Since before the beginning of time, since before the Roman calendar, since before BCE, since before AD, the question of the afterlife has been a reality in the here and now. Many faiths are clear on this subject, some less clear. There is great debate currently in the Evangelical movement about the basis of an afterlife that prescribes punishment or salvation, hell or heaven after death. It is not an abstract topic for many of us. It is not merely theological or historical or philosophical. It concerns us because by this point most of us know the pain of loss. We know the pain of losing someone dear to us, someone whose presence and memory continues to shape our lives. It is also not abstract because it has to do with us. It’s personal. What happens after we die? Is there nothing? Is there a reward or punishment awaiting us?
Many clergy in our faith tradition have wrestled with this subject. Forest Church, former minister of All Souls Church in New York City, engaged in this topic week after week as he battled cancer in his esophagus. He gave three farewell sermons, certain each time it would be his last, when he was given mere weeks left to live.
He kept getting better after each sermon he gave, prolonging his life longer than he expected. By his third sermon, he confessed to his congregation that he was slightly embarrassed to be giving his third farewell sermon. He told his congregation; “I think this will be my last. Truly, my last. But part of me still hopes it’s not.” He wrote a book during this time called “Love After Death,” a Universalist theology of the afterlife.
I know some of you are new to this faith, so you may have never heard about Universalism, or may appreciate a refresher if you have. Universalism, which is part of our faith, is concerned with this question of the afterlife. Universalism is the idea that universal salvation is a guarantee for every living person. There is no hell, no place of eternal damnation, and no sense of separation for persons based on belief or lack of belief, or even behavior. A scene depicted in the stained glass of one of our historic Universalist churches shows God dragging each person kicking and screaming into heaven. Why is each person kicking and screaming? Because Universalists said we were scared of heaven, because we were certain it was too good for us. Deep down we didn’t feel we deserved it, so we would rather content ourselves with purgatory, even hell.
Heaven somehow feels to far out of reach for us. Heaven may be appropriate for saints and those whose lives have moved our consciousness forward, but for the average person, it feels like too far of a reach.
Perhaps the place we most desire, the feeling we most yearn for, is the thing that we are most afraid of. We are afraid of peace, afraid of real connection, afraid to finally find something that actually satisfies us.
According to this Universalist view, God causes us to respond like Al Pacino in Godfather III: “Just when I thought I was out. They pull me back in.” Forest Church, toward the end of his life, inverted this relationship. Instead of seeing God as something outside us that was dragging each one of us into heaven, he saw that Love which is synonymous with God was something that each of has the capacity to give before we die. To the extent that we give this love away while we’re still alive, is the extent to which we have an afterlife. This was the conclusion he came to toward the end of his life. So he dedicated himself to giving as much love as he could to his congregation and to his community while he still had the chance.
Most people I know do not talk as certainly about the afterlife. Most people I speak with about this topic in this church and in the community take an agnostic approach: the afterlife may be a reality, it may not be. Who really knows? I admire an agnostic approach to most situations, because I think in doubt we have a chance at finding depth and something real rather than relying solely on belief. I admire those who feel that the best answer to the question of an afterlife is silence. But there are two kinds of silences as Mark Belletini points out. There is silence that is presence, and silence which is absence.
I have found through experience of personal losses, and through the experience of being with those who have recently lost a loved one or who are about to lose their own life, that there is a world of difference between silence that is presence and silence which is absence. I don’t have an answer definitively for you on the specifics of an afterlife, but I do have a guarantee. There is an afterlife. It’s a guarantee.
I have seen that in the course of a day, and certainly within the course of a life, that we will experience many little deaths, many opportunities for an afterlife. Some of these opportunities will occur naturally and some will demand an intentional choice. I have often also seen how a death of someone close to us can lead to an afterlife in our lifetime.
The clearest example of this is what I witnessed this last weekend here at church as part of a program that celebrated recovery from addiction, support for those who have lost loved ones to addiction, and continued education about understanding how addiction impacts our communities. It was a loving, sober, and compassionate event. Part of the event was a walk around Wick Park with shoes laid on the sidewalk side by side of each person who overdosed within the last year. As I walked, a mother told me the story of her son who owned one of those pair of shoes. As we walked, she told me that she had never been around so many people who lost like she did. She told me about her beautiful her son was, and how sensitive and talented he was.
