The Emperor of Ice Cream

June 5, 2022 Dr. Roger Ray Click this link to see the video One of my all-time favorite movies, one that I have forced most of my friends to watch with me more than once, is the 2005 film, Constantine, in which Keanu Reeves plays a rather complicated and difficult exorcist, trapped in the middle of a battle between heaven and hell. It is theologically rife with a combination of voodoo and Catholic myth, but I love it. But you shouldn’t assume that it has anything to do with the leading actor’s personal beliefs. On the Tonight show, a couple of years ago, Stephen Colbert asked Reeves, “What happens when you die?” His answer left Colbert speechless for a full ten seconds. Reeves says simply, "I know that the ones who love us will miss us." Which is a kinder way of expressing the rather flat-footed quote from the fallen comedian, Louis C. K., who said, “Lots of things happen after you die – they just don’t involve you.” Religious people are often shocked by such frank acknowledgments of our mortality. It is no wonder, since most of us have been spoon fed a “pie-in-the-sky” theology all of our lives. Even more progressive churches of past generations, passively repeated the grand bargain that says that if you endure enough church services, pray enough, and pay enough, if you can be good enough and avoid egregious sins, then, when you die, you immortal soul will not be tormented in hell and you may, in fact, enjoy eternal reward. We have been so trained in that kind of “carrot and stick” theology that we can hardly imagine being religious without having accepted the premise of the bargain. Sure, there is a lot of talk about “loving God,” and “loving the Lord,” but there is very little love in this equation. There is fear and there is greed, but I don’t see much love. I did my doctoral dissertation on monastic spirituality. I spent a lot of time in Trappist and Jesuit monasteries and I was deeply immersed in the literature of the historical monastic movements: The Rule of St. Benedict, The Cloud of Unknowing, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, The Imitation of Christ, and the whole body of books by the 20th century monastic, Thomas Merton. But it was the 16th century Spanish monk, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, who spelled out the grand bargain most clearly: “Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.” In his famous book, The Spiritual Exercises, he encourages prospective monks to “Consider also the innumerable others who have gone to hell for fewer sins than (you) have committed.” For centuries, the church successfully made millions of people afraid of going to hell, and just stated that they would live for eternity, either in bliss or in torment, based on how well they had “praised, reverenced, and served God” without ever giving the slightest bit of evidence that anyone has a soul or that either heaven or hell existed. It was the biggest “the emperor has no clothes” scheme in history and yet, very few people have been willing to say out loud what is obviously true. As my homiletics professor, David Buttrick, regularly reminded us, the mortality rate is 100%. And he was a man who really wanted to believe in life after death. He told us that he took a year off after his young son died to read everything he could find about the afterlife and, he said, he found that it was all just wishful thinking with no real substance. A fairy-tale we tell ourselves to take the edge off of our grief but no matter how many million people have been told by some pious prick, “You should be happy for your son, he is in a much better place now,” I doubt that anyone actually believed it. His son’s “better place” was at the dinner table with his mom and dad, playing baseball in the backyard with the other neighborhood kids. Lying about grief may help some people but, I think, for most of us, it is just an insult to the memory of someone we loved very much. It seems to be more respectful to simply acknowledge, as Keanu Reeves says, that we miss them very much, and not try to dismiss our grief with an obvious lie. I love the Wallace Stevens poem, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, but I have always found it odd that scholars and students spend so much time debating what it might mean. One English professor says, while there are some lines that are impossible to comprehend, that it is probably about a wake in the Caribbean where the tradition is to serve sweets to those who come to view the body and sit with the family. Honestly, I wonder if it is difficult to understand because we just don’t want to acknowledge that the only emperor, the only real authority in life, is death. The mortality rate is 100%. Stevens’ poem is full of images of things that are temporary. He says: Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers. See, everything in the verse is an image of something that has a very short life. A cigar is finished in minutes. If you ever had the pleasure of eating home made ice cream, the only kind available generations ago before ice cream became a grocery store item. I remember those hot, humid Kentucky summer days of my youth, before air conditioning, when my dad and my older brother would take turns cranking the handle of the ice cream maker, packing chipped ice and Epsom salt around the metal cylinder in the bucket, getting the contents cold enough to freeze. But when all of the labor was done, and mom gave us all a little bowl of the frozen curds, you could literally watch it turning back into a milky soup right before your eyes. We worked so long to make it and it had to be eaten quickly or it just melted away. And the verse mentions cut flowers, which begin to wilt almost as soon as they are cut, wrapped in, not just yesterday’s newspaper, but last month’s newspaper… and item that is already dead and gone, good only to wrap up a fish or cut flowers. All things that had only a short life. And the poet utters the refrain: Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Stevens is asking us to just accept it, don’t try to deny it, don’t try to cover it up in flowery religious language. Because, the only emperor is the emperor of Ice-cream. I think that it is important for us to be aware that the current modern belief in life after death is not normative in all places at all times. In the early centuries of the Jewish religion, there was no belief in an afterlife. Even in the time of Jesus, as we see reflected