Whether this mortal life is all there is of us or if our personal experience continues in some fashion after our physical death is one of the central mysteries of existence. The play of Halloween and the celebration of Dia de Los Muertos, release our anxiety about the mystery of death but don’t resolve it. Neither do the certainties of the religious answers satisfy. And so we live, and in choosing how we live, imply our answer.

            Several of us have been meeting on Tuesday evenings for the last couple of months reading the first two books of the Bible together:  Genesis and Exodus.

            Those are the stories of the creation of the earth, “In the beginning” and Adam and Eve in the garden, all the way up to Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt and receiving the Ten Commandments in the desert.  The stories:  Noah’s flood, and the destruction of Sodom, and Jacob wrestling with the angel, and Joseph and his coat of many colors, are linked by genealogies giving the names of the lineage between one major figure and the next, as well as the lifespan of every person.

            And the first thing a Bible reader notices is that these ancient people lived very long lives.

            You’ve probably only ever seen a painting of Adam as a young, fit, man standing naked in the garden.  But did you know that he lived to be nine hundred and thirty years?

            Adam was still alive when Noah was born, although he died before the flood.  Noah himself lived to be nine hundred and fifty years and was still alive when Abraham was born.

            And then there’s the famous old man, Methuselah who lived to be nine hundred and sixty-nine years.

            If a person died this year having lived as long as the Bible tells us Methuselah lived, that person would have been born in the year 1055. They would have been an eleven-year-old child at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 when William the Conqueror began the Norman invasion of England.  He might have witnessed the signing of the magna carta in 1215 when he was 160.  When Dante was born, our modern Methusaleh would have already been over 200 years-old and long stopped counting his birthdays.

            The other thing a Bible reader notices is that the lifespans start out very long and gradually get shorter and shorter.  By the time you get to Abraham, he only lives to be 175.  His grandson, Jacob, dies at 147.  Moses dies at 120.

            After Moses, the Bible moves out of the realm of legend and into a more reliable, though one-sided history.  King David lived only 70 years, exactly the three score and ten that the Bible says is out natural lifespan.

            That phrase comes from Psalm 90.  But you probably don’t know the rest of the verse.  Here it is:

^“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

The Bible doesn’t insist there is a hard stop at 70 years for each of us.  If we’re strong we might live longer.  But the best of our days are only work and sorrow, says the Psalm, so why hope for more?

And, anyway, however long we live, as the words attributed to Solomon told us in our Call to Worship, “There is for all one entrance and one way out.  Therefore, I prayed, and the spirit of wisdom came to me.”

We are looking this year in worship at the fundamental questions of faith.  And there is likely no issue more fundamental to faith than the question of death.

The mystery of death may actually be the foundation of all religion.

What is the mystery that makes a body live?  From where comes the “breath of life?” and when?  And what is it that goes from a living body at the moment it dies?  The dead body in the hospital bed looks exactly as it did the moment before.  Save for the shape of the green line on the heart monitor and the gradually falling number counting the pulse rate, there would be no way to know exactly when death has arrived.

And yet, that thin line between life and death, encompasses a great gulf in significance.  All that we know of ourselves, our loved ones, our world, every experience, every accomplishment of pride, every lesson learned, every moment of joy or beauty, the glory of love, the heartbreak of loss, all happens on this side of the line.  And the other side is a complete mystery.

We know the way out, but where that door leads, we haven’t a clue.

It’s not that people won’t tell you what’s on the other side.  That is for many the whole business of religion.  But what they offer is not wisdom, as Solomon hoped for, but comfort.

Religion can offer an ease to anxiety.  Visions of the afterlife offer a salve to loneliness, when our heart aches for a departed spouse or parent or friend.  Or the afterlife promises a measure of justice to those who suffer egregious injustice in this life, whether the reward of Heaven for good people who suffered while alive, or the punishment of Hell for those who deserved worse than they got while living.

There is no mystery, religion promises, so don’t feel anxious.  The work and pain that fill this life is relived in the next.  They dead are in a better place.  Or the vindictive can hope that the evil bastards will finally get what’s coming.

