First Parish Sermon Archive

“LOVE AND DEATH ON VALENTINE’S DAY”

 

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Mass

On February 14, 2010

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

 

 

          Here it is, Valentine’s Day, and the choir is favoring us with four numbers that capture four kinds of love: eros, philia, agape, and caritas. So it seemed that I should preach about love, unless I preached instead about President’s Day, which is tomorrow, or the Olympics, or the Westminster Dog Show, none of which I will deal with, or immigration reform or the afterlife, which I will.

          Immigration reform I can deal with quickly. It comes up because a number of advocacy groups, including UUMassAction and the Standing on the Side of Love Campaign, hope we will re-imagine Valentine’s Day and send Valentines to our federal delegation in support of Rep. Gutierrez’s proposal for national comprehensive immigration reform and join the effort to stop the raids in the Commonwealth. 

          “Standing on the side of love” is a phrase that is used a lot in Unitarian Universalism these days. It is the title of a song often sung at denominational meetings. As you just heard, there is a Standing on the Side of Love Campaign, usually devoted to promoting marriage equality.

          The large banner that flew last June in front of the conference center in Salt Lake City where General Assembly was held said, “Standing on the Side of Love.” It was intended to proclaim boldly in that most Mormon of cities our support for same-sex marriage, although I suspect that meaning was lost on everyone but us.

          The conference center is near Mormon Square with the tabernacle and all, and the casual passer-by may have thought the banner was a Mormon thing, standing on the side of good old-fashioned, traditional marriage. So on this day, Valentine’s Day, let me be clearer: we stand on the side of love between couples of whatever gender.

          That said, let me move on to the afterlife, fully intending to get back to love again before I am done. How did the afterlife get in here? It began when someone suggested, after I gave a UU take on the Bible with the children two weeks ago, that I give a UU take on death with the children. That connected in my mind to a book about the afterlife or afterlives I had just read with delight, and I thought I could relate them both to love on Valentine’s Day, if not to immigration or American presidents, in this sermon.

          But I could not bring myself to deal with death with the children on Valentine’s Day, even if death features prominently in the story of Valentine himself, a third-century priest who went on marrying people, in secret, after the emperor Claudius II banned all marriages and engagements so more young men would enlist in the army. As Susan Sherwood noted in the Town Crier, “In due course, [Valentine] was apprehended, dragged before the court, and condemned to be beaten to death with a club and have his head hacked off … on February 14, probably in the year 270.” It’s a good story, but I couldn’t see using it with the children. And I had this story I almost used last week, so I went with that instead.

          But I still wanted to use that book I referred to earlier. It is called Sum: forty tales from the afterlives, by David Eagleman. I thank John Gantz for introducing me to it, and I have been pressing it on others. The reactions have been mixed, as they no doubt will be here.  

          The forty tales are all short, only a few small pages long. Each depicts an imaginative view of what the afterlife might be. I will tell you a few, like the first. It begins, “In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

          “You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes.” And so forth, until at the end he writes, “Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of things. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is bliss: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.”

          Eagleman regularly throws in surprising twists like that; a child hopping on burning sand is not exactly a happy image, and it may describe how our lives can feel sometimes, too rushed and uncomfortable. As elsewhere, Eagleman suggests our situation is better than others he can imagine in the afterlife.

          I’ll read you one more, because love comes up in it, and I have not forgotten it is Valentine’s Day:

          “As humans we spend our time seeking big, meaningful experiences. So the afterlife may surprise you when your body wears out. We expand back into what we really are – which is, by Earth standards, enormous. We stand ten thousand kilometers tall in each of nine dimensions and live with others like us in a celestial commune. When we reawaken in these, our true bodies, we immediately begin to notice that our gargantuan colleagues suffer a deep sense of angst.

          “Our job is the maintenance and upholding of the cosmos. Universal collapse is imminent, and we engineer wormholes to act as structural support. We labor relentlessly on the edge of cosmic disaster. If we don’t do our jobs flawlessly, the universe will re-collapse. Ours is complex, intricate, and important work.

          “After three centuries of this toil, we have the option of a vacation. We all choose the same destination: we project ourselves into the tiny, delicate, three-dimensional bodies call humans, and we are born onto the resort we call Earth.” [I apologize to the people of Haiti and anywhere it is impossible even with the greatest imagination to think of being at a resort.]

          “The idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences. On the Earth, we care only about our immediate surroundings. We watch comedy movies. We drink alcohol and enjoy music. We form relationships, fight, break up, and start again. When we’re in a human body, we don’t care about universal collapse – instead we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.

          “Those are good vacations that we take on Earth, replete with our little dramas and fusses. The mental relaxation is unspeakably precious to us. And when we’re forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, it is not uncommon to see us lying prostrate in the breeze of the solar winds, tools in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness.”

