Maturing Mortality
By Charles Rush
October 27, 2013
Deuteronomy 30: 18 ff and Hebrews 12: 1-2
[ Audio
(mp3, 7.6Mb) ]
turn this week to Halloween, the ancient celebration from Northern Europe, that remembers we are entering the dark half of the year. It is more dramatic the farther north you go. In the village in Scotland where I served, I was told that for most of the winter, the sun doesn't really rise until closer to 9 a.m. and it starts to set closer to 3 p.m. and that in the middle of the winter, the sun doesn't really rise that high in the sky. It is probably the case that our Northern European ancestors overplayed the role of death in our lives as anyone whose followed Ingmar Bergman films is keenly aware. But, some reflection on mortality helps us frame what is important.
My fraternity
brothers got on the subject of rites of passage from childhood to becoming an
adult, reflecting on our son's lives and how they differed from our own. It was
interested to discover that our experience with death played a bigger role than
I would have expected. One of them shared a story typical of our generation that
when he was about 12 he was just itching to fire one of his uncles Browning
shotguns, not just at aluminum cans but something alive. They were just so
beautiful and boys just want to shoot guns. He pleaded and pleaded. The day
finally comes when geese are on the pond at his grandfather's place in New
Hampshire, generally considered to be rats of the air, so his uncle loads the
gun for him and watches him creep up. As the geese take flight he fires, and
the big bird folded like a 747 hitting the water. The rest of the geese scatter
but the mate of the fallen goose circled high above the pond and it was
squawking in terror, in mourning, in shock. Even though the other geese flow
off, this one kept circling overhead. He had this initial moment of such
accomplishment and prowess in front of his uncle, followed immediately by
anguish and haunting. It was a sacred transgression of sorts, his first
overwhelming sense of responsibility and sadness. He turned back towards the
house fearful. That is when he realized his grandfather had been standing
behind him the whole time, taking it all in silently. He remarked that every
few years, he reflects on that again, usually about this time of year when the
fall in New England turns towards winter. Death in the cycle of nature forces
us toward those kind of reflections.
I read an
article a hospice nurse wrote on caring for patients at the very end of their
life, when they know that they are going to die and they have to go through a
process of summing up the meaning of their life in the face of coming to grips
with their own death.
The good news is that she reports that every single person she has worked with
so far, has actually come to terms with their dying.[i]
But part of that
process is reflecting at some point on what they regret. If you knew that you
only had 6 more months to live what it is about your life that you would regret
not having done? What is it that you would have regretted making a priority
that you wish you could have changed. She listed the 5
most common things that she's heard which I'm going to condense to 3.
It turns out, almost all men say that they regret working so much.
They regret that climbing the ladder took them away from a deeper involvement
in their families lives. They regret that they spent
so much time in what seems like it was a treadmill. They regret that they spent
so much energy and life force clicking through a ‘to do' list. In retrospect
most of that didn't feel like living. It felt like monotony and checking off a
list of responsibilities, responsibilities that came from somewhere else, that
were sort of imposed. Being good girls and boys they accepted those, dutifully
fulfilled them, but they weren't joyful or fulfilling or personal.
Of course, most
of the people that she would have been talking to lived their careers in the
50's, 60's and 70's. They had been drafted and had that Army experience where
one size fits all. It was the era of big corporate American structure with IBM,
GM, and AT&T leading the way. As a child, what I remember is white shirts, suits, Windsor knotted ties, and wing tip shoes, a kind of
sea of sameness. It was the era that gave us books like “The Organization Man”
that described the corporate culture of efficient, rational design. It gave us
movies like “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”.
It was a culture
easy to critique which is what happened in the 60's and 70's when people broke
out of the structure to find their own way, to express themselves, to break
through the boundaries but then these people became parents and they decided
that structure was good because they hadn't really found themselves, they had
just become confused, they hadn't really created their own new reality, they
had just wasted years of their lives. So we've given these last two generations
of kids as much structure as any period of American history.
This month the
Atlantic Monthly has a few articles devoted to how our lives have become
over-scheduled, goal driven, with veritably no free time or creative time or
down time. One of them featured a Dad in Manhattan that decided to do his 8th
grade homework for a week and he discovered that he was up every night til close to midnight, getting grumpier and more cross as
the days wore on. It is all leading up to the
challenge of that college application and I get to read these being on a
scholarship committee and writing character recommendations. I get these
resumes from students that not only have all these AP courses, sports
involvements, theater, service and leadership in service… Structure,
structure, and more structure.
Perhaps you saw
the cartoon in the New Yorker this week that featured a couple about my age
dropping their kid off at college. The kid is lugging his gear through an arch
that leads towards freedom. His Mom is smiling and waving a fond farewell to
junior. And his Dad is saying “Be afraid to try new things!” We know what is
best for you, to bad we couldn't figure out earlier
what was best for us.
It is the path
to responsible, bill paying, educated… Nothing wrong with it, it is a worthy
goal at least for my children. But spiritually speaking, we know that there is
something much more, something important in us that wants
to be borne. It is our calling, our vocation to become who we are meant to be.
We know it, we faintly recognize it because it comes
to us in our dream life. We can make compromises between safety and our dreams
and we usually do because we don't trust ourselves most of the time. We usually
aren't confident to sing with our inner voice in public which is one of the
things that make our spouses and good friends so wonderful when they encourage
us to find that inner voice and sing with it. I think that is what made Susan
Boyle a Youtube sensation. She was a living metaphor
for every one of us. She had this raw talent that was inside of her and it was
surrounded by a quirky personality, anxious habits and a goofy appearance.
She finally
shows up, well into mid-life, never having had the guts to live her dream for
all these obvious reasons. At first, she is nothing but goofy and embarrassing,
just like we are all afraid we will be when a moment comes for us to try to
present the gift God gave us.
