Life After (somebody else's) Death

a service at the Unitarian Church of Quincy
May 4, 2025

Opening words 

“To love is to risk your life.” - Salman Rushdie

Story: Milk for the Queen
I adapted this story from the Buddhist tradition.

Once there was a great Queen, and her son, the Prince, was the most precious thing in her world. In her heart, she believed that no one had ever loved a child the way that she loved the Prince.

So when the Prince got sick, the Queen sent for the kingdom’s best doctors and said to them sternly: “If you love me
 or fear me or hope to gain my favor, you will make my son well again.”

But all the doctors’ efforts failed, and the Prince died.

The Queen was distraught and could not be comforted. In her heart she believed that no one had ever felt such a grief as she felt now. No one had ever felt so alone, so bereft, so hopeless.

But then she remembered that on the edge of the kingdom was a mountain, and in the mountain was a cave, 
and in the cave lived a hermit. Many stories were told about the hermit’s great wisdom, and it was said that he had magical powers, perhaps even the power to raise the dead.

So the Queen sent soldiers to bring the hermit to her. She promised him his heart’s desire if he could restore her child’s life, and threatened terrible punishments should he fail.

But the hermit had passed beyond desire and fear, so the Queen’s bluster did not move him. But his compassion responded to her suffering, so he offered hope. “There may be a way. Long ago, a teacher far wiser and more powerful than I devised a ritual which, it is said, can restore the dead to life. But I have never seen it performed, because its ingredients are so difficult to obtain."

“I am Queen,” the Queen responded. “Whatever I require will be brought to me. Tell me what you need.”

So the hermit made a list of many rare and exotic items. The last thing on the list, though, seemed far too simple: a cup of milk. “But not just any cup of milk,” the hermit explained: “You must go out alone and borrow it from a household that has never known grief.”

As the Queen expected, her vast resources allowed the other ingredients to be collected quickly. So she left her courtiers behind and went out to borrow milk.

At the first door she came to, a woman was only too happy to offer milk to her Queen. “But I must know,” the Queen demanded. “Has this household known grief?”

“It has,” the woman answered. “My mother died seven years ago, and yet I talk to her every day. I ask her advice, I complain about my own children, and sometimes I just ramble about my day. I know she is not really here, but I talk anyway, because I miss her so much.”

This milk, the Queen realized, would not do, so she moved on.

At the next house, a man told the Queen about his brother. “I knew him all my life, and I never imagined I would have to live without him. But now I do.”

So the Queen moved on.

At the next house, a man mourned for his wife, and at the next a woman remembered her best friend. And so it went, house after house. None of their milk could satisfy the ritual’s requirement.

As the light was fading and it became time to return to the palace to try again in the morning, the Queen made one more attempt, stopping at a poor hut.

The woman who came to the door lived alone and took whatever work she could find, barely earning enough to feed herself. Nonetheless, she offered the milk, which the Queen suspected might be all she had.

But what about grief? The woman had once had a son, about the same age as the Prince. When she spoke of him, she somehow both smiled and cried at the same time.

Her stories led the Queen to tell her own stories about the Prince, and the two of them talked for a long while, 
until they were both crying and holding each other like sisters.

And then the Queen understood what the hermit had hoped to teach her by giving her this task: There would be no death-defeating ritual, because there was no household that had never known grief. Love and death and grief care nothing for queens, they come to everyone. And the feeling that she had imagined was hers alone in fact was shared by every member of her kingdom.

The realization that the Prince would not be returning started the Queen crying anew. But eventually she returned to the palace, let the hermit go back to his cave, and began organizing the largest funeral the kingdom had ever seen. And she reserved a special place of honor for all the people whose milk she could not use.

After the Prince’s funeral, the Queen went on to live for many years. And though she never stopped missing her son, what she did with those years became the subject of many other stories.

Readings
The Christian writer C. S. Lewis kept notes on his thoughts and feelings after his wife died, and they were later collected into a short book called A Grief Observed. He wrote:

Kind people have said to me, “She is with God.” In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable. But I find this question, however important it may be in itself, is not after all very important in relation to grief.

Suppose that the earthly lives she and I shared for a few years are in reality only the basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings.  Those somethings could be pictured as spheres or globes. Where the plane of Nature cuts through them — that is, in earthly life — they appear as … two circles that touched. But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for.

You tell me, “she goes on.” But my heart and body are crying out, “Come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature.”

… Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.

The second reading is from Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff

Elements of the gospel which I had always thought would console did not. They did something else, something important, but not that.

It did not console me to be reminded of the hope of resurrection. If I had forgotten that hope, then it would indeed have brought light into my life to be reminded of it. But I did not think of death as a bottomless pit. I did not grieve as one who has no hope.

Yet Eric is gone, here and now he is gone; now I cannot talk with him, now I cannot see him, now I cannot hug him, now I cannot hear of his plans for the future. That is my sorrow.

A friend said, “Remember, he’s in good hands.” I was deeply moved. But that reality does not put Eric back in my hands now. That’s my grief. For that grief, what consolation can there be other than having him back?

Sermon

A year and a half ago, I gave what at the time I thought was a very ambitious talk, called “My Humanist Afterlife”. I took on the  problem that the late UU minister Forrest Church had said was central to religion: “our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die”.

One popular response to that problem is to postulate an afterlife, so that Death is not truly an ending. That talk examined not just whether I believe in an afterlife (for the most part I decided that I didn’t), but what alternative beliefs do I have and how do they deal with the underlying problem?

Looking back, it’s now obvious to me that there’s a very big hole in that talk: It was all about my own death. How do I cope with being alive and knowing that I will die? How do I tell a meaningful story about my life, 
one that motivates me to get up in the morning and take action, when it’s possible that my story might get cut off at any moment, and whatever I had been trying to accomplish might come to nothing.

Looking back, I now see that I only addressed part of the problem. Because the point of postulating an afterlife is not only to make peace with our own deaths, but also the deaths of the people we build our lives around. How can we dare to love someone and put them at the center of our lives, when we know they could be taken from us at any moment? And when they are taken, how do we go on?

Life has a way of pointing out your oversights. In early December, my wife Deb died. She always came to Quincy with me, and many of you knew her. She had had a number of health problems over the decades, but her death seemed to have nothing to do with any of them. All three of her previous cancers were undetectable. She seemed only to have a routine intestinal bug, the kind where you say, “If this doesn’t clear up over the weekend, maybe we should call your doctor.”

Friday morning I thought I was letting her sleep in. But when I went up at 11 to wake her, I couldn’t. The EMTs came and told me she was dead. No advance warning, no lingering decline. She was with me Thursday night, and gone Friday morning.

I’m not the first person to make the mistake of discussing Death in a self-centered way, as if  my own death were the only issue. The Greek philosopher Epicurus said: “Death is nothing to us, because while we exist, Death is not here. And when Death comes, we will not be here.”

And that’s a wonderful explanation of why I shouldn’t fear my own death. But when I was trying to wake Deb and couldn’t, Death was there and so was I. It was an experience well worth fearing.

So let’s go back to the problem of Death and look at it not centering on our own deaths, but on the death of someone else, maybe someone we love very, very much.

Religious notions of an afterlife claim to help with this, because they allow us to picture our loved ones living on, perhaps watching from Heaven and waiting for us to join them.

There is an important difference between life after your own death and life after someone else’s death. If there is no life after your own death, you’ll never know. Your belief or lack of belief will never be tested.
 
But life after someone else’s death is undeniable. Maybe you never will have to live on after the death of your spouse of 40 years, as I am doing now. But as the story recounted, everyone, at some time or another, 
loses someone they care about. So we also need to evaluate afterlife beliefs from that point of view: Can we believe that our loved ones live on? How might that belief change our experience of grief? Does it help?

I don’t want to create an artificial suspense, so I’ll cut to the chase: My experience of living on past Deb’s death has not fundamentally changed my conclusions. It hasn’t sent me running back to the Christianity I was raised in, or started me believing again in the immortality of an immutable soul.

I remain skeptical of the notion of a soul in general, which I deconstructed in that previous talk. When I look back on my own life, I don’t see all my memories as instances of some essential “Me”. In my previous talk, I ended up reframing my “soul” as a ship of Theseus. That’s the festival ship that the city of Athens kept seaworthy for centuries by replacing parts as they wore out, until not a single original plank remained. Theseus’ ship has become a metaphor for all those things that have day-to-day continuity, but not long-term identity. So I identify with the person I was yesterday, but not necessarily with the person I was when I was 10. I don’t see the eternal soul that is supposed to unite us.

Likewise with Deb: Was she the same person last December as she was when we met in 1980? Honestly, I hope not. I’d like to believe that our time together changed us both in more than superficial ways.

However, there is one part of that talk that looks different from this point of view: the idea that we live on in the memories of others. I didn’t take much comfort in that when it came to my own death, because most people’s impressions of me don’t seem that accurate. And as it turns out, the person who knew me best didn’t outlive me.

But our loved ones do live on in our memories, and I think it’s important to honor that. The way I imagine empathy works is that we shape parts of our own consciousness to resemble the people we deal with. And people who are important to us get modeled in considerable detail.

That’s why just before you call your mother with some news, you can already guess what she’s going to say, right down to the tone of her voice. Those pieces of ourselves don’t die when the people they’re based on die, and there’s no reason they should. You can still make a good guess how your mother would respond to your news, and those may or may not be conversations you want to keep having.

I do want to keep having conversations with Deb, and so I do many things that resemble what a believer in a literal afterlife might do. I talk to her when I’m alone. I have a small shrine around the urn of her ashes. And so on. But I do those things mainly because I don’t want to kill off a valued piece of myself.

