A Sermon Written by Glenn Deefholts and Given on October 1st, 2023
Preamble
In the movie “The Hours,” Virginia Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman, is with her niece and two nephews. The niece, Angelica, is five. The children have found a dying bird. The four of them see the bird die. Angelica asks Virginia, “Why does the bird have to die?” Virginia says, “So that the rest of us may value life more.” So that the rest of us may value life more.
Mortality: Three Solutions
The title is facetious, of course. Human mortality does not seem to be a problem for the universe, and so does not require solutions. Nor are there any. Still, I wanted to say a few words about our mortal condition and have a light-hearted title.
Over the millennia, far more than a few words have been said, so it’s foolish not to approach the topic with humility. It’s an essential but sensitive subject, so I’d like to say at the outset that if you are offended by anything I say, I apologize in advance. I don’t intend to offend – only to share observations and reflections on a topic I feel is of great importance.
This talk does not aim to persuade you of anything or to change your mind about any of your beliefs. I see it as offering an overview of three responses towards the most inevitable fact about our future: that our lives will end. Death is the great leveler, cutting through all human differences – of class, ethnicity, gender, religion, and so on. Perhaps that’s one reason that the Grim Reaper carries a scythe.
Because various kinds of bias have played large roles in the way people have talked about mortality and immortality, I’d like to share a little about my background, so as to reveal my perspective and biases.
In several key ways, I’m far from unique. First, I’m an immigrant. I was six years old when my parents moved my family – four of us, including my younger sister – from Mumbai to Surrey.
Second and more unusually, I have a geographically disparate genetic history: according to DNA analysis, I’m mostly South Indian, then Scottish, North Indian, Irish and a small part Portuguese. Overall, I’m over fifty percent Indian and the rest European. My personal journey and cultural background have therefore engaged three continents, with their associated belief-systems.
Third – also like many others – I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that our individual lives come to an end – and by the consequences of this shocking reality. However, also like the vast majority, I have no expertise on the topic of mortality. I’m an amateur philosopher, you could say, not a theologian or anthropologist. My academic training is in literature. I write poetry and prose and am interested in how we find ways to tell the truth about our experience; how we tell stories and create metaphors to make sense of our lives.
From adolescence, humans begin to grasp the significance of the fact that one day each of us dies. Our awareness of death and oblivion can put us in crisis because at some point all memory of each of us seems to disappear from the universe. For some, the fact that death is the end of life invalidates our individual existence, renders it spiritually meaningless. For others death is a spur; it makes life brief, but potentially sufficient, poignant, vibrant. I feel this way: if we’re lucky, death infuses life with immediacy, density.
The question of whether death is final is one that Western science and the major world religions implicitly or explicitly respond to. According to science, the death of the organism is the end of its life. But for all the major religions, death is not the end of human life. Believing that there’s life after death is what I’m calling one “solution” to the problem of mortality. Let’s call this a metaphysical solution. For some people, belief in an afterlife is experientially based; for others it’s intuitive; for others it’s fear-based. Sometimes the belief in an afterlife can arise from the affront to our dignity and worth – you could also say, our vanity and ego – that is represented by being forgotten, almost as if we had never lived.
On Earth, however, almost all of us will not be remembered for more than one or two generations after we pass. For example, my maternal grandmother was born in 1919. If I live to a hundred, she will be remembered for about 150 years. Photos and letters will preserve her for perhaps a few others who encounter them. But the last person to have known her would have died. A hundred and fifty years. Unless we have famously expressed our personalities by contributing to or damaging the world on a large scale, the details of who we are evaporate after a few generations at most. This is a bitter pill for our egos to swallow. Oblivion is horrifying to many of us. But science would have us believe it’s real.
Personally, I’m agnostic. I’m open to believing there’s a metaphysical dimension and life after death. However, I’m also okay with the strictly evolutionary explanation of life on Earth, the idea that humans are descended from a common ancestor of gorillas and chimpanzees, and each of us will be remembered for only a relatively short time longer than other primates. It’s taken a lot of intellectual and emotional work for me to get to a place where I can accept the possibility that this life is all there is. It’s not work I would recommend doing if you can avoid it, but I appreciate when people have done it. There can be longstanding mourning and grief when one loses religious faith and becomes an agnostic or atheist.
But it is also intellectual and spiritual work to learn about different religions and forms of spirituality and to find one’s own path through them – perhaps going from being an atheist to being a believer or at least a person who sees themselves as on a spiritual path, who practices spirituality in some sense.