As I listened, I felt like he was coming alive before me, but I know it didn’t bring him back, not completely. I know she was still in grief over his passing, but somehow there was a space for presence rather than absence. There was room for life in the space of a conversation about death.
The death of someone close to us never leaves us. This has been my experience. There is no philosophy or statement of belief that will completely swallow the grief, but remember the guarantee I offered: there is an afterlife. I saw many people at this recovery and awareness event who were living that afterlife. I saw mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters and sons, choosing to share their loss in compassion with others, rather than suffer entirely alone. I saw those who were newly sober, who have been able with the help of community and and a higher power of their understanding, to find something beyond addiction. I saw people from the community who were present to educate, rather than silence, those who are struggling.
It is most difficult to feel presence in the midst of great absence, but I have seen it happen again and again. I have entered many situations with individuals that I can’t understand how they can cope or keep moving through myriad circumstances, and yet they do. I have also seen the opposite. I’ve seen people with a seeming abundance of life: a great job, a beautiful family, community respect and support, who feel like they are in despair and can’t find hope. I have seen more than once situations where someone reaches a situation that they feel will be too much for them to handle.
In my version of the 5 people we meet in heaven, I believe there are at least 5 people who in certain moments see our life more clearly than we see our own. They see the opportunities of moments we can only find defeat in, and they see an afterlife where we see a certain ending.
I sense for each member and friend of this church, there is a yearning for some kind of afterlife. For some, it may be a feeling that there is something eternal that surpasses our understanding of mortality. For many more, I think it is a more practical yearning for some new chapter at the close of one that felt painful or unsatisfactory.
There is a yearning for a sense that there is something next: a next chapter, a next opportunity, a next shot at life. Well, I’m here to tell you that’s a guarantee. This guarantee will not make this new chapter simple, it may not make this new opportunity easy, it may not make this next shot at life a slam dunk, but it will be there. In this next chapter, this next opportunity, this next shot at life, it will be up to us to discover the veracity of this afterlife.
One of my favorite stories of Suzuki Roshi, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, is when he was newly in America. He had trouble speaking English that could communicate the deep truths he wished to impart. He struggled in front of his congregation to find the right words to get across his meaning. One of these times, a new student walked in to see this 5’1 Japanese man pacing back and forth on the platform where he was supposed to sit and give a talk. Suzuki Roshi was pacing out of frustration because he couldn’t find the words. As he was pacing a phrase came out of his mouth: “Today is not yesterday. It’s today.” This was the full content of his talk, this one line.
The student who sat in the hall that day heard this one line, and dedicated the next 40 years to Zen practice to discover for himself this simple phrase: “Today is not yesterday. It’s today.”
Sometimes language makes things more complicated than it needs to be. So I will do my best to give you a similar line to take away. “Today is not death. It’s the afterlife.” I would be remiss to not talk about Youngstown, in the context of this statement: “Today is not death. It’s the afterlife.” We have a narrative in Youngstown of the death of industry, and the death of viable possibility. It’s a story that I know many people in this congregation refuse to buy into, but the story remains. It remains because too many people are living in the ash of yesterday’s fire. Too many people feel they are living a waking death that is as predictable as their father’s or mother’s life. Too many people are disconnected from a viable sense of hope and possibility after decades of neglect and corruption. I know many of us know this. I say all this as a reminder to stress the point than an afterlife does us no good as a mere philosophy or theological perspective, if it does not breed hope and possibility in the here and now.
The afterlife I speak of is not a promise after our physical death. Though I know many ministers concern themselves with this question, honestly it is not the most important afterlife for me. I don’t want to wait for an afterlife. I want it now. I want it right now. I don’t want heaven later after I’ve lived my life. I want it now, and I want you to have heaven too, not later, but right now. It is available. It’s my guarantee, as unlikely as it seems. The heaven we seek is coming next, and is always next in line, coming toward us grabbing us by the ankles, dragging us into the afterlife of this day. We are mistaken if we think this is death or some kind of purgatory, biding our time. It is heaven, waiting for us to appreciate it. This heaven has been described by some like selling water by the river. You may think I’m selling you a line, but I’m just selling you water by the river, the same river that is ready to carry you into the next chapter, if you can settle yourself into it, and let it carry you all the way into the afterlife.