One reason I haven’t been tempted by a more literal view of Deb’s afterlife is that I don’t believe it would help. Believers often imagine that they will be comforted in the moment of grief. But when Death actually comes, that promise is often not fulfilled, as C. S. Lewis and Nicholas Wolterstorff discovered.

Their accounts confirmed for me an observation I had made after my mother’s funeral, which to me seemed designed more to shore up the survivors’ Christian faith than to comfort us in our hour of grief.

To me, the most attractive feature of Christianity is the vision of an all-knowing God who sees through all our posturing and denial and yet loves us anyway. So we don’t have to pretend to be lovable. To God, we are lovable.

But the death of a loved one threatens that vision, because the all-knowing God who loves us must somehow be reconciled with the all-powerful God who did this to us. Rather than save our loved one or take us at the same time, the all-powerful God has left us here to suffer. What kind of love is that?

And so for the Christian, grief is often compounded by an additional burden: a crisis of faith. Perhaps that is why so many Christian funerals seem more concerned with doctrine than with the life that has ended or the lives that go on.

Immediately after Deb’s death, when I tried on the idea that we would meet again after my own death, I found something similar to what the readings reported. What occupied my mind to the exclusion of all else was not the future or eternity, it was now. I found that a reunion in Heaven was only comforting if I also imagined that something would kill me by the end of the week. The thought that I might have to trudge through another 20 years or more without her — tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as MacBeth put it — it was such a horror that nothing I could imagine on the other side of it made the slightest difference.

I remember how much stress my Christian teachers laid on eternity, and how our earthly lifetimes are but an eyeblink, insignificant in the face of eternity. One thing I can testify to is that in moment of grief, all that turns around and goes inside out. The person you love is gone, and you don’t want to be together in eternity, you want to be together now. It is the vastness of eternity that seems insignificant in the face of now.

Couple that with my previously expressed skepticism about my unchanging eternal soul. The Me who eventually reunites with Deb — who is that guy? During the last six months, my soul’s ship of Theseus has been through a shipwreck and a repair. Now picture two or three more decades of wear and tear and replacement parts. When I finally sail that ship into my eternal port, how recognizable will I be?

So no, I haven’t found an afterlife vision that would comfort me even if I could believe in it.

But you know I can’t end there. As always, I don’t think it’s enough to critique what I don’t believe, because religious beliefs are created to solve human problems. And those problems don’t go away just because you reject the beliefs that were supposed to solve them.So: We love people, and sometimes they die. What are we going to do?

I had about as bad a case of this as you can imagine. It wasn’t just that Deb and I had been married for 40 years. During that time, we were the central focus of each other’s lives. We didn’t spread our bets by having children. We had friends, but we could go weeks at a time without paying attention to anyone but each other.

So after she died, it did not take long to realize that I was not really an individual, and I had not been one in a very long time. People would ask me what I thought, what I liked, what I wanted, how I do things, and those questions just confused me. I knew what we thought, what we liked, what we wanted, and how we did things. Who was this “I” they were asking about?

It’s hard to describe the sense of dislocation you feel when you realize that you are alone, but you are not an individual. There’s a deep feeling that you don’t belong in this world. If you belong anywhere, it is in the grave with the person you love. As Shakespeare has Marc Antony say, “My heart is in the coffin with Caesar, and I must pause till it come back to me.”

Whether or not you want it to come back is the first serious question grief poses. Do you really want to keep living? The Stoic philosopher Seneca lacked our modern taboos against suicide, so he posed the question directly. “The door lies open,” he wrote. “If you don’t want to fight, you can flee.”

But we do have a taboo, so we seldom talk about this option. Few bereaved people take direct action to kill themselves. And yet it’s not uncommon for one spouse to die a few months after the other. Death from a “broken heart”, as we sometimes say, is often a death from self-neglect. Why should I bother to eat or get out of bed or take my medication?

Pretty early on, though, I knew I wanted to live. The last thing Deb would have wanted, I was sure, was to be the cause of my death. Just a few months before, we had seen a play that imagined Romeo and Juliet as an older couple. Their double suicide plays out, but in a different way: Juliet commits suicide to avoid the late stages of a debilitating disease. Romeo finds her body and then kills himself.

We talked about that play afterwards and agreed that Romeo’s suicide didn’t make a satisfying ending. It’s all very romantic when you’re 15 to imagine that someone just couldn’t go on without you. But when you love someone as a mature person, that’s not what you want for them. I would have guessed her opinion anyway, but I was lucky enough to hear her say so.  Deb wanted me to live, and realizing that was the beginning of realizing that we wanted me to live. I wanted me to live.

But that realization just leads to the next questions: Live how? Live what? The life I had built with Deb simply didn’t work without her. It was broken. I was broken.

I was lucky enough to have friends who propped me up while I learned to walk again. Knowing I had their indulgent support, I could afford to be harsh with myself. My mantra those first few weeks was “Do the hard thing.”

That first night they told me, “You don’t have to go back to the apartment by yourself.” But I answered, “Yes, I do.” That Sunday they told me I didn’t have to make an appearance at church. I didn’t have to light a candle and tell the community what had happened. “Yes, I do.”

On Monday they reminded me that I didn’t have to write my weekly blog; everyone would understand. But if I stopped, I wondered, when would I start again? Could I count on being better in a week? Two weeks? Ten weeks? I wrote the blog.

I knew I didn’t have to speak at Deb’s memorial service, but who else could do her memory justice? It took a lot of rehearsing to get through that eulogy without breaking down, and my voice did crack a couple of times, but I made it.

When this talk got scheduled, I wondered if it was still too soon. Maybe I should talk about something completely different, like Trump’s first hundred days. But once this topic occurred to me, it filled my mind. I couldn’t not do it.

So I don’t know if I would call this advice, but it’s what I’ve been doing and it seems to be working: Find people who will catch you if you fall, and then don’t be afraid to fall. Go straight at your grief. Do the hard thing.

So after you’ve decided that you want to live, after you’ve started to regain your individuality, you face a third challenge: What do you do with your past? And here, I find, there’s a narrow path to walk between two traps.

One trap is to let the past overwhelm the present. You freeze as much of life as you can and turn your home into a museum. Going forward, whatever you find to do with your life is just an epilogue to the story that ended when your loved one died.  

The opposite trap is to let it all go. Live in the moment, and if thinking about the past causes you pain, don’t. Get rid of anything that might remind you. That was then, this is now. Move on.

Having had nearly half a year to contemplate those options, I don’t think either of them works, even on its own terms. 

I have come to believe that it does not honor the past to turn it into your prison. In the same way that I’m sure Deb would not have wanted to be the cause of my death, I also believe she would not have wanted her death to suck all the juice out of my life. My sadness, my depression, my brokenness — that’s not the legacy she would want.

But putting it all behind me to live in the moment — I don’t even believe that’s the right way to live in the moment. Because the present inexorably turns into the past. This moment, right now, will soon be part of our shared past. And if the past means nothing, then what meaning can we trust here and now?

For me, that insight got crystalized in the old Peggy Lee song, “Is That All There Is?” Each verse recalls some peak experience of life, and finds it disappointing. In one verse, she remembers: “We were so very much in love. Then one day he went away, and I thought I would die, but I didn’t.”

You can hear the disappointment in her voice, as if surviving just proved that she’d been a silly girl to imagine love meant something. She lost her love, and she didn’t even die. Is that all there is? To love, to life, to anything?

So this is where I’ve gotten to after six months. I want to live. And like the Queen in my story, I don’t want the time I have left reduced to epilogue. I want these remaining years to be the subject of many other stories.

But if I want those new stories to mean anything, I have to keep telling the old stories of me and Deb and our forty years together. I loved her very much, and I lost her. Like Peggy Lee, at times I thought I would die. And I didn’t.

But that’s not all there is.

Closing words
Sing with me, sing for the years
Sing for the laughter and sing for the tears
Sing with me, if it's just for today
Maybe tomorrow the good Lord will take you away.

- Aerosmith “Dream On”

The Last Best Day

 a short reflection presented at
First Parish Church in Bedford, Massachusetts
November 17, 2024

In the last days before the election, 
I heard many different people use the same metaphor: Waiting to hear the voters’ decision
 was like waiting for a biopsy report to come back.

That turns out to be a situation I know very well. Over the last 28 years, 
my wife Deb has had three independent cancers 
and one scary benign growth. So I’ve seen a lot of bad biopsy reports.

After the first one, 
a breast cancer in 1996, 
I honestly had no idea whether or not she would live. The doctors outlined a 9-month course of treatment 
that sounded pretty arduous, 
and even then they could offer no guarantees 
that she wouldn’t die anyway. 

Fairly quickly we decided to take that hard road. But it took us a few days longer 
to figure out how to think about it. 

When you face that kind of planned hardship, 
the immediate temptation is to write that time off, 
to put your head down and bull through it. You figure you’re bound to be miserable anyway, 
so just try to get it over with however you can. Look past it to better times in the future.

But that was precisely the problem: We couldn’t be sure we had a future together. Any day might yield some new symptom or new test result 
that would set us on a steep downward slope. So any day, 
as unpromising as it might seem at the time, 
in retrospect might turn out 
to be the best day we had left together. 

What a waste it would be 
to write off that last best day. Or worse, to let it be ruined 
by dread of what might come next.

So we developed a practice 
that we eventually started calling “How is this day not going to suck?” Looking at the particular opportunities and limitations 
of each individual day, what could we do to appreciate being alive?