But what I notice about all these visions of an afterlife, is how each one is linked to this life.  The afterlife descriptions don’t really do much to solve the mystery.  Instead, they offer an afterlife that specifically responds to the shortcomings of this life.

In this life you have to work.  In the next you relax and play a harp.

In this life you suffer sickness and pain.  No more of that in the next, because the mortal body is just a shell that you leave behind.

Good people suffer unjustly in this life, but are rewarded in the next.  And vice versa.  God, or Jesus, or the natural system of reincarnation will sort it all out properly.

In this life, the things we love, and especially the people we love, and our beloved pets, are constantly slipping away from us.  Some physically move from us and we never see them again.  Others die before us, and are lost to us.  If we live long enough to be very old, the tragedy of long life is that the world we loved is completely changed around us, and completely emptied of every friend, lover, or family member we ever knew.  So the comforters of religion tell us of a place where all the lost things and people are collected together and last eternally, and one day you’ll be there, too, with them.  Just suffer through these few more lonely years, and then you’ll be joined in the grand re-union.

There’s nothing wrong with offering these comforts to the troubled among the living.  These assurances are therapy for many who grieve, or feel wronged by life, or who are simply tired of life and want some rest, but are hoping their eternal rest will be more like an endless vacation on a sunny beach rather than an endless unconsciousness.

            The fall celebrations of Halloween, and dia de los muertos, the older pagan holiday of Samhein, the religious celebrations of All Saints Day and All Souls Day, help us deal with the anxiety of death.

            In a safe way, we can play with death, and release its energy.  We can dress as a skeleton, and set up Styrofoam grave stones in our front yard.  We can whisper pleasant poetry about the veil between the worlds of life and death becoming thin this type of year.  Our private grief of departed family members can be made public, and no one will accuse us of being morbid, or advise us that it’s time to move on, when it’s the whole family gathering at the gravesite for a picnic, and the whole cemetery is filled with other families doing exactly the same thing.

            So dress as a zombie Thursday night, or a princess, if that’s your thing.  And drink a glass of tequila in honor of your Tio Javier.  Bless the memory of the dead, which is really blessing your own memory, not them.  And invite the wisdom of the ancestors to guide you.

            It’s all good.

            But what wisdom could the ancestors, long dead, actually give now?  None of the play of Halloween, or the comforts of religion, actually address the mystery at the core.  Where are the dead?  Do uncle Javier, and William the Conqueror, and long-lived but now long-dead Methusaleh, continue to exist, as themselves, in some other world behind a veil?  Or are they really gone?  And of course, that question concerns ourselves as well.  Is this the final episode of the long-running series called, “me”, or does that scene in the hospital bed end with a black screen and the words, “To be continued”?

            I said, as a began this series of sermons this year, that I was intending to offer some final conclusions to these fundamental issues we’re examining.  After thirty years in this business since going to seminary in the fall of 1995, I was eager to challenge myself to decide what I actually think about the spiritual questions.

            It isn’t the UU way to offer religious answers from the pulpit.  Our religious symbol is the question mark.  It isn’t humble to claim I have the answer to questions that have confounded great thinkers for centuries, nor honest to say what religious people often say, that I know something that no person can actually know.

            So I honestly and humbly say, I don’t know what happens when we die.

            But my reasoned expectation is that this life is all there will be of me.  I hope my life will be long, because I enjoy it, but when it ends, perhaps next year, perhaps at age eighty-nine, the age my mother died, or age one hundred and forty-seven like Jacob, or whenever it is for me, that will be it.  My life will be banded by a birthday, with none of me before, and a death day, with none of me after.

            The hope that life will continue after death, whether for ourselves, or for our departed loved ones that we hope are still hovering around in some way, or who we will be reunited with later, depends on there being something of ourselves that is not our physical bodies (because those clearly don’t survive death) but which is capable of retaining the essence of our identities:  our personalities, our opinions, our passions, our sense of humor, our dreams, our wisdom, our taste for tequila, and so on.

            And I just can’t conceive of any actually existing thing that could perform that task:  to be firmly attached to our bodies while alive, and then immediately separable from the body when we die, and yet still retain all of the stuff that makes us “us.”  The fact that we have a name for that thing, a “soul” doesn’t make it real, it simply points to the problem.