          You see, he did it again, in this case contrasting our desire for big, meaningful experiences with how blessed we are in fact that our experiences are meaningless and small compared to what we might return to in the afterlife.

          I have recommended the book to three colleagues, suggesting they read a story or two to see if it wasn’t something they’d like. One read tale after tale, laughing aloud, and said she’d be buying the book. A second read story after story, without laughing once, and concluded that the book was depressing and he didn’t get what the author’s point was. The third had not only read it already, he leads a weekly discussion at the church he serves and at every session he reads a tale and the group discusses it.

          But back to the meeting of eyes, the glimpse of flesh, to experiences of love and joy, back to eros, philia, agape, and caritas, classical forms of love. I quote my colleague Margo McKenna: “The Greeks recognized four kinds of love over 2,500 years ago.  And, it is their influence that comes down to us in western civilization as we look at love in our modern society.  The four most commonly understood kinds of love are: 1. Eros, the basis for the word erotic, meaning love that is desire, and usually associated with sexuality.  2. Philial, the basis for word family, meaning love based on a blood relationship or a group.  3.  Caritas, love for [all people].…  4. Agape, … love for the universe, a love that transcends reason, and desires good not only for all humanity, but all living beings, and the earth itself.  This love is one that is entirely selfless … without possessiveness, without self-interest, and without limit.”

          So we had an erotic prelude and music, an offertory that had included both filia and agape, and the postlude, “Ubi Caritas,” is about … caritas.

          In my mind, pairing love of every sort and the afterlife, or death, if you will, pairing love and death as this sermon does, is perfectly natural: it is what a minister does at every memorial service.

          We say then that a time of death can make us treasure all the more the days that are ours still to live, and our chances to love and be loved. Eagleman has a tale in which, when you die, you are offered a chance to make any change you want and live your life over. You choose to be the one who eradicates death. You are informed that this is a choice you have made before, and been frustrated. You persist, and you do eradicate death. “But eventually, as … warned, your success begins to lose its shine. People come to discover that the end of death is the death of motivation. Too much life, it turns out, is the opiate of the masses. There is a noticeable decline in accomplishments. People take more naps. There’s no great rush.

          “In an attempt to salvage their once-dynamic lives, people begin to set suicide dates for themselves.” And things go from bad to worse until the mob breaks in, shuts down the computers that established deathlessness, and eventually you die and end up being offered the same choice again.  

          No, it is not deathlessness we seek, but the re-awakening to life that can come when we remember that our time is finite and that chances for love abound. There are words I say sometimes at graveside, quotes from I do not know who: “In a world where our most precious goods are perishable, we pray that we may honor our dead by being so good in our living, so kindly, so understanding, so transcendent of pettiness, that in our love for those who remain and who need us and our strength, we shall partly make good our loss, and in the beauty of our lives erect the noblest monument to our dead.

          “We pray that when we go back to the daily round of our duties, we may be more eager to be helpful and kind, as though in the presence of death itself we had learned to know the deeper meanings of life. Thankful as we are for this fine life, may we go forth to be better and more loving in the years that remain for us here on earth.”

          And we also say then that love persists beyond loss, the love we have for a person, and love of various kinds, depending on our relationship with the deceased.

          Some of you have heard these words only too often, as we often say them here at such times. We say, “We gather in the presence of unfathomable mystery; with humble hearts we bow before the veil which has fallen between us and one beloved. But don’t fear: for greater than sorrow is love, and love endures through pain and grief. Love binds all hearts in bonds of friendship and courage.”

          Then we may quote the poet John Hall Wheelock:

“The fragile network of love that binds together

Spirit and spirit, over the whole earth,

Love–that by the very nature of things

Is doomed, is destined to heartbreak, mortal love,

Which is a form of suffering–here and now,

In its brief moment, yes even in its defeat,

Triumphs over the very nature of things,

And is the only answer, the only atonement,

Redeeming all.” (John Hall Wheelock)

          “And so,” we say, “while we meet in the presence of death, we honor to the spirit of life. We make this time the time of love, and these simple rites love’s confessional. For it is Love’s tribute that we come to offer here today.

          And sometimes we say a brief poem found on an ancient sundial. One of you recently lost a close family member, and asked for short quotes, one of which might be used on the program for the service. She picked that poem, which I first used in the first memorial service I conducted here. It is:

 

Time flies

Suns rise

And snows fall.

Let time go by.

Love is forever over all.

 

          But maybe I should close with something more romantic this Valentine’s Day. I will tell you the best little quotes I came upon this week. Judy Garland is quoted as saying, “It was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.”  And the novelist Robert Heinlein noted, “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” May you know such love, and may a touch of it be part of all our relations here.