I grew up believing in the Christian God. My family went to an Anglican Church at Christmas and Easter, and as a child I prayed to Jesus every night before going to sleep. With teen age came doubt. I became an atheist around eighteen because a writer I loved was an atheist and because when you’re a teenager you sometimes feel more empowered the more extreme a position you take. The atheism softened into agnosticism in my early thirties. I feel now that if there is more to life than meets the eye, that would be a bonus. If karma and reincarnation are real – and my parents, with their syncretic East-West spirituality, believed they were – then all the better. Certainly karma and reincarnation are powerful metaphors, ideally guiding us to live well, learn what is hardest for us to learn, and acknowledge that we go through various versions of ourselves through a normal human lifetime. But if karma and reincarnation are literally true, then the universe would be a just place; and this justice would be a fact, not a fantasy.
I experience occasional synchronicities to sustain belief that there may be an intelligence behind all appearances or that we may have spirit guides, some of which may be ancestors or the recently deceased. Some days I see so many significant coincidences that they kindle belief in this larger metaphysic. But I also practice accepting the possibility that all we have is about eighty years, that before our biological births, we didn’t exist and that after the organism stops functioning, we will cease to be. I can’t always accept this possibility; like many people, I don’t like the idea that my entire being disappears when my body dies.
What one believes has immense consequences. To give one example, would a person be likely to care much about the climate crisis if they believed that a human life was just an infinitesimal waystation before a blissful eternal life? What is a few decades of catastrophic destruction to other parts of the planet – terrible wildfires, heat domes, and atmospheric rivers to ours – if after eighty years one gets to a place of infinite rapture?
However, if your spirituality involves no essential separation or disconnection between Earth-care and self-care, Brahman and Atman, big-s Self and little-s self, universe and individual, outside-you and inside-you – then you may choose to live more sustainably on this planet and seek to defend its beautiful and various life forms, protect its air and water. You will consider carefully the eighty years that each of us has, as well as many generations forward. You will empathize with your descendants.
What should one do then with this wild and precious life (to quote Mary Oliver), whether we have just one or one in a series of incarnations or existential states? Each person has to figure that out, but for me it has been enormously helpful to follow the teaching of the Delphic oracle: know thyself. To know oneself, of course, involves knowing the world that you live in and the circumstances that have formed you, including knowing one’s parents and what shaped them, such as their parents. Self- and world-knowledge take a lifetime and one never finishes. However, as the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron puts it, along the way one can befriend oneself and cultivate curiosity about oneself as this particular, quirky, ultimately not-entirely-knowable person, like a character in a novel. Pema enjoins us never to give up on who we are, but to surrender to groundlessness, adventure and our basic goodness.
If you have disposable income, the most common way to discover yourself is to try a wide range of activities. However, if no time is given to reflection on these experiences, one might repeatedly choose short-term pleasure over mid- to long-term satisfaction before realizing the deep cost of only short-term thinking. Corporations, industrial capitalism and the current dial-it-in democracy are examples of systems set up for the short term that have had devastating consequences for Gaia, the teeming web of life we call Earth.
How can reflection that leads to self-knowledge take place? We have to find our favourite routes, but here are some popular choices: Journaling. Time in nature. Meditation. Relationships. Any practice one does regularly – whether it is knitting or archery – so that one develops skill and experiences both strengths and challenges over a period of years.
Setting aside time to be alone generally helps in terms of creating conditions for contemplation, but so does doing as little as possible, so that one is exposed to the contents of one’s consciousness. These contents often require titration and social mediation – by which I mean help from other people – because ideationally and emotionally, the contents of what is inside and outside the self can be overwhelming.
Befriending oneself – that is, cultivating a relationship with one’s unique personality – is a reliable, but not easy, path to self-knowledge. The good news, which is also the bad news, is that there is no easy path to self-knowledge. One might say, then, that the second solution to the problem of mortality is mindfulness: getting to know what is; living fully in the moment as an intentional practice, and setting aside as not entirely knowable the question of whether there is an afterlife or a superior power. So this second – agnostic – “solution” involves sidestepping belief and focusing on what we can know and do. Mindfulness is compatible with a life review: reflecting on how one has lived and cultivating truthfulness and reconciliation of past and future with present. This means giving oneself space to have all one’s feelings, for the past, present, future. To see what you regret and are grateful for. To see what you want. To see what you have.