            Without a soul, the death of the body is the end.  With a soul, though, solving one mystery creates a host of other mysteries.  Indeed, whole systems of metaphysical worlds need to be created to answer questions like where souls existed before their associated body was born.  And did the soul develop an identity with the living person or was the soul always what it was?  And will souls continue to develop after leaving the body in some cosmic university?  And can a single soul return and enter a new body?  Do animals have souls?  And so on and on, all of which can be answered but never by any actual evidence.

            I don’t believe in souls, so I don’t believe in a personal life after death.  But I do believe in a general, communal form of after life existence.  I believe that consciousness is the fundamental form of existence.  I believe that the universal consciousness expresses itself through us while we live, and our lived experiences contribute back to that consciousness.  I picture the metaphor of individual waves rising and receding on the surface of the water in the middle of the sea.

So I believe at death that while the current expression of consciousness we call “I” will cease to contribute new experiences to the universal consciousness, consciousness itself will continue and we, in the sense that our lives are now part of the accumulated history of that consciousness, will continue with it.

            In that theory of the afterlife there is no loss, because separate individuals are only expressions of that eternally existing consciousness that always contains all.  There is no other world, no other place to go, so we are never separate. The wisdom of the ancestors, merely means the wisdom of the past, always available to us because lives once lived are forever retained in the universal consciousness.  The dead don’t live on in the sense of having new experiences, but the life they lived while alive, “lives on” in the eternal memory of the universal consciousness.  And we can always access every part of that consciousness, present and past, because we are part of it; it is us.

            But enough about that.  Because the other conclusion I’ve come to with thirty years in the ministry is that except for reasons of providing comfort in face of anxiety and loss, or commiseration about the injustice of life, theology about the afterlife is beside the point.

            Life isn’t about what happens after we die.  The point of life is what we do between that long ago birthday, and that slowly approaching death day.

            If the injustice of the world bothers you, make justice now, as best as you are able.  Don’t worry about ultimate justice, do something kind for the suffering person right in front of you right now.

            If loneliness troubles you, make friends, stay in touch, write a letter, pick up the phone.  The world is filled with people as lonely as you.

            If death has taken the one you love, let your grief be your ongoing expression of love.  Cherish their memory, the person they actually were, that’s the person you loved and who can never be lost to you.  Connect with that once-lived person that exists eternally in the storehouse of the past, rather than longing for new experiences with a person you no longer know.

            I realized as I was writing this that not only do I not believe that I will ever see my mother again, but I also don’t particularly want to.  My father might have hopes to see her again, they had a different relationship.  But for me, my mother was of a time that is past now.  The mother I loved I loved as a child.  My memories of our home together.  The meals she would cook.  Or sitting in her chair in the living room with a book on her lap.  I remember her dressed for work.  I remember her care and her love.  I remember her and dad helping the kids to settle into our own lives, and refashioning their lives together in retirement.  Her face as she aged.  How small she got.  I know her delights, her contributions, her enjoyments.  I see her in the pew at church, or solving the jumble in the local paper, or curiously looking out from the passenger seat of the car as she and dad drove around the hills of western North Carolina keeping track of all the farms and the country stores, and holding together all the stories of who belonged where and how they were doing and what became of them.

            If that person came again to see me, or I came to her after I die, of course I would be pleased, but nothing important in that relationship would change.  The value of our relationships don’t depend on them continuing forever.  We had our time.  A life of love, and joy, learning, meaningful, sacred.  We had our time.  That time is passed.

And the same is true with our own lives.  The length, whether short or long, or longer, or eternal, doesn’t affect the quality.  The meaning of a life comes in every moment.  Meaning is not measured by length but by depth.  That is our task, not to live endless moments, but to live every moment.

Every moment can itself be infinitely full, if lived openly, intently, deeply, joyfully.  Seventy years is ample to do what must be done, even less than seventy.  This is the life that I’m making.  This is the life that I will hold respectfully as I look back on in it from the far end.  Hopefully with pride, and peace, and pleasure.

And if I do this life well, as I try, and as I intend to keep doing; and it turns out that this is all, this will, also, be enough.