*LOVE AFTER DEATH*

*by Forrest Church*

*Easter Sunday, April 20, 2003*

The first Shakespearean soliloquy I ever had to memorize
was mostly lost on me, Jacques?s eloquent, if grim,
"Seven Ages of Man" from _As You Like It_.

All the world?s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

I was only in the second act back then:

. . . the whining school-boy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

Far too young to take to heart how the story ends?in

second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans
everything.

But now I know, if Jacques is right, then Easter is a
fairy tale.

My father was a politician, I am preacher, and my eldest
son is an actor and aspiring chef. Being performers, the
stage is an apt metaphor for each of our lives. By
Shakespeare?s measure, however, it is no less apt for my
grandfather, a small businessman, or his father, who
weighed gold in the boom years following the gold rush.
The stages on which they played their public lives
(Church?s Sporting Goods Store, the Idaho State
Assessor?s Office) were less public perhaps but no more
intimate than the U. S. Senate chamber, All Souls
Church, or the Williamstown Theater Festival. They too,
in "their exits and entrances" played their parts as
best they could, sometimes poorly, sometimes well.

An introvert, my grandfather loved nothing more than to
sit by himself on the porch at night and blow smoke
rings at the moon. Yet he also loved the festive town
displays on the fourth of July, taking particular pride
in having supplied the fireworks. My great-grandfather
went West as a young man to Idaho from Maine to seek his
fortune. He spent his professional life counting other
people's money. He also watched them lose it. The five
of us each have a story, beginning as all stories do
with a birth and ending with a name chiseled into stone,
the name we share: Frank Forrester Church. Beneath our
name, the story of our life unfolds during that little
dash between dates on the marquis of our final
resting-place.

When our play is ended, it becomes evident how unique
each of our stories is, how rich in specific character
and plot. The French feminist and social philosopher
Simone de Beauvoir recognized this clearly when her
mother died. As the parish priest intoned her mother?s
name at its appointed place in the liturgy of the
funeral mass, "Emotion seized me by the throat," she
writes. "?Francoise de Beauvoir?: the words brought her
to life; they summed up her history, from birth to
marriage to widowhood to the grave. Francoise de
Beauvoir?that retiring woman, so rarely named, became an
/important /woman."

By my definition, religion is our human response to the
dual reality of being alive and having to die. Knowing
we must die, we question what life means. Final answers
may elude us, but by living the questions, we create and
discover meaning where we can. Every year about this
time, Easter invites us to live the questions. Is
oblivion life?s goal or is resurrection? Unlike Jacques,
though, with him, taking it poetically, I opt for the
latter. Our lives will prove worth dying for only if
something remains to mark our sojourn here after we have
gone. However you read it?s runes, Easter makes this
promise: Love remains. As my five-year old son, Frank,
said to comfort me, when my fifty-nine-year old father,
Frank, died, "God is not the only one who lives forever,
Daddy. Love lives forever too." Resurrection or not?and
I don?t believe that Jesus was raised bodily from the
dead?every Easter sermon could be titled, "Love after
Death."

In the Christian liturgical calendar, Easter is the
eternal Epilogue to the greatest story ever told, "Jesus
the Carpenter?s Son." Two thousand years after his
curtain fell, more people view their own life?s meaning
by the light of this story than by any other. Yet, it is
a story without any of the markings by which the world
measures success. No riches. No earthly power. Not to
mention that the hero dies young, branded a criminal,
nailed to a cross. In light of his own story, almost
every time Jesus? name is uttered by the powers and
principalities of Christendom, irony is elevated to
paradox. We fight wars in the name of the Prince of
Peace. True believers in the one who told the rich man
that, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, he must sell all
that he has and give it to the poor, amass riches.
Prelates and priests dedicate bejeweled altars to him
who cast the money changers out from the temple. In its
two millennia old retelling, the gospel of Jesus reads
more like a fractured fairy tale than a reverent
representation of eternal reward and saving grace. We
Unitarians and Universalists may long ago have changed
the words to Jesus? hymn, but the potentates of
Christendom have done us one better: They?ve changed its
tune.

We still must ask ourselves why we are here this
morning?here instead of an orthodox church to witness
Jesus?s resurrection or?and more likely given the
patinas of skepticism that enamel our minds?home in our
pajamas drinking a Bloody Mary and reading the New York
Times? Is it to pray for Spring, sympathetically invoked
by flowered patterns and pastels? I truly hope not. One
thing I can say with some confidence is that we are not
flowers.