Some days we could get out and go for a walk. Other days, the best we could manage 
was a to take a pretty drive. Or snuggle together on the couch 
watching 3-minute music videos. Or Deb could stay in bed, 
and I could read to her.

That strategy, I am happy to report, worked, 
in both senses. Treatment was successful, 
and Deb is sitting right there. But also, we did more than just survive, 
and I am grateful 
that we did not write those months off. I value the memory of that time, 
and I am glad we did not miss it.

So now let’s pursue the metaphor: Our national biopsy came back, 
and from my point of view the outlook is not good. I’m sure you’ve been hearing many apocalyptic predictions — environmental, economic, social, or political apocalypses might be on their way. And I can’t tell you those visions are wrong. I can’t promise you everything will be OK.

But how should we look at this? My experience tells me 
that we can’t let ourselves be overcome with fear and dread, and we can’t just write off these next four years. People will tell you “Try not to think about it.” But just for a moment, do think about it. What if the doomsayers are right 
and the worst happens 
—whatever “worst” means to you?

If that’s true, then this day 
— as unpromising as it might seem 
compared to the kinds of days we were hoping for — could be one of the last best days. What a shame it would be not to appreciate it.

So yes, do whatever you can 
to try to turn the world away from whatever vision of the future worries you. In the metaphor, 
that corresponds to the treatment program. But while you’re doing that, 
don’t forget to live. Your chance to experience freedom, justice, democracy, 
and perhaps even happiness itself 
may never be this good again. 

Don’t miss it.

Challenges and Opportunities for a Future Church

 a service presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on October 13, 2024

Opening Words

The opening words are from the surgeon general’s report 
“Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Social Isolation”.

"Even when they couldn’t put their finger on the word ‘lonely,’ 
time and time again, 
people of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, 
from every corner of the country, 
would tell me, ‘I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself,’ or ‘if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice’.

"[Social isolation] is associated with 
a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, 
dementia, stroke, depression, 
anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected 
is similar to that caused by 
smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that 
associated with obesity and physical inactivity."

Reading

A little over a year ago, Perry Bacon, 
a 42-year-old Black political reporter for the Washington Post, 
published a very different kind of article, 
one about his personal religious journey, 
and his longing for what he called
 “a church of the Nones”, i.e., 
a church that doesn’t require believing any specific dogma. The article is long enough to be a sermon on its own, 
so I’ll summarize.

Bacon grew up as the son of an assistant pastor 
and continued participating in Christian churches 
through his 20s and early 30s. Despite his theological doubts about Christianity, 
he stayed faithful because 
he believed in the values his churches promoted.

“I didn’t leave church for any one reason,” he writes. But partly it was politics. “I couldn’t ignore how the word ‘Christian’ 
was becoming a synonym for 
rabidly pro-Trump White people 
who argued that his and their meanness and intolerance 
were in some ways required to defend our faith.”

A final straw came when Bacon discovered 
that although his church allowed gays and lesbians to participate in church activities, 
his gay friend was barred 
from even the most minor leadership roles. By 2020, Bacon was church-shopping, 
and dissatisfied with what he was finding. When the pandemic cut off his search 
by closing most churches, he felt relieved.

He found he didn’t want to raise his daughter 
in a church whose doctrines and worldview he didn’t believe. “What has kept me away is having a child. If I were childless, 
I think I would join a church to be a part of its community, 
and I would ignore the theological elements I’m not sure about. But my 3-year-old is getting more inquisitive every day.”

He knows about Unitarian Universalism, but “Unitarian churches I have attended 
had overwhelmingly White and elderly congregations 
and lacked the wide range of activities for adults and kids 
found at the Christian congregations that I was a part of.”

He’s thought about starting his own church, 
as his uncle did for other reasons a generation before, 
or recruiting like-minded friends to join a UU church together 
to “make it younger and more racially diverse. But I’ve not followed through on any of these options.”

Instead, he has drifted into other forms of weekly community: 
his neighborhood’s farmers’ market 
and a happy hour for local journalists. Those activities allow him to meet people, 
but he still senses a “church-sized hole” in his life, 
and in the larger society as well.

“Kids need places to learn values such as forgiveness. Young adults need places to meet a potential spouse. Adults with children need places to meet with other parents. Retirees need places to build new relationships, 
as their friends and spouses pass away. Our society needs places that integrate people 
across class and racial lines. Newly woke Americans need places 
to get practical, weekly advice 
about how to live out the inclusive, anti-racist values 
they committed to during the Trump years.

“There are lots of organizations trying to address those needs. But strong churches could address them all. It’s strange to me that America, 
particularly its left-leaning cohort, 
is abandoning this institution, 
as opposed to reinventing it to align with our 2023 values.”

Talk

You may be familiar with the classic distinction 
between the fox and the hedgehog. The fox, the adage says, knows many things, 
but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Ordinarily, I give hedgehog talks: I’m building towards one central point, 
and I want to hold your attention until I get there.

This is a fox talk: There are a number of ideas 
that may send your thoughts down a side track, 
and that’s OK. I’ll try to call you back near the end. This talk is also different 
in that I don’t really answer anything. Instead, I want to lay out a paradox I’ve been thinking about, 
to see if I can get you thinking about it too. The paradox has to do with 
the future of churches generally in America, 
and of Unitarian Universalist churches in particular.

On the one hand, 
this ought to be a time 
of unprecedented opportunity for churches. As Perry Bacon noted in the reading: Churches offer precisely the kind of community and connection 
that America is lacking as a society, 
and that many individuals say they are yearning for. And yet, while some churches are doing well, 
nationwide the institution is in decline: Churches are closing, 
church membership is dropping, 
and the percentage of the population 
that says religion is personally important to them 
has been falling for decades.

If you listen to why people are leaving their churches, 
or never showed any interest in church to begin with, 
a lot of those reasons don’t seem like 
they should apply to Unitarian churches. We aren’t bound to ancient dogmas about sexuality and gender. We aren’t in conflict with science. We don’t consign people to hell 
if they think or live differently than we do. We focus our attention on the issues of life today, 
and discuss them in terms that are meaningful today, 
rather than try to shoehorn our moral intuitions 
into elaborate interpretations of scriptures written thousands of years ago.

And yet, all those people 
who need what a church can offer, 
but can’t seem to find one they can live with — most of them don’t find us either. Maybe they never hear about us. But even if they do, 
even if they show up to check us out, 
many of them run into barriers to entry 
that we may not even see and certainly never intended to put there.

So that’s the paradox: There are crying needs in today’s society, 
and there are institutions 
that seem perfectly designed to fill those needs. And yet it’s not happening. What’s going on? What can we do about it?

Let me back up and support some of those claims I just made. In America today 
there is a cluster of needs 
that different professions see from different angles, 
and have been reporting on for decades.

In the opening words, 
you heard the surgeon general 
diagnose the medical problem of social isolation.

Sociologists see something similar from their own perspective. As far back as 
Robert Putnam’s turn-of-the-millennium book Bowling Alone 
they’ve  been reporting a decline in what they call “social capital”. Community organizations of all sorts, 
from bowling teams to labor unions to churches, 
have been losing significance, 
and the result is a less cohesive society. People are less trusting. Communities that need to act together 
have a harder time reaching consensus, 
largely because it has become easier for us to demonize each other. 

A bowling team may not seem like it knits society together, 
but something about relying on 
an immigrant, a lesbian, or a Republican 
to pick up your spare 
helps you appreciate what wonderful people they can be. 

Francis Moore Lappe' wrote: 
“A culture of democracy can be defined as one that builds trust.” Sadly, the same logic works in the other direction: A culture that has trouble building trust 
will also have trouble preserving its democracy.

Psychologists talk about how hard it can be 
to establish a unified or coherent identity in a world where you may have a thousand Facebook friends, 
but no one who sees your whole life. Back in 1991, 
well before the Internet as we currently know it, Kenneth Gergen wrote a book called The Saturated Self. In it, he described 
the stress caused by modern communications technologies, 
which give us easy access to far more communities 
than we can effectively participate in. Each community has its own ideals, 
and its own vision of how a good person lives. Beset with all these conflicting goals, 
the postmodern individual feels perpetually inadequate.

Fast-forward 33 years, 
and individuals have become more and more atomized. It’s no longer just that you’re 
one person at home and another at work. Your work persona itself may have become narrower and have shallower relationships. When you meet primarily over Zoom, 
you no longer share coffee breaks with your colleagues 
or get a beer together on your way home.

Online communities are even more fragmenting: One community knows your political views, 
another your hobbies, 
and a third your taste in books or movies. Another group of acquaintances knows you 
only through your dating profile, 
which may not be entirely accurate. So does anyone really know you? And if not, who are you anyway?

If we were social planners, 
looking at all these phenomena together, 
we might be tempted to design some completely new institution: one that holds regular face-to-face events 
that don’t require an invitation. People could show up alone, 
or with their full household. Come regularly or only once in a while. At these gatherings, 
people might do simple things together 
— maybe sing songs or listen to music or a short talk.  These communal events could conclude 
with a chance to chat over coffee and cookies.

Our new institution 
would be even better if it encouraged you to show up as your whole self, 
and not just as some narrowly focused set of interests or beliefs or attitudes. And better still if it fulfilled all those needs 
Perry Bacon listed, and helped you teach your children values 
that run deeper than making money or getting famous 
or buying the latest products? 

Wouldn’t it be great if there were such a thing? Somebody should invent it.

