“In this Life”

“In this Life”         Dec. 29, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray

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                      Martin Hägglund, This Life, p. 2

The sense of finitude – the sense of the ultimate fragility of everything we care about - is the at the heart of what I call secular faith. To have secular faith is to be devoted to a life that will end, to be dedicated to projects that can fail or break down. Ranging from the concrete (how we approach funerals) to the general (what makes a life worth living), I will show how secular faith expresses itself in the ways we mourn our loved ones, make commitments, and care about a sustainable world. I call it secular faith because it is devoted to a form of life that is bounded by time. In accordance with the meaning of the Latin word saecularis, to have secular faith is to be dedicated to persons or projects that are worldly and temporal. Secular faith is the form of faith that we all sustain in caring for someone or something that is vulnerable to loss. 

                        

The former Harvard professor and partner to Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, passed away this week. After spending some time in Leary’s experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, Alpert had a falling out with Leary. He was fired from Harvard for giving drugs to an undergraduate student so he then chose to find his high’s elsewhere, specifically, he went to India to study Hinduism. Out of that emersion in eastern faith, he renamed himself Ram Dass and returned to the United States to become a spiritual teacher and writer. 

He became very popular with the kind of people who seem to like that sort of thing, and I don’t want to unnecessarily throw shade on him, but most of what he said looked to me like word salad . . . as if, maybe, he had not entirely given up on his use of psychedelic drugs.  Some of his teachings seem to be loving, kind, and life affirming . . . not too challenging but nice, like a spoon full of honey in a cup of hot tea. As my father used to say, “Even a blind hog finds and acorn now and then.” 

But a lot of what this sort of pseudo-spirituality offers is important sounding words that don’t really mean anything. The most fundamental anxiety that has cursed human beings since we became conscious is our awareness that we are mortal. In the face of this huge issue, Alpert says, “The ego is frightened by death, because it is a part of the incarnation that ends with it. That is why we learn to identify with our soul, as the soul continues after death. For the soul, death is just another moment.”            

For saying things like this, thousands of people were willing to portray him as being some kind of spiritual savant, a Buddha if not, indeed, a Christ. But what is he talking about? What is a soul. Where is it? What is it made of? Where does it go when that “moment” of death arrives? Do only humans have souls or is it true that “all dogs go to heaven?” And why just humans and dogs?

The reason why mice are used in drug experiments is because humans and mice share 85% the same DNA. For that matter, we share 65% of the same DNA as a fruit fly. Do mice and fruit flies have souls. And if you will bear with me, it is 

also true that we share 50% of the DNA found in a banana. Do bananas have souls? What about corn, or trees, or grass?

Are Veggie Tales an animated children’s religious education series or is it, Ram Dass style, a factual documentary on the religious life of salads?

The whole schtick of these pseudo-spiritual teachers is to tell people what they want to believe and then to try to make it seem plausible. Yes, the ego fears death because it is difficult for us to image that the universe would dare to go on without us. Narcissistically, we hold onto an entirely unverified and implausible certainty that while we may have had a beginning in the backseat of a 1950’s Chevy, our essence now has no end. 

C. S. Lewis fairly cleverly works the whole journey from this world into the next in his seven-part children’s series, The Narnia Chronicles. You see attempts at making it seem believable in Robin William’s movie, “What Dreams May Come?” and great authors, no less than M. Scott Peck and Bishop John Shelby Spong have written speculative pieces about what form eternity might take. In each case, the argument seems to be especially disappointingly hollow, and, if anything, to erode the credibility of the authors. 

These are all efforts at comforting us in the face of the fear of our mortality, but does anyone really believe it? I have personally witnessed the most ardently religious people fighting against death, willing to undergo the most extreme of medical procedures to wring just a few more days of life out of their mortal coil. Western religions have all claimed to have a product to sell that is the ultimate cure for mortality and no matter how elaborately we decorate our cathedrals and our coffins, it is always a kind of whistling past the graveyard, figuratively and literally. 

