“IMMORTALITY”

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Easter Sunday, April 12, 2009

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

The following words are quoted from the personal journal of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”

End quote.

Well, Waldo (his friends called him “Waldo”), you may be disappointed in what I have to say this morning. But I think I know what Emerson meant. On a subject like immortality, though, no one can say what they know, because no one knows anything. Most especially, me. Under such circumstances, it is safer to quote someone else who doesn’t know anything, so that they can be held responsible if it turns out to be wrong. You’ll be hearing a lot of that in the next few minutes.

Easter is filled with thoughts of immortality. The Biblical resurrection story about Jesus points us in that direction. The more ancient celebrations of the coming of Spring points us toward this idea. So this is the right time to think on this most puzzling of thoughts.

I speak today on immortality, not because I have any keen insight or understanding. On this topic, there are no experts -- at least no one living and able to talk about it. Everything that can be said is speculation. But apparently, there is quite a lot to be said about a subject concerning which no one knows anything for certain. In 1897, the great psychologist and philosopher William James gave a lecture on this topic, and he cited a book he used to prepare his lecture, and the book’s bibliography cited over 5,000 titles of other books on the subject of “immortality.” And that was over one hundred years ago.

This is a subject which everyone thinks about from time to time, especially when reflecting on the resurrection story, but no opinion is authoritative. I have no more authority than any of you. Seems like the perfect sermon topic to me.

The easiest way to approach immortality, of course, is metaphorically. It is not arguable that people who have made great impact on our world, whose work we turn to for wisdom, and whose life we look to for inspiration, can be considered “immortal.” Plato and Jesus and Leonardo di Vinci and Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.: to say that the impact of their lives continues as strong, maybe even stronger, than it did during their lives, is to say, in some sense, they are all immortal.

This metaphorical sense of immortality is true even among those who are not famous. Most of us carry something of our parents’ spirit, more than just their DNA, and we pass something significant of our lives on to our children or the world as well. What our lives mean does not end when we die.

This very deep sense of immortality is real and, I believe, true. As true as it may be, in one sense, it is also a cop-out. If by immortality we want to know whether our lives continue eternally, this metaphor is only slightly helpful.

Here is how Woody Allen said it: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying.”

In speaking about immortality, I hope to keep a couple of thoughts in mind. First, as I have said, no one knows with certainty what the facts are. That includes me. Secondly, it would be wrong to interpret anything I have to say literally. To speak of things which have no basis in fact the only way to speak is metaphorically.

What I want to do this morning is to offer an alternative understanding of immortality. It is a view somewhat foreign to our culture, and yet it probably has more adherents the world over than any other interpretation. I am not suggesting that this is the right interpretation, but I do think it is worthy of our deliberate consideration.

In some sense, the question of immortality has less to do with us, and more to do with what came before us and what will come after us. To me, the sense of immortality seems to be about having our lives linked to eternal things.

Kirsopp Lake offers, I think an intriguing metaphor about immortality:

“There was once an archipelago of islands off a mountainous coast separated from each other and from the mainland by the sea. But in the course of time as the sea dried up, the islands were joined to the great mountain behind them, and it became clear that they had always been united by solid ground under a very shallow sea. If those islands could have thought and spoken, what would they have said? Before that event they would have protested against losing their insularity (and individuality), but they would they have done so afterwards, when the water which divided them from each other was gone, and they knew that they were part of the great mountain which before they had only dimly seen, obscured by the mists rising from the sea?”

This image illustrates for me what is meant by being linked to eternal things. The fact is, of course, that when we think of an island, we think of a discrete and individual unit of land. The fact is, of course, that this is largely an illusion, and all land on earth is connected to all other land. There is no distinct break in the earth that connects Mount Everest to the Sahara Desert or Iceland with Hawaii. What Lake seemed to be saying is that in a similar sense the individuality of our personal identities is similarly an illusion, and that at some level, our personhood is linked not only to every other person, but also to a universal sense of person that passes through the years long before and long after us. The point of immortality, then, is to reveal, connect, and make more real the links we have to eternal things. Our immortal self survives after the illusory individual self fades, just as an individual island is revealed to be linked to the mountains when water is removed. Lake also says it this way:

“Who knows whether the (individual) ‘personality’ of which (we) talk so much and know so little may not prove to be the temporary limitation, rather than the necessary expression of life?”

In other words, does the idea of immortality require the continuation of a person’s individual personality, or is that individuality an imperfect expression of a more universal truth that is immortal?

This touches on what is among the most striking differences between Eastern and Western religious traditions – indeed between Eastern and Western cultures. We in West think of personal identity solely in terms of individuality. Who you are and who I am as a person has little significant relationship to any other person, any other environment, any other experience, any past or any future. Human life begins and ends with individual personal identity.

It is in this sense that Western thought can seem to conceive of immortality only in terms of the survival of the individual person. In Eastern thinking a person’s identity is intimately connected and dependent on the infinite influences that shape that person – other people, cultural values and traditions, and so forth. Immortality, then, does not refer to the survival of an individual person so much as it means the reuniting of a person’s soul with the eternal flow of life from which it arose.

It is not entirely out of the question to interpret the Easter resurrection story along these lines. From the cross, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” These words suggest not so much the continued personal existence of the Jesus who walked the earth, but rather it could mean the return of his spirit, the joining of his spirit, with the eternal source of his individual life. I am not saying that is the way to interpret the story, but I am saying that such an interpretation is as credible as other interpretations.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, the great Christian theologian from the 18^th century, seemed to understand this in a statement that reflects this different idea of immortality. He wrote,

“the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve one's own finite self.”