And yet … In their book Beyond Doubt: the secularization of society 
sociologists Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman and Ryan Cragun say that “somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 churches 
close down every year”. In 1998, 62% of Americans answering a survey 
said that religion was very important to them. In 2023, only 39% did.

And it’s not that people don’t know churches are out there. The Christian pastors who authored The Great Dechurching 
estimate that 40 million Americans 
used to attend church at least once a month 
and now go less than once a year. The study they commissioned found that 
“no theological tradition, age group, ethnicity, political affiliation, 
education level, geographic location, or income bracket” 
has been immune to this trend.

The Great Dechurching goes into some detail 
about why people are leaving churches 
— again, from a survey, 
and not just reflecting the authors’ possibly biased intuitions.

Some reasons are specific to particular denominations. The Catholic Church’s clergy sexual abuse scandals 
disillusioned a lot of members. Young people have been leaving Evangelical churches 
for largely political reasons, 
as Perry Bacon described: They can’t reconcile the message of Christian love and compassion 
with the harsh and often hateful positions 
their churches take in the culture wars, or understand how loving Jesus can lead to voting for Trump.

We may not feel that those issues apply to us, 
but there is a more general lesson: Members begin to fall away 
when they sense hypocrisy in their churches, 
when what the church teaches doesn’t match 
what the church does 
or how members are treated.

One challenge many churches face 
has become known as the Rise of the Nones: The percentage of the population 
reporting their religious affiliation as None 
has grown from 6% in 1991 to almost 30% in 2022.

Many churches don’t know what to do with that trend. The whole point of a Baptist or Catholic church 
is to gather up all the Baptists or Catholics in a town, 
not to socialize seekers who balk at reciting a creed.

UUs, though, tend to see the rise of the Nones 
as an opportunity rather than a problem: "Not sure what you believe? Believe something you can’t put a label on? Welcome! You’ll fit right in."

But Nones present a challenge for us too. We know what to do with Nones like Perry Bacon: 
people who were raised in another faith, got disillusioned, 
and now report a church-sized hole in their lives. Lots of us got here that way: I used to be Lutheran. My wife used to be Catholic. That kind of journey is familiar to us.

But as more and more parents leave 
the churches they were born in, 
more and more children are growing up without a church. As adults, those children may discover 
exactly the same needs in their lives as Perry Bacon, 
but to them it won’t look like a church-sized hole. To them, church is an old-timey thing Gramma and Grandpa did, 
not a plausible solution to their own social isolation.

So lifelong Nones won’t walk in our door church-shopping. Someone will need to meet them where they are
 and communicate to them 
that church is a reasonable thing to do. We’re not used to making that case.

And even if they do walk in the door, 
even if they join, they may be slow to grasp how all this works. Not just the when-to-stand-up and when-to-sit-down 
of the Sunday service, but the constant give-and-take 
of being in community with a diverse group of people.

UU minister Kimberley DeBus put it this way in her blog: “Understanding what it means to be a member, 
to be in covenant, 
to support the common endeavor. That means things like supporting a decision 
[that was] fairly and honestly made, 
even if it wasn’t your preference. It means looking to the future and trusting those with vision, 
even if it wasn’t your vision. It means teaching others and helping them along 
even as you were helped along when you first arrived. It means doing the work to support the congregation 
- helping out, taking on leadership roles, 
being engaged with each other.”

Most UU churches aren’t set up to be an adult’s first church. When adults walk into their first church, 
everything seems to happen by magic. It takes a while to understand 
that nothing happens unless someone does it, 
and nothing is paid for unless someone contributes. If you express a need and it isn’t instantly satisfied, 
that doesn’t necessarily mean people don’t like you 
or don’t want you to feel welcome. No one is born knowing this stuff. More and more, we will have to teach it.

And then there’s the problem that Bacon himself exemplifies: People like him aren’t joining our churches 
because people like him aren’t joining our churches. Many, many UU churches have a bootstrapping problem 
— racially, generationally, 
and across divides we may not even be aware of. Waiting for Perry Bacon to show up 
and bring his community with him 
is probably not a viable outreach strategy 
— but I’m not sure what is. 

And if he did show up with a cohort of friends -- 
younger, darker, 
hoping to change the church to better serve their needs -- 
what then? Would we see them as an opportunity, or as a threat? We come here now because we’re happy now. And new members, 
especially members different from us, 
might change things. How will we preserve what we need 
without sending away
 people whose needs are different?

And then, there’s the challenge churches always face, 
whether they’re growing or shrinking: How do we make the cost/benefit balance work? How do we reach out to more people 
without burning out the people who are already here?

Having raised the cost/benefit issue, 
I have to mention a challenging question 
Christian writer Jake Meador posed in The Atlantic: In our busy 21st-century lives, 
we may think we need a church 
that asks less of us. But what if what we really need 
a church that asks more of us, 
one that calls us to transform our busy life
 rather than just squeeze church into it? 

“Contemporary America,” he writes, 
“simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment 
as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy 
for forms of community 
that don’t contribute to one’s professional life. Workism reigns in America, 
and because of it, community in America, 
religious community included, 
is a math problem that doesn’t add up."

He continues: “The problem in front of us 
is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society 
that doesn’t have room for church. The problem is that many Americans 
have adopted a way of life 
that has left us lonely, anxious, 
and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.”

I know how exhausting church responsibilities can be, 
so I don’t want to press the ask-more idea too hard. But think about it. Chew on it for a while.

So I’ve described a lot of challenges, 
but not all churches are failing. I only stop by a couple times a year, 
but everything I’ve seen at this church lately looks encouraging. My own church in Massachusetts 
recently came out the other side of a rough patch: Our minister of 31 years retired just as Covid was hitting. A lot of members decided this was a good time 
to take an extended vacation from church, 
and we wondered if they would ever come back. But our search committee did a good job of finding a new minister, 
and the congregation seems to be on the upswing again.

[Here I have edited out a couple of stories about churches I know that are struggling, for fear the churches are a little too recognizable.] One of my friends ministered to another UU church 
a little over an hour from Boston. I spoke there a few times. They have a lovely sanctuary 
that decades ago would hold hundreds, but they can’t afford to heat it in the winter, 
so we met in a side room with a couple dozen chairs.

In short, the future could go either way. Having invoked Emerson, 
I have to pass on one of my favorite Emerson quotes: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, 
if we but know what to do with it.”

So why am I bringing this up today? What am I hoping you take away from this talk? (This is that point where you might come back from your side track.)

I’m sure I’m not the first person to say 
it would be good if this church grew. I’m not the first person to try to sell you the vision 
of a congregation that becomes more racially diverse, 
and that renews itself by pulling in a new generation of young families. The UUA is full of consultants who will tell you that. 

But even if we agree with that vision,
 too often we repeat those statements
in the same tone of voice we use when we talk about cleaning out our garages or starting an exercise program. Of course it would be nice, 
but where are we going to find the time and energy to do it?

What I’m trying to do today 
is throw another coin on the motivation side of the scale: We don’t need to do this just for ourselves. In fact, our individual motives sometimes pull the other way: If my friends are here already, 
how much bigger does the church need to be? But growing Unitarian Universalist churches, 
and changing them so that they’re better equipped to grow, 
is something we need to do for the world. The world needs the kind of institutions we could build.

Many years ago, 
my church held a brainstorming afternoon 
to compose a new mission statement. The goal was to have a concise answer to the question: 
“What are we trying to do here?” 
so that every proposed project 
could be judged by how well it helped us do that thing.

I drew a complete blank that afternoon, 
and contributed almost nothing. The mission statement we came up with 
was one of those multi-subordinate-clause paragraphs 
that was all very well-intentioned. But I don’t remember it 
and I never hear anyone quote it.

A few months later I was out for a walk 
when what I should have proposed popped into my head: Becoming the people the world needs.

That’s what we ought to be doing. The world needs thoughtful, committed, compassionate, truth-seeking people. Right now, we may not always be those people. But we aspire to become them, 
and we come together as a community 
to help each other work on that aspiration.

Lately, though, I’ve been realizing that 
“becoming the people the world needs” 
isn’t quite good enough, because it only covers our individual growth. I think we also need to care about 
building the institution the world needs.

And so that’s the question I’d like to leave you with: Right here, right now, 
what church-resembling institution does Quincy need? And how could this church move 
in the direction of becoming that institution?

Closing words

The closing words are by William Wordsworth: 
“What we have loved, Others will love; and we will teach them how.”

Maintaining a Healthier Relationship with the News

 presented at First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts
August 11, 2024

As most of you probably know, I write a weekly news and politics blog called The Weekly Sift. I’ve been doing it for more than 20 years.

And all that time, people have been telling me the same thing: “I could never do that. Following the news is just too depressing.”

While some people say that in a matter-of-fact way, UUs typically say it in a tone of self-criticism. Because Unitarian Universalism is a this-world religion, we feel like we ought stay informed about this world. But too often we end up bouncing back and forth between obsessive anxiety and depression when we do follow the news, and guilt when we don’t. So many, many UUs have an unsatisfying relationship with the news.

That’s what I want to talk about today: How could you relate to the news in a healthier, more positive way?

I want to start with a couple of simple suggestions. Then I’ll look back to a bad period in my own recent relationship with the news and draw some conclusions from it. And finally I’ll close with some general observations 
on what I think of as the “spirituality” of the news.

First the simple stuff. The reason the Sift comes out weekly is that I believe most Americans consume news at the wrong pace. The 24/7 news cycle tempts us into frequent, shallow interactions with the news rather than fewer, deeper ones. So in the course of a week you may spend an hour on some particular topic or event, but probably you’ve just processed the same five minutes 12 times. You’ve heard the same facts, felt the same emotions, and thought the same thoughts over and over again.

