"The Weight of the Soul"

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The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
October 31, 2004

"Life is a valley between the sunlit peaks of two eternities.
We arrive in vain to look beyond the heights.
Then comes death, calling one to leave his native place and to move into the deep unknown."

Those are the opening words I've often spoken for memorial services. They remind us that life and death are mysteries – that try though we may, we cannot see beyond the peaks that order our existence. Each time I speak them they remind me too, that someday death will call me to leave my native place – my place in life – and travel into the deep unknown.

Death and life. Notable UU Minister Forrest Church once wrote: "Until her death a few months ago, one of my parishioners had been struggling with cancer for twenty years. It was a rare genetically transmitted form of cancer, which she in turn had passed on to two of her three children. She felt guilty about that. All I could think of to say to her was this. Every one of us with children, regardless of his or her genes, gives them two gifts, life and death. Every time a woman gives birth, she gives death. The two are hinged together. Without death, life as we know it could not be." (In the book, "Life Lines")

Death and life are hinged together. They are the two things each and every person in this room – each and every person on this planet – has in common. We are alive, and someday we will die.

But why talk about death? The Rev. Jane Rzepka, another UU minister, provides this answer, "Death and immortality make us wonder. We have to respond. We may be inclined toward philosophical questions, attracted by the mystical, swept away by gentle poetic forms of curiosity, or lean toward the scientific. But who can understand death? In its immensity, power, and mystery, it holds us in a non-negotiable sacred grip." Samhain symbolizes this non-negotiable sacred grip, celebrates this reality.

But often we treat death as unreality. Often we act as though it were a curse, something to dread, something we should run from or carp against. A poll on Beliefnet which asked "Assuming you're healthy and active, how long do you want to live?" netted these responses: 28 percent said, "Just long enough to see my grandchildren grow up." Twenty-nine percent said, "My 90s." Nineteen percent said, "Well past 100." And 23 percent said, "Forever." There's even a new group out there called the Transhumanists, who are organized specifically to "study and discuss… emerging technologies which overcome the limitations of the human body, and the consequences of those technologies." The main goal of the Transhumanists is exploring the blending of the human body with technology, so that the human lifespan might go on forever.

It may not be conscious, but many of us seek every possible means to avoid death – or, to put it in marketing language, to avoid aging, to stay in shape, to be the best that we can be. Again, from Forrest Church: "I have a friend who has given up alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, eggs, meat, milk and the sun. He eats oat bran for breakfast, takes megadoses of vitamins C and E, rides his exercycle religiously, and never uses his microwave oven…But the hard truth is, (at least at this point in history) we all die of something. Vegetarians die. Joggers die. Even people with low cholesterol die, many before their time. One can do everything imaginable to play the right numbers, to change the variables in our human equation, and still life won't check …. When we die, … the ultimate culprit is not sin or squalor. The culprit is life. Life draws death in its glorious train." (“Life Lines,” p.22)

We don't know what will happen when we die, of course. Personally, I have always had a hard time believing that there is some kind of life after death. This puts me in the minority amongst Americans. A Gallup poll published some years ago found that fully 67 percent of the American public believed that there is some kind of life after death. "71 percent … believed that … there is a heaven where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded. … Less than half assumed they would see their friends, relatives or spouses. About one-third believed they would grow spiritually in heaven, but only eighteen percent … believed they would grow intellectually. Only five percent thought that eternity would be boring." (Thanks to my colleague the Rev. Cynthia Johnson who culled this information from the book “Adventures in Immortality by George Gallup.)

And as for hell, well, 53 percent believed that there is a hell, to which people who have led bad lives without being sorry will be eternally consigned. Twenty-three percent believed in reincarnation, … and twenty-four percent believed it is possible to have continuing contact with the dead. (Also from Adventures in Immortality.)

Way back in the days when I served as a hospital chaplain intern as part of my training for ministry, I came to know an elderly man, a very sick man. One night, as he lay in his hospital bed, he had a powerful dream. He dreamed he was standing on the shore of a serene blue lake, a lake ringed with trees and lush grasses. It was a beautiful day. As he stood on the shore, he saw his wife, who had died a few years before, standing on the far side of the lake calling to him and beckoning. The next morning he said it was the most beautiful dream he'd ever had.