I mentioned earlier about a lecture given by William James a century ago on this topic. In that lecture, James attempts neither to prove nor disprove immortality, but simply to show that it is not an impossibility. He begins by affirming the obvious proposition that our thoughts are a function of our brain. He then observes that most people would conclude that if our thoughts are a function of our brain, then when the brain stops working at death, thoughts and consciousness cease as well. A person cannot survive the death of the brain which causes their thoughts, consciousness, and existence in the first place.

It is a reasonable theory, he says, except that it assumes something it shouldn’t assume. For most people, to say our thoughts are a function of the brain is to suggest that it is the brain that produces our thoughts and consciousness. But for James there is a difference between producing something and transmitting something. A waterfall produces power. The sun produces heat. But consider the function of a prism or glass. What happens to the light that shines through that prism is a function of the prism -- the light changes course, it bends, and changes color -- but it is not correct to say that the prism produces the light. The prism is simply transmitting the light. The light already exists.

James then wonders if it is possible that the human brain merely transmits consciousness rather than producing it. Our brain is a finite expression of a more universal consciousness, which is eternal. Is it possible that the individual consciousness I experience to be me and you experience to be you is not produced by the brain, but simply takes the shape it has because of the brain. Consciousness is eternal, and like a prism which doesn’t produce light but shapes it, our brain receives the consciousness and shapes it to our individual personal identity. If this were so -- and I remind you again that everything said on this topic is speculative -- then it is at least conceivable that consciousness survives death. It may carry memories of lessons learned while existing in the prism of the brain, but it survives only to the extent that it re-connects with the eternal consciousness.

This metaphor that James invokes is ancient in origin, and a central part of Plato’s philosophy. It was Plato’s view that everything in this world is an imperfect reflection of a perfect world of ideal forms. One popular example used to explain this is that we have an idea of what a chair is, but the idea does not exist, the only thing that exists in this world are the chairs themselves. The idea must come from somewhere, though, and so we postulate about another world ideas, of perfection, a world we cannot enter. There exists the idea of what a chair is, the idea of what justice is, the idea of what happiness is. In our world, though, we have imperfect examples of chair, and of justice, and of happiness, and so forth.

So our individual consciousness, then, may simply be the imperfect reflection of a more universal consciousness. This notion is also suggested by one metaphorical theory of Plato’s.

Plato suggested that our souls originally exist, before birth, in some form of perfection, but when we are born in this world, the perfection falls away, we forget so much of what we knew before our birth. Life in this world consists of our efforts to regain the wisdom we had before our birth. I know this can sound a little strange, but if you are willing to overlook any literal interpretation of it, and accept is as a metaphorical, even poetical, explanation of the source of human consciousness, I think it is worthy of consideration.

The great romantic poet William Wordsworth used this metaphor, I think, to structure his famous “Ode” to immortality. Wordsworth’s images about recalling our unconscious past are direct echoes of Plato. In his lines you can envision the notion that mortal life is striving to regain that immortal wisdom.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

If, like Plato suggested, our souls exist in some sense to regain the eternal wisdom we once had, then there is infinite wisdom. Immortality after death would mean regaining that sacred wisdom we lost at birth. In many ways, our so-called childhood “innocence” is simply the fact that the young children are far closer to much of that wisdom than those who have been away from it so long.

It is, in fact, a very different idea of immortality, one that may take some stretching for the Western mind. The death and resurrection of Jesus doesn’t mean that continuation of his life as it was in life, it means blending his spirit with the universal and eternal values which inspired his message in the first place. “Into thy hands I commit my spirit.”

This idea of dying to join the eternal values is not an uncommon image for poets. Percy Shelly offers this verse on death:

He is made one with nature: there is heard

His voice in all her music, from the moan

Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird. . .

Immortality might mean joining us with the eternal sacred things; whereas survival of our individual identity would continue our separateness. Here are some eternal things that we seek in our individual mortal lives: hope, ideas, passions, love. These are also some qualities that characterize the wisdom of children. To the extent all of our lives are about linking ourselves to that which is eternal, we are part of that eternity.

I said earlier that to me the sense of immortality seems to be about having our lives linked to eternal things. This is the good news: that we are part of that eternity, and that infinite wisdom is available to us at least in parts. In a later stanza Wordsworth seems to identify the joy that comes in linking ourselves to the eternal values that feed, I would say, our immortality:

... For these I raise the song

of thanks and praise:

... for those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,

Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish,

and have power to make

Our noisy years seem

moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake,

To perish never;

Hence in a season

of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hithr.

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children

sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters

rolling evermore.

So there you have it. Another sermon about something no one knows anything about. I certainly don’t know what happens after death. But this morning I offer one different interpretation of immortality. Whatever interpretation one takes on this subject about which we are all ultimately guessing, I think one point is of highest value. When we consider these matters, as we are often inspired to do at this holiday, whatever scenario we accept, its value should be in pointing us toward those eternal values that give life meaning. Whatever is to happen to us, we can be certain that that which inspired Jesus’ message, and that which continues to inspire us today, have eternal meaning. The deeper questions of life and death should make that meaning come alive.

But if you take this all too seriously -- which is way too easy to do on this subject -- I’ll turn away from quoting Wordsworth and close by returning once more to Emerson:

“Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation.”