For example, think about watching coverage of a mass shooting. In the first five minutes you’ll learn where it was, an estimate — possibly wrong — of how many people were killed or injured, and whether the shooter is dead, in custody, or still at large.

At that point, you know all the information that is publicly available, and there may not be anything more for several days. If you want, you can keep watching the continuous coverage for three more hours. But you won’t learn anything new?

That pattern is more common than you probably think. Surprisingly often, you’d be better off following a story week by week rather than minute by minute.

My second simple suggestion is to be wary of speculation. It’s a rare day when the news networks actually uncover 
24 hours worth of information. So they pad their schedules with panels of “experts” who try to guess what will happen next. Very few of these pundits predict the future all that well, but they fill the time.

Sometimes, speculating about what’s going to happen next is fun. That’s why we do it in our personal conversations. Do you think the Red Sox will make the playoffs? Will that couple get married eventually? How is the final season of Stranger Things going to wrap things up?

We have those speculative conversations because we enjoy them. And so, if you enjoy watching TV talking heads speculate, feel free. There’s no harm in it.

But it also has no value. So if you’re not enjoying it, if it’s making you tense or agitated, you can walk away and do something else.

So those are my two simple pieces of advice: Consume news at a slower pace that allows you to think about it 
rather than just react to it. And walk away from speculation that you aren’t enjoying.


Now let’s go a little deeper. Often mistakes have a lot to teach us, so I thought I’d tell you about a recent time when I mismanaged my own relationship with the news.

Back in February, as you may remember, Special Counsel Robert Hur released his report on Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents. He found no justification for pressing charges, but along the way he made gratuitous comments about President Biden’s mental competence. Biden responded with an angry press conference that made things worse. As he was leaving the room, he answered an unscripted question about Gaza, and said “Mexico” when he obviously meant “Egypt”.

That started a media frenzy similar to the one this summer that led to Biden dropping out of the race. That next week, 
the Annenberg School for Communication counted 26 unique articles about Biden’s age in the New York Times alone. And only one of them pointed out that Trump might also have an age problem. So for an entire week, 
Biden’s age blotted out all other considerations: his administration’s accomplishments, January 6th, and even Trump’s criminal indictments and plans for authoritarian government. None of that was worth discussing, because Biden was old.And I thought: “This is it. We’re going to replace democracy with authoritarianism because one man said ‘Mexico’ instead of ‘Egypt’.”
 
And that’s when the bottom fell out of my mood. I felt it physically, as if I were carrying a weight around. The effect lasted for several days. I would seem to be coming out of it, but then something would remind me and I’d sink back down again.

And I don’t think it was just me. In Paul Krugman’s subsequent column he seemed to be carrying a similar weight: “I am,” he wrote, “for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.”

OK. At this point we could go down at least two long sidetracks and never find our way back, like Biden’s actual mental competence, exactly how bad a second Trump term would be, and stuff like that. But talk to me about that some other time.

Right now, I’m more interested in that experience, that sudden mood collapse touched off by something in the news. If you’ve ever felt something like it, you know that the triggering information doesn’t have to relate to politics or elections. It could be about climate change or the Supreme Court or what corporate capitalism is doing to our culture or whatever else you happen to worry about.

One minute, you’re sailing along calmly, thinking, “Yeah, there are problems, but we’ll probably be OK.” And then you hear or see something. Maybe it’s a big thing, like the Dobbs decision or the October 7 attacks. But it doesn’t have to be. Maybe you hear about a heat wave in Asia. Or see police fighting with protesters. Or maybe a personal friend, somebody you’ve always respected, surprises you by repeating some hateful talking point about trans people or immigrants.

And in an instant the bottom falls out. That guarded confidence you felt a minute ago is gone, and suddenly all you can think is: “We’re doomed. We’re on a track to some unthinkable dystopia, and nothing I do makes any difference. People don’t understand, and I can’t explain it to them, because I can’t figure out what they were thinking to begin with.”

I experienced this as depression and despair, but I know other people for whom it manifests as anger: How can so many people be so gullible or self-centered or short-sighted?

We don’t usually talk about these experiences, because it feels like confessing a weakness, or like a virus we don’t want to pass on. If I’m panicking inside, I don’t want to tell you about it, because I don’t want you to panic too.

But I think we do need to talk about this, for at least two reasons. First, because when this happens to you, it’s really unpleasant. Despair is one of the most painful emotions out there, so the less time you can spend in it, the better.

And second, it’s debilitating. When that sinkhole opens up or that volcano of rage erupts, it’s hard to keep doing any of the constructive things you ordinarily do. And if you do manage to keep doing them, you probably aren’t doing them very well. I know that when I’m coming from a place of fear or anger, when I’m running away from an internal panic, I have bad judgment and find it hard to connect with people. In situations where I’d like to communicate confidently and persuasively, what tends to come through instead is my anxiety. So despair, depression, and anger 
tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies. If you and everyone like you are panicking, that can easily turn into something to panic about.

FDR famously said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. But that quote skates over the fact that fear itself can be pretty fearsome.

After I surfaced again, I started asking people if they recognize this experience and, if so, what they do about it. I’ve learned two things from those conversations: First, not a single person has told me that they don’t know what I’m talking about. And second, from the remedies they suggest, I gather that most people experience this as a passing mood, a short-term unpleasantness that they just need to get over. So I’ve heard suggestions like: Eat something. Go walk in the woods. Watch a movie. Get a big hug from somebody.

And if you have a minor case, that works. Treat yourself like a malfunctioning device: Unplug yourself, wait a little while, and then plug yourself back in again.

But sometimes that only works for a few days, or until the next triggering event. News-induced despair or anger can be a recurring injury like a bad back or a trick knee. And if that’s the case, you need more than just a reboot, you need a strategy, a training regimen. You need to look for patterns in the outbreaks, to see what you need to strengthen and what you need to avoid.

One pattern in my life is that my blog gives me a weekly cycle. Monday mornings I put a lot of energy into getting the posts out, and that puts me in a vulnerable state Monday evenings and into Tuesday. So I’ve learned not to expect much of myself until Wednesday. Another thing I don’t do is double up Sunday services and Monday blogs. So you may have noticed that I’ve cancelled tomorrow’s Weekly Sift. I just don’t have the stamina to do both.

But I was doing all that in February, and it still wasn’t enough. And that got me looking at these sorts of crashes more deeply: What causes them? Is there some kind of mental hygiene that can prevent them?

Now, it’s tempting to say that the News itself is the cause, that the bad state of the World is making us feel this way. And if that’s true, then the only permanent solution is to stop paying attention altogether, or stop caring. That’s what Jackson Browne is wrestling with in the song. [Earlier in the service, we had listened to Jackson Browne’s song “Doctor, My Eyes”.] Maybe I should have closed my eyes rather than leaving them open for so long.

As you can imagine, I don’t want to go there. If we all do that, then the American experiment in self-government really is over, no matter who wins our elections. And if we stop paying attention to anything beyond our own private lives, our own loved ones and our own circle of friends, then our UU values become empty. Are people starving in Gaza? Is the planet going to be unlivable for future generations? Too bad for them. I’ve got my own problems.

So I was highly motivated to take a closer look at my February collapse and see what I could learn from it.

Think about the list of symptoms I experienced and that I’ve heard other people report: — paralyzing fear, despair, depression, and annihilating anger. To me, those are all symptoms of broken denial. You keep telling yourself that some unpleasant thing can’t happen, and then you get reminded that it can. So you get angry or depressed or fall into despair.

That tracks with my experience in February. I had been telling myself, and telling my readers, that the American people are basically sensible, and they’ll rise to the challenge of this election. Every voter starts paying attention on their own schedule, so at any given moment they might tell a pollster all kinds of things. But come November, 
most voters will look around, figure things out, and do the right thing.

But then for a week in February, nothing mattered but Biden’s age. And I was forced to admit: Maybe not.

Once you accept the diagnosis that the root problem is denial, it becomes important to understand what exactly you’ve been denying. This can be tricky, because the demons of Depression will do their best to fool you about it. Denial typically involves telling yourself that good things are going to happen, so Depression will try to convince you that the way to fix your mistake is to tell yourself that bad things are going to happen: Democracy is over. Climate change is going to destroy civilization. Rational thought can never compete with religious extremism. Humanity will never make any progress on poverty or war or bigotry. In short, we’re all doomed.

I went through that phase, as I imagine many of you have at one time or another.

But this kind of negative thinking is just the mirror image of the positive thinking that got me in trouble to begin with. Because my true mistake, the conclusion that needed replacing, wasn’t that the election was going to have a happy outcome. My true mistake was telling myself that I knew what was going to happen. Jumping from “I know things are going to turn out well” to “I know things are going to turn out badly” doesn’t undo that denial, it maintains it.

Because here’s the scary, humbling, but true thought that I was actually denying: I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can guess. I can speculate. I can argue that one outcome is more likely than another. But when you come down to it, I just don’t know.

I don’t know who’s going to win the election. I don’t know if Trump will ever face justice. I don’t know how bad climate change will get before we turn it around, or if we even will turn it around. I don’t know what future wars we might find ourselves fighting. I don’t know what new plagues are out there. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out 
how to offer everyone a chance at a good life. I don’t know how long it will take the arc of the Universe to bend towards justice, or if it even wants to bend that way. Pick any problem or issue you care about, and I can’t promise you anything. Because I just don’t know.