Helping to keep us honest, this year Spring and Easter
Week have only begrudgingly cooperated with one another.
Theology aside, we should welcome the wild shifts in
weather. They gave us something to wonder at that
doesn't really matter. Something for hawks and doves to
commiserate over with full mutual sympathy, as we shiver
through the streets or shake out our wings in lobbies
and elevators.

But Easter brings us back to a deeper place of meeting.
We are not perennials, whose death, when it comes, is
only apparent, not truly real. Our departed loved ones
don?t burst forth in remembered splendor at the sun?s
urging, brushing our tears away, telling us that
everything is fine again. That is not what the greatest
story ever told is about. It is about real death, death
that could destroy all meaning, but doesn?t. Jesus
really dies. And then he lives again, reborn, made new,
not in his earthy body but in divine form, free of all
exigency, eternal, immortal. This is neither a fairy
tale, nor a fractured fairy tale. It is the universal
story of love after death.

The story begins in the scriptures themselves. Jesus
lives on in Peter?s heart. And then in the mind of
Doubting Thomas. He saves the Apostle Paul, who never
met him in the flesh. I don?t take the resurrection
story literally. Taken literally, the gospel narrative
is almost crude, a cheap magic trick that has been kept
alive by slight of hand and human credulity for two
millennia. Yet, taken to heart, it can save even those
of us who will never be able to sign our names on a
doctrinal dotted line. God is love. And love is where
the heart is. Meaning simply?as a fallen, once prideful
poet wrote?"What we love remains, the rest is dross."
(Ezra Pound)

The ancients remind us never to judge a person?s life a
success or failure until it is over. How did Jesus judge
his own life as he hung there on the cross? "It is
finished," he cried. "My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?" He almost never quoted scripture, but here
we find Jesus, dying, quoting not the 23^rd but the
22^nd Psalm. Not, "I shall walk through the valley of
the shadow of death and fear no evil for thou are with
me," but "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why
art thou so far from helping me?" Forget about those
comforting words that usher in the close of the 23^rd
Psalm, "My cup runneth over." Jesus moans, "I thirst."

Where in this drama is the bridge from one life to the
next? Jesus crosses it when he says, "Father, forgive
them for they know not what they do." For a moment in
his agony, he thinks not about himself, but about
others, and God is with him. The bridge is Love. Love
before death. Love after death.

"How do we get to Heaven, Rabbi?" his disciples once
asked him.

Jesus answer is remarkable. Not a word about theology.
Nothing about belief. "Feed the hungry," he replies.
"Clothe the naked, house the homeless, heal the sick,
visit those who are in prison," Jesus replied.

When they ask him about keeping the commandments, Jesus,
who more than once broke the letter of the law to serve
its spirit, says to them: "Follow the two great
commandments, which sum up all the law and the prophets:
Love God with all your heart, mind and soul and love
your neighbor as yourself."

"Who is my neighbor?" they ask.

"Whoever needs your love is your neighbor," he replies
by way of a parable. "You must therefore love your enemy
as well."

"But, how do we get to Heaven," they ask again, for
salvation, not their neighbor, is foremost on their mind.

"Don?t say, ?Lo, here," or ?Lo, there,? for the Kingdom
of Heaven is in the very midst of you," Jesus reminds
them surely for the thousandth time. "For heaven is
where the heart is." According to Jesus, we enter Heaven
not when we die but as we live, through the Gates of Love.

So don?t judge a life until it?s over. And then, judge
it by love?s remains. Perhaps a spectacular Hail Mary
pass will turn a lifetime of defeat into victory. I?ve
seen it happen. But that is not what I am talking about
here. More likely, things that once mattered more than
they should have?all those illusions by which the world
measures success?will, like blinders, fall away from
before our eyes until we finally see clearly the tears
of our loved ones and their gentle smiles. That is true
redemption, life?s equation transfigured, our losses
adjusted for, the balance sheet recalculated, failure
forgiven, love the answer. When the end comes (and even
before) we can then let go for dear life, knowing that
we loved and were loved in turn, knowing that everything
is well and shall be well. Don?t judge a person?s life
until it?s over.

In their section entitled "A Nation Challenged," from
September 18, 2001 to the last day of December that
year, the New York Times published 1800 obituaries of
men and women who died on 9/11. We are accustomed to
reading obituaries of the famous and infamous. These
were ordinary people, their lives both as alike and as
unique as fingerprints. In our heightened appreciation
for life?s preciousness and fragility, reading these
obituaries we pondered our own. And what stood out? Do
you remember? Not worldly success. Not the list of noted
accomplishments that appear to give weight to more
famous people?s lives. In almost every instance, what
stood out was love given and received.

