Roger Ray, D.Min.
"In music, one does not make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so the best conductors would be those that played the fastest and there would be composers who wrote only Finales.....it is a hoax, a terrible hoax. They made you miss everything. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end and we were supposed to get to that end, and the thing is to get to that end, success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead. But we miss the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance the whole way along."
Alan Watts, philosopher "On Life and Music"
One of our YouTube viewers in Florida wrote to me to ask: "I am elderly, how can I die peacefully without doctors, bright lights, and terrifying inner anxiety?" Progressives are in the business of reimagining what it means to be a spiritual person in a post-modern, scientific, information centered world but a world in which children are still born, people get married...or at least they want to where the law allows, and they still get sick and they die.
The church has historically been the gateway to life's transitions. We bless or baptize infants, confirm or baptize young people who are coming of age and we perform the rituals around marriage and death. And as the traditional gatekeepers of these events, pastors are usually a part of people's preparations for marriage or for death, during times of crisis and of great joy.
For most of modern history the church and its clergy have offered pretty standard and predictable answers to life's big questions. A great deal of that has been marked with humiliating hypocrisy. We threatened even little children with the fires of hell unless they believed and behaved in just the right way and yet promised the family of virtually every deceased person that heaven awaited their departed family member no matter what kind of moral monster they might really have been.
We have allowed only persons of the opposite sex to be united in holy matrimony and we told them that they are to remain together under all circumstances until they are parted by death, as if the Lord God Almighty had some kind of sick pleasure in seeing people remain for their entire lives in meaningless or even abusive relationships. I have felt nausea, standing in the chancel of a church asking people who are too young to know what they want to declare as their major in college to make a pledge to a living arrangement that cannot be questioned for the rest of their lives. You only have to see what they have selected to have tattooed on very visible parts of their bodies to realize that they are not mature enough to making permanent decisions!
We have, for centuries, held out the ephemeral promise of eternity in heaven and people have taken what solace they could from pretending to believe it while doing everything possible to avoid having to test the hypothesis by actually dying. Among the modern proverbs that I would have engraved in granite along our walls is this fundamental truth about progressive faith: We have exchanged false certainty for honest uncertainty.
Sure, traditional religion had a clear and firm answer to most of life's questions. The only problem is that we now realize that none of those answers were right, or at least they cannot be known with certainty. With great faith and conviction ancient Egyptian kings had their bodies prepared so that their physical remains would be revived in the next world. Thousands of years later their expertly preserved bodies are on display in museums all over the globe. Neither their faith nor their magic worked.
There may be life after death but if there is no one knows anything about it and the best speculations of our philosophers and the personal testimonies of those who claim in clinical death experiences to have seen heaven (why is it that none of those people ever report on having seen hell?) can offer any objective, testable or repeatable evidence about it. And so, while we cannot resist speculation and even hope when we are in the midst of grief for a deceased loved one, our desire cannot dictate the nature of the universe. Hope is a good thing. Self-deception is not, however, the mission of the church.
I attended the funeral of a teenaged girl who was the granddaughter of a friend. The girl and some other under-aged friends had taken a car joy riding in the country. None of them having a license or driving experience, the end of their excursion was tragic and fatal for this one young women. The family had no warning, no opportunity to even prepare for the horrifying news of the girl's death. The pastor who conducted the memorial was from a generally progressive denomination but she stood before the grieving family and confidently announced, "We do not grieve today because this young woman we have all loved is now enjoying a much better life in a much better place."
This is religious denial at its most heinously dishonest. It not only denies all known reality it also denies the family their sacred right to grieve. Some things in life are sad and we should not deny anyone their right to a full throated expression of their loss, their grief, and the anguish of their souls. Grief is the logical reaction to a life cut short by untimely death. What possible benefit is it for us to make the claim that the universe always balances the scales and makes every bad thing acceptable? In choosing honest uncertainty over false certainty, we do not complicate the horrible losses in life with the guilt of trying, but always at least partially failing, to make ourselves believe that we should not be sad lest we appear to be doubting God.
Progressive faith is about honesty and meaning. It is not our goal to take away spiritual comfort but to focus on the comfort of meaningful existence. As one modern proverb says: "Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin."
Traditional religion either specifically teaches or at least emphatically implies that the whole reason for existing is to attain to eternal reward and to avoid eternal punishment. The philosopher, Alan Watts, challenges that view with the simple observation that we do not sing a song in order to come to its end.