And that, I think, is the essence of a problem we all face: How do we keep going, keep striving, keep doing whatever we can to give humanity its best chance to thrive — without falsely promising ourselves that whatever we’re doing is certain to work?

The answer to that question, I believe, is that we need to have a deeper appreciation of the difference between Optimism and Hope,And learn to practice Hope. We often use those two words interchangeably, but they’re actually quite different.

Optimism, like Pessimism, is a belief about the future: It will go well or it will go badly. But Hope is an attitude towards the Present. Hope says that striving is worthwhile. It doesn’t promise an outcome. It just says that trying is better than not trying. The future will always be uncertain, but Hope is what allows us to accept that uncertainty and keep going.

UUs ought to be good at this, because our religion has never offered us certainty. Unitarian Universalism doesn’t postulate a God who promises happy endings. It doesn’t guarantee us a place in Heaven or assure us that we’ll all meet again after death. Unitarian Universalism just says that living a good life is better than living a bad life. Focus on that, and have hope.

I think that’s an important lesson to remember right now, because in recent weeks the news cycle has turned again.
Biden dropping out of the race ended several weeks of what (from my point of view) was a really bad news cycle. And now, suddenly, we’re in a very good news cycle. People like me are excited again and polls are shifting. All the momentum is what I consider good momentum.

So it’s tempting to start buying into Optimism again, to tell myself that everything’s going to be fine, that on election night I’ll have the pleasure of watching good people win and bad people lose. And that may happen, but I don’t want to get attached to it. I don’t want to start the whole manic/depressive cycle going again. The mental hygiene I’m trying to live by is Hope, not Optimism. I want to strive for good things without ever losing sight of the possibility that they may not happen.

I recommend that attitude not just for this election, but for all other political issues, and for challenges in your personal life as well: Don’t spend a lot of time in the future, living in positive or negative scenarios that may never occur. Just keep striving for the best outcome you can reasonably imagine, and then let things happen as they will.

We don’t get to choose the future, but we do get to choose our own actions.  

Choose well.

Hope, Denial, and Healthy Relationship with the News

a service presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on May 5, 2024

Opening Words

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
and the slow parade of fears 
(without crying).
Now I want to understand.

I have done all that I could 

to see the evil and the good 
(without hiding)
You must help me if you can.

Doctor, my eyes tell me what is wrong.
Was I unwise 
to leave them open for so long?

- Jackson Browne

Reading

In addition to its plot and characters, the novel All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren is one of the greatest storehouses of metaphors in American literature. Here’s one relevant to today’s topic:

It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second.

While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself.

The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know too. But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing.

Sermon

I’m taking a bit of a risk this morning.

Whenever I write a talk, I try to keep certain balances in mind. To me, those balances define what it means for a talk to be a Unitarian sermon rather than an academic lecture or a political speech or some other kind of sermon.

One of those balances is between the personal and the universal. I think a Unitarian sermon needs to be personal. It shouldn’t just be a collection of abstract notions I think you’ll find interesting. The topic should mean something to me and figure in my life. But on the other hand, a Unitarian sermon shouldn’t just be personal.  It shouldn’t be idiosyncratic. My experiences and struggles should illustrate some larger, more universal point, because this isn’t therapy and you didn’t come here to listen to my problems.

Today, though, I’m talking about an experience that I know is personal, but I’m only guessing about its universality. I think maybe something similar happens to a lot of you also, but we tend not to talk about things like this, so I don’t really know.

The experience is an intense spiraling downward that gets triggered not by anything in my personal life, but from my interaction with the news. I hear about something in the outside world, the public world that we all share, and then the walls come tumbling down.

Let me tell you the last time this happened to me. The trigger — which, looking back, seems kind of trivial, but these things usually do after a few months — was the Hur report. Maybe you remember: Robert Hur was the special counsel tasked with investigating President Biden’s unauthorized retention of classified documents, an investigation that in some ways paralleled the one that led to former President Trump’s Florida indictment. The bottom line of that investigation, from my partisan perspective, was positive: Hur found nothing that would justify pressing charges. As an official matter, the case was closed.

But along the way, he took a swipe at Biden’s mental competence, describing the president as “an elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age”. Biden responded with an angry press conference that made things worse. As he was leaving the room, he answered an unscripted question about Gaza, and said “Mexico” when he obviously meant “Egypt”.

And then the media frenzy was on. According to the CSS Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication: During the next week the New York Times alone published 26 unique articles about Biden’s age, only one of which pointed out that age might also be a problem for Trump. For a week, Biden’s age blotted out all other considerations: It mattered more than anything his administration had accomplished, more than Trump’s plans for authoritarian government, and even more than January 6th. Nothing else was worth discussing, because Biden is old.

And I thought, “My God, we’re doomed. We’re going to lose our democracy because one man said Mexico instead of Egypt.”

And that’s when the bottom fell out of my mood. The effect lasted for several days. I would seem to be coming out of it, but then something would remind me and I’d sink back down again.

In Paul Krugman’s subsequent column he didn’t talk explicitly about his emotions, but I imagined he was having a similar experience: “I am,” he wrote, “for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.”

OK. From here I could go into a long rant about the importance of this election, or how the media is covering it, or why in spite of everything I’m still hopeful about November. But that’s not where I want to go.

No, what I want to talk about is that experience, that sudden mood collapse touched off by something in the news. The something doesn’t have to relate to politics or elections. It could be about climate change or the Supreme Court or what corporate capitalism is doing to our culture or whatever else you happen to worry about.

One minute, you’re sailing along calmly, thinking, “Yeah, there are problems, but we’ll be OK.” And then you hear or see something. Maybe it’s a big thing, like the Dobbs decision or the October 7 attacks. But it doesn’t have to be. Maybe you hear about a heat wave in Asia. Or see police fighting with protesters. Or maybe somebody you know, somebody you thought knew better, surprises you by repeating some hateful political talking point about trans people or immigrants.

And in an instant the bottom falls out. That guarded confidence you felt a minute ago is gone, and suddenly all you can think is: “We’re doomed. We’re on a track to some unthinkable dystopia, and nothing I do makes any difference. People don’t understand, and I can’t explain it to them, because I can’t even imagine what they were thinking to begin with.”

I experience this as depression and despair, but I know other people for whom it manifests as anger: How can so many people be so stupid or self-centered or short-sighted?

We don’t usually talk about these experiences, because it feels like confessing a weakness, or like a virus we don’t want to pass on. If I’m panicking inside, I don’t want to tell you about it, because I don’t want you to panic too. But I think we do need to talk about this, for at least two reasons. First, because when this happens to you, it’s really unpleasant. Despair is one of the most painful emotions out there, so the less time you can spend in it, the better.

And second, it’s debilitating. When that sinkhole opens up or that volcano of rage erupts, it’s hard to keep doing any of the constructive things you ordinarily do. And if you do manage to keep doing them, you probably aren’t doing them very well. I know that when I’m coming from a place of fear or anger, when I’m running away from an internal panic, I have bad judgment and find it hard to connect with people. In situations where I’d like to communicate confidently and persuasively, what tends to come through instead is my anxiety and fear. So despair, depression, and anger tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies. If you and everyone like you are panicking, that in itself can be something to panic about.

Ever since February I’ve been wandering around asking people if they recognize this experience and, if so, what they do about it. I’ve learned two things from those conversations: First, not a single person has told me that they don’t know what I’m talking about. And second, from the remedies they suggest, I gather that most people experience this as a passing mood, a short-term unpleasantness that they just need to get over.  So I’ve heard suggestions like: Eat something. Get a good night’s sleep. Go walk in the woods. Watch a movie. Get a big hug from somebody. Snuggle with a pet.

In essence, these remedies treat a poor mental state like a malfunctioning device. You don’t need to understand exactly what went wrong. Just unplug it and then plug it in again. Reboot, and hope the problem goes away. Most of the time, it does.

But sometimes it doesn’t. Or it goes away for a day or a week, and then the whole pattern repeats itself: You hear that the bird flu might lead to another pandemic, read about another species going extinct, hear somebody else confidently proclaim their racism or sexism, and the roller coaster takes another dive.

At this point, you need more than just a distracting hobby or a comfort animal. You need a strategy.

The beginning of strategy is noticing patterns. One pattern I’ve noticed in my life is a weekly cycle. I post my political blog on Monday mornings. And even though I’ve been assembling it all week, Monday morning usually requires about six hours of intense concentration. In particular, it’s emotional concentration, because I test each sentence for all the ways it could be misunderstood, and all the unintentional insults I might be dealing out to readers who come to this topic with life experiences different from mine. By Monday afternoon my empathy is exhausted, including my empathy for myself. So Monday evenings are difficult for me, and I’m highly vulnerable to these kinds of collapses.

I’ve tried a number of remedies, but the one that works best is simple acceptance: This is what Monday evening feels like. Notice it, accept it, don’t make it worse, but also don’t take it too seriously. I get through Monday, try not to expect much out of myself on Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning I’m almost always fine.

In the Carlos Castenada books, Don Juan talks about stalking your dysfunctions the way that a hunter stalks prey. In this case, you may need to stalk your fear, despair, anger, or other negativity. Find out where it hangs out, where it comes from, where it goes, and plan your strategy accordingly.

But sometimes even that doesn’t work. And at this point, you might wonder whether you’re in the territory of that old vaudeville joke: A guy walks in to his doctor’s office and says “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” And the doctor responds: “Don’t do that.”