For the Buddha, dwelling on whether there is a God or an afterlife – on unknowables – was beside the point. Through mindfulness, we can stay with what is, the here and now, and practise being fully present in the moment instead of worrying about the future. We can practise investing, inhabiting, occupying each moment with as much heart, soul, mind, body and spirit as we can. Any thoughts of mortality that arise can be gently set aside because, to paraphrase Epicurus, when you’re alive, you’re not dead, and when you’re dead, you’re not alive – so why worry? There’s nothing we can do about the fact of death.
Indeed there are few universally valid conclusions to be generalized from the fact of mortality. Each person’s set of beliefs is as unique as a fingerprint, a snowflake. This set may differ within each of us at different times of life – sometimes at different times of a given day. Crises may cause us to lose faith – or gain it.
With language and our incredible capacity for personal and cultural memory, we humans have the potential to influence each other more intricately than other living beings. For me, the nature of this influence – a word etymologically rooted in the idea of flow – is a key feature of mortality. Still, influence is almost as personal as spirituality. Some people have been much more influenced by Greta Thunberg, say, than Socrates, Nina Simone, or Barack Obama. For some, Taylor Swift has been much more influential than the other four put together. (For the record, they have all influenced me!) To open oneself to being influenced and to influencing as we move from youth to old age: this can be one of the most fulfilling aspects of being human. Influence involves giving and receiving the products of love and work, attention, consideration, care. Our influence can be defined as the sum of the consequences of our love and our work.
Discussions of mortality often bring one back to love and connection because they are essential to human life: love is in a sense the opposite of death: it creates bonds rather than severs them. If we are lucky, we are born into familial bonds of love, which create significance and meaning in our world. From the moment we are conceived, we begin to influence and are influenced by others.
As adults, we are influenced even when remembering or thinking of others – and we are always influencing ourselves. But the idea of performing great or small deeds that will result in being talked about in stories after one dies is – in the West – an inheritance of Homer, the ancient Greek poet (or assemblage of prior unnamed poets). Stories of heroes exist for example in sports today, when we watch the highlight reel or describe an amazing goal scored. The status update in social media is another example: I’m posting in order to show I did this. Subscribe or follow to be entertained, inspired, influenced. People with a large following on Instagram are called influencers (which is often a euphemism for “advertisers”).
Most people appreciate being well-remembered in others’ hearts and minds. As Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. So, following in the Western tradition from Homer to Wilde, let’s call this third idea a secular “solution”: influence, which is a consequence of affecting one another, whether through words, deeds, emotions, sounds, images – or in other ways yet undreamt of. Being talked about, being part of other people’s stories, influencing each other.
Before concluding, I feel it’s important to add that no major religion asserts the existence of an afterlife as a stand-alone belief; instead, there is often a belief in more magical beings than us and a belief in the sacred, which infuses life with meaning. So within a religion it’s not possible to believe in the afterlife and drop everything else; metaphysics is a package deal, which is what makes it so powerful. Thus, if I were to make a sort of pie chart of these three so-called solutions in terms of their importance historically, I would say that metaphysical beliefs make up about 95% of the chart because it’s only very recently in human history that relatively large numbers of people have become agnostics or atheists. Of course, there’s overlap between the three solutions. So one could believe there’s an afterlife, believe in the value of mindfulness, and be influential. But for those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the only avenues left to them are essentially to set death aside and live with as much awareness as they can (what I’m calling mindfulness), or to love or work so profoundly that they make a lasting and deep impression on others that extends beyond a few generations (what I’m calling influence).
In sum, there are three “solutions” – or responses – to our mortal condition: the metaphysical one is faith, the agnostic one is mindfulness, and the secular one is influence. Mortality can be seen to give life great poignancy and beauty. An agnostic worldview can lead to utter devastation when we lose someone we love. Thus, an unshakeable belief in an afterlife can be a bulwark against anguish and mental disintegration, can enable people to “hold it together” and carry on. In this sense a metaphysical foundation can be the basis of a community. Is there a price to be paid? Usually extreme positions have a cost. Extreme rationality – science without ethics or empathy – has been disastrous, but so has taking action against others who don’t share the same faith as you. I’m thinking of – respectively – the invention of the atomic bomb and the carrying out of the Crusades, but there are of course other heartbreaking examples. Instead of choosing between these two options – science or metaphysical belief – we can see the brevity of life as a shared universal experience, generating empathy, and be grateful to mortality for bringing us closer to what makes us come alive, alerting us to our acute individuality and natural bonds of community and significance – spurring us on to deeper, richer human connections that recognize and honour the magic of existence.
Thank you very much for listening. Take care. Namaste.