I have lately been quite taken with the work of the Swedish philosopher, Martin Hägglund, who persuasively argues in his book, “This Life,” that mortality is not what takes meaning out of life but rather what gives our existence worth and purpose. 

He says, “Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal.” I hope this is self-evident, but if life were to go on indefinitely, then nothing we say or do really matters. Saving the earth loses any meaning. Preventing deaths, whether by wars or by disease, is equally meaningless. There is always a tomorrow, and a tomorrow, and an infinite line of tomorrows, which makes today virtually worthless. 

A recent issue of the U.S. Catholic dared to ask the question, “Will heaven be boring?” And they tried to persuasively say, “no,” suggesting that we will always have work to do, eternal activity for eternal social concerns. M. Scott Peck tried to make that argument as well but to my reading, he basically described heaven as an eternal committee meeting, and I have spent most of my adult life trying to avoid committee meetings. 

Mark Twain was telling a joke when he observed that most people can barely endure an hour in church on Sunday mornings and yet they expect to joyfully sing hymns and basically be in church for all of eternity. 

But seriously, even if it were real, who could endure it? 

Hägglund says, “Instead of lamenting the absence of eternity, we should acknowledge the commitment to finite life as a condition for anything to be at stake and for anyone to lead a free life.” It is similar to the story of Midas who was so greedy for gold that he begged the gods to give him the power to turn anything he touched into gold. It is not simply that he tragically turned his daughter into gold when he thoughtlessly touched her, or that he starved to death because he could not touch food without turning it into gold. 

It is that gold has value because it is rare. If gold is abundant, it is boring and inconvenient. If you are a meat eater, and evidently, I am, sitting down to a nice steak is a real treat, but if I were to be obliged to sit down to eat a cow, that would quickly turn into torture, and when we talk about eternity, an infinity of days, it would be more than eating a cow, or a herd of cows, or even all of the cows in the world…. It would be like eating an infinity of cows. . . . the absurdity of which immediately becomes obvious, even to a guy who has an appetite like mine!

Life has meaning only because it is finite. Our mortality is what makes life precious, even sacred. Today is important because we have a limited number of todays.

Twenty years ago, I outlined a novel that I have not yet managed to write. The main character of my novel is a philosophy professor who has received a terminal cancer diagnosis. As he realizes that he only has one more semester in which to say everything he ever wanted to say, then every lecture must, of necessity, be an attempt to articulate the most important, the most profound, the most necessary things. 

I have grown old, working on other books and other things, while that novel has been waiting to be written. Now, however, as a senior citizen, I have come to the existential awareness that I am now basically living my novel. I may have more than one or two semesters left in me, but after 41 years of preaching, I realize that the number of times that I will have the opportunity to tell a gathered audience what I think is a whole lot smaller than it was when I outlined that novel. For me, for you, for all of us, our time may be longer or shorter, but it is not infinite and the brevity of life should inspire us to make every day meaningful.

Now, I do not want to be flip about this topic. I know that people invented a belief in a soul and an afterlife, not just to give people like Ram Dass an income but because belief in an afterlife is a solution to two urgent human problems . . . the fear of death and the grief that we experience about the death of others. 

Before I ever preached my first sermon as a pastor, I preached my first funeral. I was 22 years old and the U-Haul was in the driveway of the parsonage of my first church and the funeral director drove over to the parsonage and told me to put on a black suit and follow him. Since that day in 1978, I have had to help survivors cope with the grief of loss in hundreds if not more than a thousand funerals. The services attached to untimely deaths were the most painful and therefore the most memorable . . . infant deaths, car accidents, domestic murders, and suicides are all still nauseatingly with me, I can still feel every one of them, and there have been many. You don’t have to explain to me why we have needed a heaven in order to not be crushed by grief. 

Now that we are not confined to the limitations of a single congregation, because we have an internet congregation that numbers in the thousands, it is a rare week when I am not called upon by someone, from California to New York to Great Britain or Australia, to comfort them by assuring me that life goes on after death. I do not doubt that such requests motivated Bishop Spong and M. Scott Peck to write their books that held out some thin and unknowable hope . . . but if you turn to me for anything other than an honest answer, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. 