[Roll Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk]
There is
something intrinsically beautiful and fulfilling about finding your own voice
and living your life, not someone else's. It takes us many years, sometimes
many failures trying to be someone we are not, and then magically almost we
take the permission that others give us to be ourselves. It is like rounding a
corner and heading for home.
And the second
thing that people most often regretted was letting friendships atrophy not
paying enough attention to people that were really
close to them. They regretted not really giving deeply enough of themselves
emotionally so that their relationships were not as intimate and fulfilling as
they wanted them to be. So at the end of their lives, looking back, they wish that
they had loved more deeply. What they are wishing is that they had a deeper
drink of life. They not only want to fall in love, they want to resonate love in all parts of their being.
We humans are
inextricably social. We are most profoundly shaped and able to shape others by
our love. It is the gift that keeps on giving. If we are lucky enough to spread
a lot of love around, we just might get to see it grow and flourish and watch
this ripple effect of all these people finding blooming and flourishing around
us. It turns out that is one of the most intrinsically fulfilling things that
can happen to us.
Professor Martin
Seligman almost accidentally discovered this through an experiment that he set
up at the University of Pennsylvania with his overly intellectual, overly
sophisticated Ivy league undergraduates. He had a
course where he asked his students to write a letter to someone in their lives
that had blessed them when they were younger, someone who had been a very
positive influence on their lives and left a substantial imprint on them.
The students
wrote their notes. Professor Seligman read them. Many were very moving, some
profoundly so. He decided to add one more piece to it. He asked a couple of
them if they would invite the person they had written about to class and they
did. And once they were there, he had the student and the person they wrote
about sit in the front of the class. Then he had the student read their piece
aloud to the person that had blessed them. Then he gave the person who had just heard this piece a chance to
respond. He had them wade into the stream of meaning in their lives and allow
themselves to be filled with elixir of gratitude.
It is literally
the antidote to cynicism and jadedness. It opens people and blooms them. And
for those who receive the gratitude for having loved other people and believed
in them so they could bloom, it is your personal lifetime achievement award. It
is a reminder of the difference that you have made. And we don't have to have
thousands of people that we have loved, but if we can love a few, if we can
positively influence a few in a deep and meaningful way that will live after
us, then a critical part of our personal fulfillment will have been reached.
Jesus summed up his teaching in the gospel of John saying “A new commandment I
give you that you love one another. As I have loved you, so I hope you will
love one another” (John 13).
Professor
Seligman couldn't measure Jesus saying, so it didn't make it into his paper.
But what he could measure is that more people wanted to sign up to read their
papers to someone that had blessed them than any experiment that they had
developed so far on practicing meaning and happiness.
And the last
thing that people regretted was that they didn't let themselves find more
happiness during their lives. Looking back, they said that they spent way too
much time being frustrated by other people, way too much time being angry and
stewing in their anger, way too much time being annoyed at what wasn't working
in their lives.
At the very end,
when the primacy of love was the emotional oxygen that they needed to breath
immediately. At the very end of their lives, when they were palpably aware of
what was meaningful to them and how love and gratitude were the spiritual mode
that gave them life, they realized how much of their lives could have been
happier if they had chosen to focus on that earlier than they did.
And our research
on the subject of human fulfillment has born this out. It turns out that money
does not substantially move us, although it does for a while, especially if you
move out of poverty and into normal stasis or survival. But, we adjust quickly
and develop new levels of expectation and after the minimum has been met, our
material standard of living does not impact of meaningful contentedness very
much or for very long…
Curiously, it
turns out that even outside conditions don't have the impact that you might
think they would. If you happen to live in a world where a number of very good
breaks roll your way, like living in a prosperous society or if you manage to
thread through the minefield of accidents that happen around you, it doesn't
make a huge difference in how fulfilled and meaningful your life is. In a real
sense, happiness is a choice that you make. It is not that you wake up every
day and decide to be in a good mood because that is not real fulfillment to
begin with.
It is more that
you begin your day in the fundamental spiritual disposition of gratitude. That
is why my wife makes me stop periodically at the beginning of the day or at the
end of the day, and pray with her. As Psalm 104 says, “Bless the Lord O My
Soul, bless the Lord and forget not his benefits… Remember the wonders that he
has done and the gracious gifts that are your life”.
We start and end
our spiritual lives in gratitude. And as we do, we invoke the Spirit of love,
the spirit of God in our lives, to fill us and bless those around us. In that
sense, choosing to live the life of love is a choice. In good seasons, in bad
seasons, we are there for each other and that is what makes our live worth
living. That is what gives us peace.
I hope for you
that you won't leave any gas in the tank by the end of your life. I hope that
you expend all of the love that you could potentially live and that you are
sputtering towards the finish line with nothing more to burn. I hope you have
that sense that the life that you leave behind is sacred. I hope you know that
the people you loved, you healed and made holy. I hope you find what is real.
So, it is
appropriate on a day like this that we close with a hymn, remembering the
generations that have come before us in this place, a full 111 years to be
exact. They love that they shared spilled over and blessed the generation after
them and blessed the generation after them and blessed the generation after
them… and here we are today… We are blessed by the humane and holy love of
people that didn't even know us and made possible this sacred space, this
beloved community that will nourish us and sustain us through the good times
and the bad. During the singing of the last hymn, I'm going to ask if you would
make your way to the sides of the church and we are going to close by forming
one large circle and gather as one unbroken circle. And as we do, I want you to
remember, “Seeing as how we are compassed about by so great a cloud of
witnesses, let us lay aside every anxiety and nervous worry that clings to us
so closely, and let us run the race of our lives with purpose, looking to Jesus
the pioneer and perfecter of our faith…”