Does it hurt when you pay attention to the news? Don’t do that. Stop looking. Stop caring about elections or the planet or global injustice or anything beyond what you need to get through your day. That’s the question Jackson Browne was wrestling with in the opening words: I’ve been living with my eyes open. Was that a mistake?

Now, for me, not paying attention to the news would mean shutting down my blog, which has become a major part of my identity. But even without that consideration, I also think it would betray my Unitarian values.

As Unitarians, I don’t believe we’re supposed to be fat and happy. I think we’re supposed to be active, well-informed citizens. I think we’re supposed to be involved in the give-and-take of democracy. And even to lead those discussions to the extent that we’re able. As a religious movement, we take seriously Thomas Jefferson’s warning: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”

But that said, sometimes you do need to step back and let the world manage without you for a week or two. We all, I think, have inside us that sad little fetus Robert Penn Warren was talking about, the one that wants to stay warm in its not knowing. Once in a while, we need to show ourselves some compassion and take a little time to comfort that fetus.

And sometimes the negative pattern you’ve stalked to its lair is obsessiveness. So you need to ration your attention and set up circuit breakers to keep yourself from going down a rabbit hole. More than one person has told me that they need to enforce a rigorous bedtime to keep themselves from doomscrolling their news feeds far into the night. You can make those kinds of adjustments without permanently turning your back on the world.

I want to devote the rest of my time this morning to thinking about prevention. Short of ignoring the world’s problems, is there some regular practice, some mental hygiene, some healthy relationship to the news, that can prevent these sorts of mood collapses?

I think there is. But to understand it, we need a more precise diagnosis of the problem.

If you look at the kinds of responses I’ve mentioned — paralyzing fear, despair, depression, and annihilating anger — I think they’re all symptoms of broken denial. You keep telling yourself that some unpleasant thing can’t happen, and then you get reminded that it can. So you get angry or depressed or fall into despair.

That’s what happened to me in February. I had been telling myself, and telling my readers, that the American people are basically sensible, and they’ll rise to this challenge. Every voter starts paying attention on their own schedule, so at any given moment they might tell a pollster all kinds of things. But come November, most voters will look around, figure things out, and do the right thing.

But then for a week in February, nothing mattered but Biden’s age. And I was forced to admit: Maybe not.

So if the root problem is denial, then the obvious solution is to live without denial. But that’s a lot easier said than done. Perfect perception of reality is not given to human beings. We all piece together our worldviews from a few facts, some reasonable deductions, a little hearsay, a few wild guesses, and maybe a bit of wishful thinking. No matter how hard you work on your picture of reality, the world is going to continue to surprise you.

And figuring out how to respond to those surprises gets tricky. Take my response to the Hur report. That mood crash should have told me that I had been in denial about something. But what exactly? What was the belief that events had exposed as dysfunctional? And what was the right belief to replace it with? It’s really easy to get this wrong, and many people do.

Here’s one way I could have thought it through: What got me in trouble, what got exposed as denial, was my belief that the American people are going to do the right thing in November.

So maybe the correct view, the thing I need to admit to myself, is that the American people are going to do the wrong thing. The Republic is doomed. We’re going to vote to end democracy once and for all. That’s just how it is.

I see people do this all the time: If my positive belief is denial, then the exactly opposite negative belief must be true. Climate change is going to destroy civilization. Rational thought can never compete with religious extremism. Humanity will never make any progress on poverty or war or bigotry. We’re all doomed.

I say I could have thought it through that way, but it’s actually worse than that: I did. For several days I tormented myself with those kinds of negative thoughts.

But eventually I realized that this kind of thinking was just the flip side of the same denial. Because my true mistake, the conclusion that needed replacing, wasn’t that the election will have a happy outcome. My true mistake was telling myself that I know what’s going to happen. Jumping from “I know things are going to turn out well” to “I know things are going to turn out badly” wasn’t undoing my denial, it was maintaining it.

Because here’s the scary, humbling, but true thought that I was actually denying: I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can guess. I can speculate. I can argue that one outcome is more likely than another. But when you come down to it, I just don’t know.

I don’t know who’s going to win the election. I don’t know if Trump will ever face justice. I don’t know how bad climate change will get before we turn it around, or if we even will turn it around. I don’t know what future wars we might find ourselves fighting. I don’t know what new plagues are out there. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out how to organize humanity to offer everyone a chance at a good life. I don’t know how long it will take the arc of the Universe to bend towards justice, or if it’s even bending that way at all. Pick any problem or issue you care about, and I can’t promise you anything. Because I just don’t know.

And that, I think, is the essence of the problem we all face: How do we keep going, keep striving, keep doing whatever we can to give humanity its best chance to thrive — without falsely promising ourselves that whatever we’re doing is certain to work?

My best response to that question is actually in one of my previous talks, the one I gave during the Covid lockdown, when we were meeting over Zoom with the congregation in La Crosse. Remember? I talked about hope.

My hope at the time was that if you remembered anything from that talk, it would be this: Hope is neither optimism nor pessimism. Optimism and pessimism are beliefs about the future, but hope is an attitude towards the present. Hope says that striving is worthwhile. It doesn’t promise you an outcome. It just says that trying is better than not trying.

So in conclusion, that’s the mental hygiene I’ve been trying to live by these last few months, and that I recommend: Cultivate your capacity for hope, and regularly exercise your ability to live and function in the presence of uncertainty.

Whether we’re talking about the election, climate change, some other public issue, or even some challenge in your personal life, try to avoid both optimism and pessimism. Try to avoid either promising yourself a positive outcome or getting lost in some negative scenario. Just keep striving for the best outcome you can reasonably imagine, and then let things happen as they will.

We don’t get to choose the future, but we do get to choose our own actions.  

Choose well.

Closing Words

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance. -- Benjamin Franklin

My Humanist Afterlife

Presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois
12 November 2023

In the traditional wheel of the year, fall is when things come to a conclusion. You can see different aspects of that theme in the season’s two major holidays: Thanksgiving is about harvest, and Halloween is about death.

The great UU preacher and author Forrest Church once summed up all of religion as “our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die”. That’s what I want to talk about today.

Most of us deal with that challenge, at least in part, by practicing denial. Yes, we’ll die, but let’s not think about that right now.

This is the attitude Don Juan cautioned Carlos Castaneda against when he told him to “use Death as an advisor”. Simply by living, we use up a finite resource. When we deny Death or ignore it, we lose sight of that finiteness. And so we might be tempted to fritter time away. Death would advise us value our time more highly.

A second kind of denial is embedded in many religions, which teach that death is not as real as it looks: The body that dies is not important; it’s just the housing for a soul, which lives on eternally. In Christianity, that eternal life happens in Heaven or Hell. In many Eastern religions, the soul traverses a series of incarnations as anything from an insect to a god.

As I’ve mentioned in previous talks, I grew up at St. James [Lutheran Church in Quincy] with a very literal Christian theology, and my parents maintained that faith for their entire lives.

In 2011, my mother’s funeral was held at Hansen Spear [a local funeral home]. When I wrote about it later for UU World, I confessed how isolated I had felt as I listened to the minister’s description of Heaven, that perfect place where Mom now was and where we would all someday join her. Because as appealing as that story can be, and as much as I might want to believe it, I simply could not. Trying to assemble that vision in my mind was like building a house of cards that kept falling apart as fast as I could construct it.

Something I never wrote about is a very sad and difficult conversation I had with my father a year and a half later, shortly before his death. Dad knew he was dying, and in fact looked forward to it, because he believed he would see Mom again, along with his parents, sisters, and many old friends. My sister still practiced the Lutheran faith, so he was confident she also would arrive in Heaven eventually.

But as Death approached, he was now facing the fact that I probably would never get there. So he needed to say good-bye to me, and it was hard for him.

It was hard for me too. First, because no one wants to be included in his father’s list of dying regrets. And second, because my religion is something I take pride in, and to his final breath, Dad never understood.

As Dad was saying his good-byes to me, I think that he came as close as he ever would to having the Universalist epiphany, a religious awakening that Christians here and there have been experiencing since the earliest days of the faith: the realization that Heaven can’t truly be a place of perfect bliss if anybody you care about is missing. And if everybody is loved by somebody, then the only Christian salvation that makes sense is universal salvation. If we don’t all make it to Heaven, it can’t really be Heaven.

But Dad never crossed over into Universalism, and I did not push him, and he died.

That UU World column I mentioned implied a question that I don’t think I’ve ever answered in public: If I can’t believe in the Christian afterlife I was taught at St. James, what do I believe? Have I come to some alternative vision? Or have I made peace with the idea that Death is final and there’s nothing more to say? Or do I just try not to think about it?

Well, the first thing I want to say is that since I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist, I’ve heard several theories of what persists after Death. And I have to confess, that if the goal is to help me make peace with my own death, I haven’t found them particularly helpful.

For example, I often hear that we live on in the effects of our actions, and particularly in the influence we’ve had on the lives of others. And while that’s certainly true, if you find it comforting, you have way more confidence in the efficacy of your good intentions than I have in mine.

How many of us can say with any confidence what the ultimate consequences of our actions will be, or if, when they’re all are added up, the sum total will be positive or negative. That kind of assessment is a Judgement Day I don’t think I want to face.

I also hear that we live on in the memories of those we leave behind. Now, I appreciate that this thought comforts survivors, and helps us get past that period when grief seems overwhelming. It encourages us to hang onto our memories of those we have lost, even through that period where those memories are most painful. As President Biden has said, “There will come a day, I promise you, when the thought of your son, or daughter, or your wife or your husband, brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.“

But as I look ahead to my own death, the thought of living on as a memory is not that consoling. For one thing, the people who know me best may not live much longer than I do.