in gospel accounts of the conflicts between competing Jewish sects, the Pharisees and Sadducees, there was sharp disagreement even then. Aristotle believed that life was somehow eternal, but he didn’t believe in individual immortality, more that your life force evaporates at death and is taken up into a cloud of life that rains down as trees, ducks, and people. And, as you know, there are various forms of incarnational eastern beliefs, but our western images of heaven and hell, associated with later Christianity, is not the norm. There have been critics of these issues all through the Christian era, but I believe that the 19th century German theologian, Ludwig Feuerbach, expressed it best in his book, 'Thoughts on Death and Immortality.' Sadly, because denying the existence of heaven and hell was so controversial, Feuerbach published it anonymously. I hate that there are thoughts that are censored even before they are aired. The late Scott Peck said, “Anything that cannot be questioned is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.” I realize that most Christians and Muslims, and many Jews and Buddhists would not agree with what I am saying today but they should at least allow me to say what I believe, just as I give them the liberty to be mistaken. It is, after all, only fair. Feuerbach makes the observation that I have tried so often to point out to my religious peers: there is no evidence, that is to say, none, zip, nada evidence for consciousness apart from a body. Engels and Marx read Feuerbach’s books and said, at the time, that his book Had a profoundly “liberating effect” on him and Marx by “breaking the spell” of the Hegelian system, and establishing the truths that human consciousness is the only consciousness or spirit that exists, and that it is dependent upon the physical existence of human beings as part of nature (Engels 1888: 12–13). One of the consistent complaints that I have with my own discipline, philosophy, is that philosophers give too much importance to thinking about the possible and not enough time thinking about the probable. Anyone can say that you cannot prove that there is no heaven or hell because, in all cases, you cannot prove a negative. You cannot prove that there are no unicorns in the world, but you can say that there is no evidence for their existence and in the absence of a reason to believe in unicorns, we need to acknowledge that the probability is very very low. While it may be, in some inexplicable way, possible for consciousness to exist apart from a body, there is no evidence for it and therefore, no reason to believe that it is the least bit probable. You can’t prove that I am not Spiderman but don’t jump off of a high building in any confidence that I am going to swing down and save you because, in all probability, that isn’t going to happen. Feuerbach, by the way, had nothing to say about Spiderman. I realize that if this is the first time that you are hearing a minister say that there is no heaven or hell that it might be unsettling. It is hard to hear something that is contrary to what you have always believed and on which you have staked a whole lot of your religious faith and assumptions about existence. This is huge, and such a change is not easy; most people won’t do it, and if you do, your first feeling is a feeling of loss. If you have been raised with the whole “carrot and stick” grand bargain, it is very difficult to think differently, even though I hope that you do. Feuerbach discusses it in the impossibly difficult style of a German philosopher but, put more simply, eternity is a long time. If we did have eternal life, it would cheapen our mortal existence, making it seem to be irrelevant. In fact, we have all heard more than one preacher put it exactly that way, telling us that our mortal lives are of no importance because, what is one grain of sand when you can have the whole beach? Even the Apostle Paul says, (2 Cor. 4) that the momentary suffering we endure in this life is meaningless in comparison with our eternal home in heaven. That thinking has encouraged, not only Paul, but millions of priests and pastors to encourage people to have the commitment to stay in a bad marriage, or even to remain in slavery, but the conditions of life in this world mean nothing in contrast with eternity. Most of us have known more than one person who refused lifesaving surgery or cancer treatments because they welcomed death as a portal into a better life. . . incapable of conceiving that the universe might be able to go on without them. They really needed to have seriously considered Louis C. K.’s observation, “A lot goes on when you die, it just doesn’t involve you.” I’m saying that it is precisely because we are mortal that life is precious, sacred, even. You only have so many sunsets. There are only so many evenings when you can sit and talk with an aging parent and really get to know your own mother or father. Our children grow up, they leave home, they have careers, friends, kids of their own. I wish that I had a century to show my pre-school aged daughter the wonders of the world but, in fact, it was over in a moment, and I can never get any of those days back. Now, I wonder, why did I work so much? Why did I let so many other things crowd out that time? I stop by the tables of young parents in restaurants, especially when they are staring at their phones or getting impatient with their toddlers, total strangers, I just walk up with my white beard and thinning hair and I tell them, “Life doesn’t get any better than this. Savor every minute.” The German American poet of the mid 20th century, Charles Bukowski, said it as clearly as anyone can: We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing. Clearly, in light of our mortality, we should focus on what is important. We should be quick to forgive our siblings, even if they voted for Trump. We should do whatever we have to do to get conflict out of our marriage, to make the holidays absolutely super for our kids, and to put in the effort to hold friendships together. And we should do it now, now while we still can. The Buddha didn’t really say it, but one of my favorite fake Buddha quotes is, “the trouble is, you think you have time.” The truth is that the mortality rate is 100% and it typically comes much quicker than we thought it would. So, grab today with both hands and live as much as you possibly can while you can. So that when we are gone, the people who knew us will miss us.