The Art of Living and Dying

January 29, 1967
Plainfield
(Westfield 3/18/1967)

The Art of Living and Dying

We all have an appointment in Samarra. What one believes about that appointment can make an authentic difference in how one meets life and what one receives from life. If there were no experience of death, there could be no definition of the experience of life. We are born "sentenced to death." Life and death are each empty of meaning without the other. Yet the idea of death has always been formidable – sometimes frightening, frequently shocking, as in the untimely death of the young, many times comforting as in the instance of an aged sufferer who dies and is then at peace. Take two brief examples from the Hebrew scriptures:

(Wisdom of Solomon III): "The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God. In the sight of the unwise they seen to die: and their departure is taken for misery, and their going from us to utter destruction: but they are in peace, and their hope is full of immortality: for God hath proved them and found them worthy of himself."

What a hopeful statement of strong faith, that is, if faith can be defined as belief beyond evidence. I made a fast count and in that quoted paragraph, there are at least eight statements or assumptions that are not verifiable in human experience.

(Psalm xxxix) "Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. Behold thou hast made my days as a handbreath; and mine age is as nothing before thee. Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry: hold not thy peace at my tears: for, I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner as all my fathers were. O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more."

When that psalm is matched with the faith represented in the quotation read earlier from the Wisdom of Solomon (not likely to have been written by King Solomon, incidentally), we confront another of the countless and bewildering contradictions of Scripture. Bewildering that is if one fails to understand that of a certainty there will be contradictions in literature which accumulated for more than a thousand years and represented the unlike hopes, fears and convictions of persons of different times, moods, cherishing different values and basing expressions on unidentical assumptions. The pertinent comparison today is not that hope and despair are contrasted as well as immortality and extinction, but that there are different ways of confronting the idea of death.

We have attempted to create a worship service such as this because too many persons in our modern, sophisticated culture try to escape from the idea of death but are unsuccessful. If the art of living has something to do with meeting life as it is and carving meaning out of human experience, then the certainty of death has some leverage we can use as we attempt to lift reasons for being from the whirl of sensations that we call life.

If one is a believer in the Christian scheme of salvation, with eternal life guaranteed by the atoning death of a supernatural savior, such a believer may not know the agonies of the search for meaning, or require the courage and candor needed to confront the mystery and pain involved in the possibility that there will come a time when we shall cease to be. Many students believe that the bullfights of Spain have primitive origins in religious ceremonials involving the bull as the symbol of vigorous, potent life. Because most of us are revolted by the cruelty of the bullfight, we may fail to understand that this in an expression of the art of dying. As a modern psychologist has noted, the matador with swift thrust of the sword ends the life of the tormented bull. The matador represents death, the inevitable end that awaits even the strongest expression of the life-force. (See McClellan, ROOTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS, p. 194)

Briefly, will you consider the art of living and dying? Let me remind you that where once there was assurance, there is now disbelief or skepticism. Furthermore, many persons have failed to confront and tried to escape from the implications of the loss of certainty.

A key statement in today' s approach to the art of living and dying is found in Andre Malraux's (unfinished) novel, THE WALNUT TREES OF ALTENBUKG, "if the world has any meaning, death should find a place in it, as it did in the Christian world.... If humanity's fate is a story with a point, then death is a part of life; but if not, life is a part of death." (quoted by Michael Harrington, THE ACCIDENTAL CENTURY, p. 201)

Death did have a place in the Christian world. Particularly when life was grim, cold and harsh, death was a gate to the eternal world of bliss promised in the salvation scheme. Christians knew that their Redeemer lived; and they would live too. Most believed that the sacraments comprised the channel through which God's grace flowed. Therefore, baptism, the Lord's Supper or Mass, extreme unction were vital to life because the only life that mattered was the eternal life one would be granted after death.

There was great fear of Hell, of course. Many would suffer eternal torment there. But even fear of such punishment had assurance of a sort. The soul would be there – conscious – and even the flames of hell recognized the surviving self. If the self survived, how could hope be eternally destroyed?

But man in bondage to evil in this world, struggling against the evils he experienced in events and wrestling with the evils in himself, was emancipated by the promise of heavenly salvation. The place of death in the Christian believer's theology has seldom been more nobly and artistically expressed than in these lines from John Bunyan's PILGRIMS PROGRESS:

"It was noised abroad that Mr. Valiant-for-truth was sent for by a summons, and had this for a token that the summons was true, that his pitcher was broken at the fountain. When he understood it, he called for his friends and told them of it. Then said he, I am going to my Father's; and though with great difficulty I have got hither, yet now do I not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought his battles who will now be my rewarder. When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river side, into which as he went he said, Death where is thy sting? And as he went deeper, he said, Grave where is thy victory? So he passed over, and all trumpets sounded for him on the other side."

