi?" his disciples once asked him.
Jesus answer is remarkable. Not a word about theology. Nothing about belief. "Feed the hungry," he replies. "Clothe the naked, house the homeless, heal the sick, visit those who are in prison," Jesus replied.
When they ask him about keeping the commandments, Jesus, who more than once broke the letter of the law to serve its spirit, says to them: "Follow the two great commandments, which sum up all the law and the prophets: Love God with all your heart, mind and soul and love your neighbor as yourself."
"Who is my neighbor?" they ask.
"Whoever needs your love is your neighbor," he replies by way of a parable. "You must therefore love your enemy as well."
"But, how do we get to Heaven," they ask again, for salvation, not their neighbor, is foremost on their mind.
"Don’t say, ‘Lo, here," or ‘Lo, there,’ for the Kingdom of Heaven is in the very midst of you," Jesus reminds them surely for the thousandth time. "For heaven is where the heart is." According to Jesus, we enter Heaven not when we die but as we live, through the Gates of Love.
So don’t judge a life until it’s over. And then, judge it by love’s remains. Perhaps a spectacular Hail Mary pass will turn a lifetime of defeat into victory. I’ve seen it happen. But that is not what I am talking about here. More likely, things that once mattered more than they should have–all those illusions by which the world measures success–will, like blinders, fall away from before our eyes until we finally see clearly the tears of our loved ones and their gentle smiles. That is true redemption, life’s equation transfigured, our losses adjusted for, the balance sheet recalculated, failure forgiven, love the answer. When the end comes (and even before) we can then let go for dear life, knowing that we loved and were loved in turn, knowing that everything is well and shall be well. Don’t judge a person’s life until it’s over.
In their section entitled "A Nation Challenged," from September 18, 2001 to the last day of December that year, the New York Times published 1800 obituaries of men and women who died on 9/11. We are accustomed to reading obituaries of the famous and infamous. These were ordinary people, their lives both as alike and as unique as fingerprints. In our heightened appreciation for life’s preciousness and fragility, reading these obituaries we pondered our own. And what stood out? Do you remember? Not worldly success. Not the list of noted accomplishments that appear to give weight to more famous people’s lives. In almost every instance, what stood out was love given and received.
Scott M. McGovern:
Just before bedtime, Ms. McGovern said, her husband would pick up Alane, the older of their two daughters, wrap her in a blanket and walk out to the driveway of their house in Wyckoff, N. J. "Where are you going?" Ms. McGovern would ask them. Scott would whisper back, "We’re going to wish on a star."
Cora Hidalgo Holland:
"I loved my mother’s hands, her extensions of her soul," Nate Holland, now 19, said in eulogizing his mother. . . "She had hands like silken clay, forever soft and always warm. When I was a child she would tuck me into bed and run them through my hair as we talked until I could talk no more. I would drift into sleep as her fingers floated across my scalp. The second that she withdrew her hand I would awaken, her rhythmic lullaby ending, but I would still pretend to be asleep."
David S. Berry
"It was raining stunningly hard, and all the kids, of course, were running around the house naked," Mrs. Barry said. "David was running with them. Water was just coming down in buckets, and they remembered how it was coming down the gutter, like a faucet. In playing with the children there was no distraction," she said. "He was nowhere but right there in the moment, right there."
Christopher C. Amoroso
The other night, after Sophia Rose Amoroso had her bath, she looked at her tiny hands, wrinkled from the bath water, and told her mother, Jaime, "I have Daddy’s fingers." . . . She will [also] always have the letter he wrote her when she was 10 weeks old: "Sometimes it makes me cry, as I am overwhelmed by the joy I’ve been given by you and your mother. I want you to know that I consider myself the luckiest man to ever walk the face of this earth. If anything were to happen to me, I could honestly say I’ve known true love and happiness in my life."
Cynthia Motus-Wilson
"She was very caring," Mr. Wilson said. "A small woman, five-foot nothing. But a heart bigger than Alaska." . . . After her death, [her son and daughter] found a loving note from their mother attached to a life insurance policy and adorned with a drawing of a smiling face. She had highlighted her request that the two take care of each other.
You see what it’s all about, don’t you. It’s all about love.
And love doesn’t die. Michael Tucker’s obituary closes, "He was Michael, he was Mike, he was Tuck to his friends from school and he was Daddy, and he’s still making us smile." Patrice Braut’s friends endowed a scholarship "not for the best student, but for the most tenacious." Firefighter Michael Cammarata, left a letter of instructions for his brother to be opened in case of death. "No 1 on the list: ‘Take care of Jenna,’ (referring to his girlfriend of seven years.’ No. 2: ‘Don’t mourn me. This is the career I chose.’ No. 3: ‘Make my spirit live on.’" In a memorial service for his two brothers, Keith and Scott, Todd Coleman said, "I will try to live my life in a manner that will be worthy of their respect and admiration. . . Their memory reminds me that the world can be a wonderful place." On the day he was to die, George E. Spencer left a note for his wife on their kitchen counter: "Stop being critical of yourself," it said. "Enjoy life. Today is another day. Chance to live a little."
Love after death.
This is why we celebrate Easter. It’s really very simple. We celebrate Easter to remind ourselves of everything that matters. Jacques was wrong, you see. Jesus was right. Whatever happens to us after we die, life doesn’t end in oblivion. It continues in love, our own love, once given, everlasting. Read an obituary unadorned by pretense and your eyes will tell you what your heart already knows.
After death our bodies may be resurrected. Our souls may transmigrate or become part of the heavenly pleroma. We may join our loved ones in Heaven. Or we may return the constituent parts of our being to the earth from which it came and rest in eternal peace. About life after death, no one knows. But about love after death, we surely know. I learned this from my father, as he did from his father and grandfather before him. I learn it also from each of you. The one thing that can never be taken from this world, even by death, is the love we have given away before we die. Those fortunate enough to complete life’s seven acts may die sans teeth perhaps, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything but love. For love, I swear it, is immortal.
Let us unite our hearts in the spirit of prayer:
Dear God, thou who art greater than all and yet present in each, mystery of life’s mystery, power of life’s power, open our eyes this day, the one day we are surely given, to life’s transient beauty, and sanctify our hearts in Thine eternal blessing, that we may enter thy Kingdom, the realm of eternal love.
Amen. I love you. Happy Easter. And may God bless us all.