By emphasizing the after-life, we devalue life itself. By telling young couples that there is an implied ultimate goal to marriage which is to avoid getting divorced at all costs, undermines the value of a day to day shared life.
Watts specifically bemoans the message that we send to our young people that implies that the goal of education is graduation. You get a degree so that you can get a better job because, somehow, happiness is found in career success.
This, he flatly says, is a hoax and a terrible one at that. As a professor, I get to stand in front of a room full of students who have come to study the subject that I have found to be so very interesting that I have devoted my life to the study of it. Even after two decades of teaching, I still engage in the fantasy that this semester I am going to encounter students who will share my enthusiasm for the study of religion and ethics. Mostly, however, I encounter young adults who have bought into the hoax. What they often want from me is three hours of college credit with a good grade for the least amount of bother possible.
I wish that I could award each student an "A" on the first day of class and then spend the rest of the semester actually engaged in active learning though I fear that I might end up spending a lot of time alone and I'm nearly certain that my university would cease assigning me classes. What Watts is trying to say to college students and to the rest of us by extension is that we should live life to its fullest and find both meaning and joy in it as we go. We do not live our lives so that we may arrive safely at the grave. The late journalist, Hunter Thompson said it quite eloquently: "Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up..."
Indeed, the only real answer to the reality of our mortality is to live as meaningfully as possible so that we may come to the time of our death as peacefully as possible. This is not, however a matter of choosing reality over superstition. It is also a choice of the present moment over anxiously living for an unknown future.
Buddhism teaches detachment while acknowledging that everything is connected.
That is, we are a part of the universe. We are connected to every living thing and to ever race of humanity but suffering, anxiety, anguish comes from wanting to own, to hold onto anything or even to our own existence. The mortality rate is 100% and as threatening as that reality can be, as soon as we accept that reality, it ceases to have so much power over us.
Should I ever marry again, I will hope that it is a relationship that will remain meaningfully intact as long as we both shall live. I will work and sacrifice to make that come true. I would not, however, remain in an unhealthy relationship beyond the reasonable point of becoming healthy just to avoid religious guilt or the public shame of failing in marriage. Religious condemnation is almost always neurotic. We need to celebrate love and promote healthy relationships, not forge chains to keep people in misery or abuse.
As I have grown older, my doctor begins to try to push me into ever more frequent and expensive medical tests to make sure that I do not have some undetected threat to my longevity. I try to be a good patient and cooperate within reason but I recently assured him that, "I am not afraid of death." My physician is an evangelical and the son of an evangelical pastor. He looked at me and with an expression of shock, said, "I never hear that. Most of my patients are in their 80's and they want me to do everything possible to make sure that they do not die. I never hear from any of them that they are not afraid of death." I think that is sad.
I could protect myself from any exposure to divorce by never allowing myself to fall in love again but that seems like a very bad way to approach human relationships. Life is a gift. Why would we squander the years of our lives trying to find some divine life-insurance that would promise us eternal resuscitation but never be able to put that product up for examination?
As odd as what I am saying will sound in the ears of traditional Christians, it is neither a new insight nor in any way unique to modern thinkers. Among the most ancient of our shared scriptures are the musings of the philosopher who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes. In chapter 8 the teacher advises:
8No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death; ....
15So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun.
I always felt that my very puritan mother was suspicious of anything that might make one happy. Her religion taught her to live in absolute rejection of all forms of pleasure in order to gain a place in heaven. I think that is a bad bet.
Buddhist monks practice keeping a smile on their faces as a gift that they give to the world. Even when discussing very serious things, they attempt, as an offering to others, to maintain a very cheery appearance which, frankly, can deny even death the ability to extort misery out of us ahead of its time. I think that the writer of Ecclesiastes is right. We will die one day and we cannot change that fact so between now and then we should attempt to do what we can to make the world a better place, adding meaning to every day we have, and we should dance our way through the living of our lives, not rushing to the end of the song.
This is not a matter of denial but rather it is a matter of defiance. We will not let mortality rob us of life while we are living, nor will we allow the prospect of personal failure keep us from throwing our arms open to the potential of love, joy and success.
The most popular early teacher of Buddhism in the United States was the very colorful monk, Trungpa Rinpoche. I will end this chapter quoting what he often demanded of his American audiences: "You cheer up. You cheer up right now."