He died the next day.

His younger daughter and I were there when he died. The moment of his death was startlingly clear: he seemed to bend in upon himself, as though his soul had pulled away from its shelter of flesh, leaving his body on the bed like an empty husk. He was so very alive one moment, so very dead the next. His daughter's eyes met mine across the bed. "He's gone," she said, wonderingly, and I nodded.

In a study published about ten years ago, a team of German scientists weighed the bodies of subjects immediately before death, and then right after death. They determined that a living body weighs about one three-thousandth of an ounce more than a dead one. Their conclusion was that this was the weight of the soul.

Was that the difference the elderly man's daughter and I felt in the room? One three-thousandth of an ounce? I don't think so, and yet we could feel the change. We felt his ending. Or was it his new beginning?

A few years ago I was present for another death, the death of a woman who was very precious to my former church. Cindy was kind, friendly, honest and caring – and loved by many, many people, as the traffic through her hospital room testified. Friends and relatives, told she was dying after her long battle with cancer, came by to see her one last time. She was unable to respond consciously, but her breathing indicated that she knew people were there. The more people in the room, and the louder their voices, the faster she breathed.

When the stream of visitors finally slowed, Cindy's ex-mother-in-law Barbara and I were sitting with her quietly, on either side of the bed. Her young adult son sat silently by the window. Cindy's breathing, while still labored, was slower and more peaceful now.

I put my hand softly on her bare arm beneath the sheet and breathed with her rhythm. I closed my eyes, and spoke to her silently in my thoughts with words of peace and love and gentleness, and her breathing deepened. The four of us sat this way for a long while. And then through her skin I could feel a change – it was as though she was slipping away, but that wasn't quite right. It was more like she was changing form - transforming. Barbara could sense it too. We looked at one another and knew we had to find Cindy's husband and older sons right away. They came just in time to hold her as she took her last breath.

It's conventional to say that we each have "a life," or to speak of "my lifetime." But my experiences with those who are dying have changed my perspective. I have come to believe that Life is really too big for me to think of as mine, as something owned or controlled. Life is big, life is magical; life, it seems, is only shared with us. It is loaned to us for a time and for that time it lives up through us as it does through all living things. I have come to believe that my life is simply part of this larger Life that connects us all, flows through us all like a river to the sea. Like an invisible thread, this larger Life ties us all to one another in a single, intricate, immortal web. When we die, the river does not dry up, the thread does not break. The river flows on, the thread weaves on, in our loved ones, in animals and plants, in all the world of bodies and breathing, photosynthesis and metamorphosis, growth and change.

But our individual claim on the river, the thread, will end. Something will change in our physical bodies, and the person we are to our friends and loved ones will move from being in the outer world, alive, breathing, talking and touching, to the inner world of memory and meaning. That one three-thousandth of an ounce marks the portal into the deep unknown.

What happens when we die? More words from Forrest Church, "None of us knows for sure (what will happen). But if someone were to ask you before you emerged from your mother's womb if there was life after birth, and what this life would be like, how would you have replied? Would you have mentioned birds and rivers, the sun and moon, children, faith, and hope? Would you have foreseen love and grief, guilt and fear, humility, compassion, shared joy and shared pain? Life is far more amazing than we could ever have predicted, … So who is to say what will follow? All I know is this. Before death we are witnesses to at least one miracle, the miracle of life."

The weight of the soul, then, is measured not in thousandths of ounces, but in life's average miracles. The miraculous chance that we are here at all. The miracle of love from friends and family. The miracles of our senses. The miracle of so much pleasure and so much pain, so much to know and hold, and so much to let go.

At the end of a memorial service, I often say these words:

"We have come together in community
To remember, to honor and to grieve – each in our own way.
Being here, we have remembered that in times of sadness
there is room for laughter;
That in times of shadow, there will always be light;
And that when we feel most lonely,
There are others who love us and are with us in our pain.
Having been here together, in memory and hope
May we hold fast to the conviction
that what we do with our lives matters,
And the knowledge that our love can transform the world.
May we go forth with thanksgiving for the gift of life
and the mystery of death
that are the heritage and the blessing of every human being."

Amen.