And as for the others, let me put it like this: Do you ever overhear people talking about you? Whether they’re saying good things or bad things, how accurate is it? The thought that similar conversations might still be happening ten, twenty, fifty years after your death — how satisfying is that?

When I floated this topic on Facebook this week, I heard a third idea that I hadn’t even thought about: the satisfaction of letting your corpse dissolve into the Earth, so that its elements can be taken up by new life.

Those comments were a lesson to me in how different people find meaning in different places. Because I don’t really care what happens to my corpse. I’m with Socrates on this: According to Plato, when Crito asked Socrates what to do with his body, he replied: “Do whatever you want, as long as you don’t imagine that it is me.”

In short, if the point is to make peace with being alive and knowing that I’m going to die, I’m going to have to look for that peace somewhere else. But where?

Before I start trying to answer that I need to lay down some ground rules. First, I can’t just try to talk myself into believing something because it’s pleasant and I want to believe it. If that was going to work for me, I’d still be a Lutheran.

And second, I believe in Occam’s Razor. So I’m not going to postulate whole realms and forces and choirs of angels unless something in my lived experience suggests they exist.

Now, that said, I differ from a lot of humanists in having a fairly loose definition of what counts as experience. So if you’re like Ezekiel, and you’ve been granted a vision of going up to the throne of God and being shown what’s what, I wouldn’t tell you to ignore it. But nothing like that has happened to me, not even in dreams. So I’m limited to constructing my vision out of fairly mundane materials.

My final prior consideration concerns how humanists tend to go wrong when we reason about spiritual matters. Too often, we don’t back up far enough. We take the questions traditional religion asks, and we try to answer them within that established framework, but using only the evidence humanly available. And so the answer usually winds up being “I don’t believe in that.” — which may be honest, but is seldom very helpful.

So if you let the question be “What happens to the soul after the body dies?”, and if the possible answers are “It dies too”, or “It reincarnates”, or “It moves on to some eternal realm”, then I’ll probably wind up saying “I don’t believe in a soul”. And how does that help?

So I think I need to start further back. What the heck is a soul  supposed to be anyway?

Your soul, if you listen to the people who believe in such things, is the essence of who you are. It stays with you, or more accurately, it is you, all the way from birth to death.

Try to think, for a moment about the totality of your life: all the changes, all the relationships, all the roles, all the careers, all the responsibilities, all the activities and interests that dominated your attention for some period of time and then were replaced by something else. Does it feel like there’s been an essence to all that? Do you really feel like you’ve been the same person, all the way from birth to the present moment?

Personally, I don’t. I find myself agreeing with Joan Didion, who wrote: “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”

The narrator of Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men describes an even more fragmented experience of identity: Travel, he says, is a frail thread that connects “the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place. You ought to invite those two you’s to the same party, some time. Or you might have a family reunion for all the you’s with barbecue under the trees. It would be amusing to know what they would say to each other.”

I wonder the same thing sometimes. At age 14, I wanted to be a baseball pitcher. In high school, I was on the chess team and spent all my free time working on my game. For a time, I thought I would be a novelist. My first career was as a mathematician, and for years math was as all-consuming as any interest I’ve ever had.

I don’t do any of that stuff now. So am I really the same person? If any of those past versions of me could look into the future, would they feel vindicated or fulfilled by the person I am today? I’m not so sure. More and more, I suspect that there is no essential Me that has been present through my full 67 years.

That lack of identification explains why both reincarnation and Heaven fall flat for me. Suppose that someday after my death a baby is born who remembers nothing of my life, the people I loved, or the things I tried to do. In what sense could that baby possibly be me reincarnated? That eternal essence we supposedly share is so abstract that I can’t identify.

I also have trouble identifying with myself in Heaven. Think back over your life and consider the extent to which you have been shaped by imperfections, both in yourself and in the outside world.

Maybe you spent much of your life overcoming a disability, or trying to win the approval of a difficult authority figure, or fighting addiction or depression, or living up to unrealistic expectations, or competing with a brother or sister, or dealing with poverty, or believing that you’re ugly or unlovable, or facing the consequences of mistakes you made, or battling society’s bias against people like you.

Your whole life has been shaped by imperfection: the imperfections of your body, your character, the people you lived with, or the society you lived in. How you dealt with those challenges is a big part of who you are today.

Now imagine yourself transported to a perfect place, where none of that matters. All your questions have been answered. Your conflicts with others are now just misunderstandings that have been resolved. Your physical or psychological wounds are healed, and so on. Who are you, in that world? Is that really somebody you can identify with? Is that really you living on?

So I could stop here. But if I did, this would be another one of those typical nay-saying humanist talks: A bunch of people believe in X, Y, and Z, but I don’t. And the unstated implication would be that if you do believe something and it gives you comfort in the face of Death, then I think you’re just wrong. The end. Sing the closing hymn.

But instead, let’s take a step further back and see if we can still solve the original problem somehow. Remember: I’m supposed to be responding to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. I’ve been working with the idea that my soul is some kind of eternal essence, and trying to imagine how this essential Me can transcend Death. 

And I haven’t done very well with it. So I could just say, “That’s it. I’m done. Death is Death. Deal with it.” But what if we think of the soul differently? “OK,” I imagine you saying, “but different how?”

I want to introduce my soul model with an anecdote that’s meant to be amusing: A man takes his son aside and says, “I want you to have this; it’s your great-greatfather’s ax. Your grandfather replaced the head. And I replaced the handle.”

Now, you may notice that those two pieces are the whole ax. So not a single atom of what the man is handing down actually belonged to the boy’s great-grandfather. And yet, there is also some kind of continuity that goes back that far.

In philosophy, this conundrum is known as the Ship of Theseus. Plutarch tells us that the city of Athens preserved the ship on which Theseus returned from Crete after his adventure with the Minotaur. But rather than let it rot in a museum, they kept it seaworthy by replacing pieces as they wore out. Over the centuries, probably every plank of it had been replaced at one time or another. So in what sense was it still the Ship of Theseus?

See where I’m going with this? What if I think of my soul not as an eternal essence, but as a Ship of Theseus? It’s more or less the same from one day to the next, but pieces are constantly wearing out and being replaced. So while there’s continuity all the way back to my first breath, if I look back twenty years or forty years or sixty years, I barely recognize myself.

That feels more right to me somehow. It fits with how I experience my life and think about my past. But how does it help?

A few minutes ago I talked about the experience of looking back at moments in my life and not identifying with them. And I projected forward, imagining futures beyond my death and how I would have a hard time identifying with them as well.

But now let’s talk about the opposite experience. There are people who are not you at all. But when you see them, and what they’re going through, you identify completely. Say there’s a new kid at school who doesn’t know anybody and doesn’t fit into anything yet. And you’re not a new kid. You know lots of people and feel at home in all sorts of situations. But you remember when you were the new kid, and you feel a strong connection.

Or maybe you’re older and your children are grown and out of the house, but you talk to a young parent who feels overwhelmed in exactly the way you felt overwhelmed. Or you’re a teacher, and you see a student touched for the first time by a piece of great literature, just like you were. Or someone’s mother has died, and you remember how it felt when your mother died. Or you’re at a wedding (maybe of a couple you don’t even know, because you’re just somebody’s plus-one), but you savor the bittersweet memory of imagining a whole life stretching out in front of you with all those possibilities. 

You know what I’m talking about. Those people are not you. And yet, in some significant way, they are.

Or maybe, in some small way, they’re somebody else, somebody important to you. Someone you’ve lost. You see a smile or a gesture, or hear a tone of voice, and — just for a moment — it’s your old friend, your brother, the girl you took to the prom. It’s a small thing. And yet, it’s not.

My Ship of Theseus may be a unique collection of parts. But a lot of those parts were mass produced. I can look around and see them in other people’s ships. When I see another ship with one of my parts, or maybe a part I replaced long ago, I feel the connection.

That’s how I’m hoping to live on.

What doesn’t work for me in the traditional notions of an afterlife is that they promise to preserve my uniqueness. And that doesn’t feel credible to me, because I see my uniqueness as just an idea, an abstraction. What connects me to that baby born 67 years ago is so ephemeral, it barely matters to me. And if that thin thread somehow stretches into the infinite future, I’m not sure I care.

But what I believe is going to live on, and what I do feel strongly about, is my commonality, the ways that I am like other people. The challenges that shaped my life — people will go on facing those challenges. Some of them will rediscover the same responses I came up with. And some will do better. Probably right now, there are people out there somewhere facing situations that I screwed up, and they’re fixing my mistakes. There’s something satisfying about that thought.

The things I have been, other people will continue to be. The battles I have fought, other people will continue fighting. The relationships I have had, other people won’t have exactly those relationships, but they’ll have similar ones. My closest, most special relationships, maybe they won’t turn up that often. But they are part of the broad range of human possibility. And sometime, somewhere, other people will stumble down that same path.

When that happens, will I be looking down from some eternal realm, sharing their moment? Maybe not. But I don’t think I need that.

What I need, if I’m going to make peace with Death right here and right now, is to imagine those people, to be aware of my similarity to them, and to feel a sense of connection stretching out into the indefinite future. That connection seems real to me in a way that Heaven or future incarnations don’t seem real.

And you may feel differently. But for me, right now, it’s enough.

Closing words

The closing words are from The Grapes of Wrath:

Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one — an’ then …

Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be everywhere — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.

If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ — I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build – why, I’ll be there.

See?