But much has happened. At least in this audience, who today will believe he hears trumpets sounding on the other side? Before the time of Charles Darwin the creation story of Genesis was the first of the mighty acts of God for man. Since Darwin, even among a substantial number of Christian believers, the Genesis story has been made a symbol of the evolutionary process. At least in this audience today, who when speaking of God the Father can completely unravel Freudian interpretations completely from his passions and impulses, even theological impulses? Much has happened. As we understand more about the relationships of nerves, cells and synapses to consciousness, memory, learning and responses, what happens to what was called an immortal soul? We know illness, accident, senility can alter personality drastically and cruelly. If personality survives the body, which personality? The one we knew in full health or the one grievously decayed? Hard questions, but they are central to the creation of the art of living and dying.

Late in the 19th century, Matthew Arnold anticipated the situation many now experience when the old faiths are gone (4th stanza of "Dover Beach"):

"The Sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
and naked shingles of the world."

Such realistic observations may dampen light-hearted, blithe cliches about a "better-land far away." But if death is a part of life, astringent acceptance of what we understand to be real is much to be preferred to mindless escape from the word and idea of death. Read the papers any and every day. Death is there. We are mortal. No one fully knows life until he has embraced and accepted his mortality. Every ore of us is he who must die.

But attempting escape from that health-giving acceptance is a modern phenomenon that is fairly wide-spread. We try to run from the face of death; we try to mask the face of death. A singularly successful and prosperous religious group, one of the few denominations indigenous to America, incidentally, will not face death. The words, "die," "dying," "death" are forbidden in the religious vocabulary. The group's otherwise good newspaper indulges in all manner of clumsy circumlocution to avoid the words, "death," "dead," and "dying."

There is a similar but much more wide-spread attitude in the manner which we dispose of dead bodies. We attempt to disguise the obvious fact of death. There are viewings of "the departed" whose cheeks have been rouged, whose facial lines have been smoothed and the ravages of illness masked. If it is a woman's body, very likely the hair will have been coiffured. The body is encased in fine wood or metal, then many times this casket sealed into a concrete burial vault. All in the name of "the last thing we can do for him (or her)." But perhaps we respond to such opportunities for overdoing death ceremonies because we have left behind older theological assurances and find no easy avenue for our feelings so we choose expensive escape and saccharine euphemism.

But how [can we] incorporate mortality into a total view of life? One way is to recognize that grief is real; that it is a hard experience when a person dies you have needed or who has needed you. Death is hard not only for its own sake but also because grief triggers guilt and remorse for those things we ought to have said and did not; for those things we ought to have done and failed to do. These realities we should recognize, and accept ourselves for the fallible human beings we are. But what we can’t do for the dead, we can still do for the living.

We can be honest, not giving voice to the easy cliches that sound polite. Platitudes may deceive our friends who may worry that our hurt is too deep; but there may be a valid need for plain-speaking. I remember well how, when a child met accidental, sudden death for which no one was to blame, the most appropriate words were, "damn the universe, anyway." Consequently I believe there are times when Edna St .Vincent Millay's rebellious lines are true to the human condition.

First and fourth verses of "Dirge without music":

“I am not resigned to the shutting away of living hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned
with lilies and laurel they go: but I am not resigned.
.....
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."

Each of us has an appointment with Death in some Samarra. Acceptance of this reality is basic to our spiritual health. But I am not resigned to war, cancer, pollution, carelessness with the lives of persons, the conditions which breed murder, the twisted passions which trigger violence, or the miserable poverties which sentence people to death before they live. Maxwell Anderson in his play of a generation ago, “Winterset” struck home when he bad a character say, "This is the glory of earth-born men and women, not to cringe, never to yield, but standing, take defeat implacable and defiantly, die unsubmitting."

Neither must I be overwhelmed by monumental difficulties and be only defiance personified – for life is life is life, and our essential unions are with persons, with persons, with persons. Emily will say, "let's look at one another."

The art of living and dying is in the meeting of opposites as well as the blending of compatibles, the conjunction of creative tensions as well as the pleasant harmonies. We have an appointment in Samarra, but also, as we have heard Jean read from Holmes, "Testament,"

"Out of the beating heart the words that beat
Sing of the fountain that is never spent.
Let us remember life, the salt, the sweet,
And make of that our tireless testament."

[PAUSE FOR HERB TO PITCH FOR CHOIR, then]

The third act of Thornton Wilder’s play, "Our Town" takes place in the cemetery of a small New Hampshire town. The author uses the dramatic license of allowing us to hear the dead speak, to show, in this instance, how it takes the experience of death to bring to Emily Webb a full and heightened awareness of the richness of life. Emily's burial is in progress as we open our reading of this scene, but we hear only the words of the dead....