Scott M. McGovern:

/Just before bedtime, Ms. McGovern said, her
husband would pick up Alane, the older of their
two daughters, wrap her in a blanket and walk
out to the driveway of their house in Wyckoff,
N. J. "Where are you going?" Ms. McGovern would
ask them. Scott would whisper back, "We?re going
to wish on a star."/

Cora Hidalgo Holland:

/"I loved my mother?s hands, her extensions of
her soul," Nate Holland, now 19, said in
eulogizing his mother. . . "She had hands like
silken clay, forever soft and always warm. When
I was a child she would tuck me into bed and run
them through my hair as we talked until I could
talk no more. I would drift into sleep as her
fingers floated across my scalp. The second that
she withdrew her hand I would awaken, her
rhythmic lullaby ending, but I would still
pretend to be asleep."/

David S. Berry

/"It was raining stunningly hard, and all the
kids, of course, were running around the house
naked," Mrs. Barry said. "David was running with
them. Water was just coming down in buckets, and
they remembered how it was coming down the
gutter, like a faucet. In playing with the
children there was no distraction," she said.
"He was nowhere but right there in the moment,
right there."/

Christopher C. Amoroso

/The other night, after Sophia Rose Amoroso had
her bath, she looked at her tiny hands, wrinkled
from the bath water, and told her mother, Jaime,
"I have Daddy?s fingers." . . . She will [also]
always have the letter he wrote her when she was
10 weeks old: "Sometimes it makes me cry, as I
am overwhelmed by the joy I?ve been given by you
and your mother. I want you to know that I
consider myself the luckiest man to ever walk
the face of this earth. If anything were to
happen to me, I could honestly say I?ve known
true love and happiness in my life."/

Cynthia Motus-Wilson

/"She was very caring," Mr. Wilson said. "A
small woman, five-foot nothing. But a heart
bigger than Alaska." . . . After her death, [her
son and daughter] found a loving note from their
mother attached to a life insurance policy and
adorned with a drawing of a smiling face. She
had highlighted her request that the two take
care of each other./

You see what it?s all about, don?t you. It?s all about
love.

And love doesn?t die. Michael Tucker?s obituary closes,
"He was Michael, he was Mike, he was Tuck to his friends
from school and he was Daddy, and he?s still making us
smile." Patrice Braut?s friends endowed a scholarship
"not for the best student, but for the most tenacious."
Firefighter Michael Cammarata, left a letter of
instructions for his brother to be opened in case of
death. "No 1 on the list: ?Take care of Jenna,?
(referring to his girlfriend of seven years.? No. 2:
?Don?t mourn me. This is the career I chose.? No. 3:
?Make my spirit live on.?" In a memorial service for his
two brothers, Keith and Scott, Todd Coleman said, "I
will try to live my life in a manner that will be worthy
of their respect and admiration. . . Their memory
reminds me that the world can be a wonderful place." On
the day he was to die, George E. Spencer left a note for
his wife on their kitchen counter: "Stop being critical
of yourself," it said. "Enjoy life. Today is another
day. Chance to live a little."

Love after death.

This is why we celebrate Easter. It?s really very
simple. We celebrate Easter to remind ourselves of
everything that matters. Jacques was wrong, you see.
Jesus was right. Whatever happens to us after we die,
life doesn?t end in oblivion. It continues in love, our
own love, once given, everlasting. Read an obituary
unadorned by pretense and your eyes will tell you what
your heart already knows.

After death our bodies may be resurrected. Our souls may
transmigrate or become part of the heavenly pleroma. We
may join our loved ones in Heaven. Or we may return the
constituent parts of our being to the earth from which
it came and rest in eternal peace. About life after
death, no one knows. But about love after death, we
surely know. I learned this from my father, as he did
from his father and grandfather before him. I learn it
also from each of you. The one thing that can never be
taken from this world, even by death, is the love we
have given away before we die. Those fortunate enough to
complete life?s seven acts may die sans teeth perhaps,
sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything but love. For
love, I swear it, is immortal.

Let us unite our hearts in the spirit of prayer:

Dear God, thou who art greater than all and yet present
in each, mystery of life?s mystery, power of life?s
power, open our eyes this day, the one day we are surely
given, to life?s transient beauty, and sanctify our
hearts in Thine eternal blessing, that we may enter thy
Kingdom, the realm of eternal love.

Amen. I love you. Happy Easter. And may God bless us all.