Rather than inventing an imaginary afterlife, I believe that people of faith have honest and meaningful things to do to address mortality. Let me give you a short list:

Because life is finite and therefore precious, we must expand healthcare to include everyone to stop the senseless and needless suffering and premature deaths of tens of thousands of people every year. And if you are one of those people who argue against universal health care because you have healthcare and you want to keep in place a system that either prices or outright excludes millions of others then you better hope that I am right about there not being an afterlife because you know that if there is you are going to go to hell. If you are so selfish that you are willing to preserve a system that has a casualty count in the tens of thousands just because you like what you have, then you know that you belong in hell. 

         And secondly, we need to take the profit motive out of healthcare and make the point of healthcare taking care of people’s health. Most people die of either heart disease or cancer and a growing number suffer from various forms of dementia. So, spend money on research on those things that are killing people . . . besides, we have plenty of ED pills and cosmetic surgery options already. 

And because life is sacred, we need to decriminalize drug addiction and start treating it as what it is, an illness and not a crime. 60,000 opioid overdose deaths a year and we keep building prisons? How much longer until we admit that criminalizing addiction causes addiction and treatment actually addresses the problem?

And fourth, (Moses got 10 and I’m just staking out my lane here) rather than subsidizing the crops that kill us: wheat, soy, corn, rice, and sugar cane, subsidize clean water projects and restore family farms by supporting the production of fruits and green vegetables. . . because life is precious.

And with 15,000 tot 20,000 suicides per year, if you want more life, can’t we see that we need to provide adequate mental health care so that people can see a better option than causing their own deaths?

And on a sadly related front, we must outlaw or strictly control the sale and ownership of assault rifles and handguns. More than 40,000 deaths a year now and more than 100,000 more gun shot injuries. Anyone who claims that this is acceptable because they like having guns…. You like a product that has killed a million Americans in the last generation and wounded 2.5 million and so you don’t want to give them up? You need to rewind to what I said about those who oppose universal healthcare because there is no moral justification for America’s lethal gun addiction. Hell is surely big enough to deal with the narcissistic egos of those who want to keep their guns in light of the river of blood that has been spilled.

And we have to make it possible for people to work their way out of the misery of poverty. We had serfs and lords, then we had slaves and masters, now we have the minimum wage and business owners. Surely it is time for us to pay everyone who works enough to also have a decent life. If the success of your business is dependent upon the impoverishment of your employees, then we don’t need your business. Sorry, having a classed society of serves, slaves, or the working poor is not acceptable because life is short, and it is sacred.

After drugs and guns, the largest cause of death other than illnesses is car accidents. We have made cars and road safer but only by degrees. We need safe, efficient, and non-polluting mass transit. The technology exists and the moral excuses for not building it have all expired. 

Number nine is this: through pollution and putting toxins in our food, our water, and our air we are shortening human lives and making the planet uninhabitable. Nothing short of a war time scale of a green new deal can be considered. We are literally poisoning ourselves as if we were going to live forever and that neither our bodies or our planet matters . . . that is clearly not true and it is time for us to act on what is true and get our heads out of the clouds. 

Finally, just as we managed to wipe out polio and other  plagues, we need to concentrate efforts on stemming the spread of or wiping out altogether, HIV, malaria, and other communicable lethal diseases because illness that shorten the lives of people on other continents destabilizes the world and threatens all of us. 

Now, some of you may think that I am wrong about all of this. I can only invite you to pay attention to my sermon on logical probability next month on January 26.  Between now and then, you might want to chew on Bayes Theorem a bit:

I know it seems complicated.

This may help but, spoiler alert, the bottom line is that I am probably right. Or, at least, it pleases me to think so. 

But, if what you really want from your source for spiritual insight is lies that make you feel good, you can still find Ram Dass on YouTube.