Death

Three Spiritual States of Being

Classically, the Christian model for afterlife is formulated in three spiritual states: heaven, hell and purgatory. Heaven is a state of eternal reward. Hell is a state of eternal damnation. Purgatory is a state of working out or paying for one’s sinfulness. United Methodists don’t believe in purgatory -- if we are talking about a prison people go after death to pay the divine penalty for their sins. However, if we are talking about a spiritual state of working out one’s separateness (or in Dante’s imagery, working off our thick skins), it seems self-evident.

These usually eternal reward or punishment for the life lived or for the state of the relationship between oneself and God at the point of death. Protestants tend emphasize faith in Christ as that which "saves" more than the works that one does within one’s lifetime. But faith and works are always interwoven.

However, many of the masters of the faith have suggested that these three spiritual states of being are descriptions of what we live each moment of our lives. In this case, they cease to become descriptions of the state after death and instead become affirmations of the importance of life: there is value to a good life, there are consequences of evil, there is always a process of amendment of life.

Physical Death and Spiritual Death

From the beginning the Christian church has separated death into two basic types. Physical death, although painful (emotionally and often physically) is not to be feared. God is bigger than death. Paul even hints that in some situations physical death is to be preferred to the pain of the world because it reunited us with God and Christ, but Jesus wants us to live.

Spiritual Death, however, is the Enemy. When we live apart from God, apart from the source of life, we live in a kind of death that is eternal. This death is the result of sin, it is separation, alienation, pride. I have often wondered in the book of the Revelation if the death that is locked up is physical death or spiritual death. It makes a great difference to the reading of the last book of the Bible. Do heaven and hell occur after physical death, or after spiritual death?

Preparing for your own Death

There is hardly any excuse anymore for not having a will. In the course of doing our series on money this fall, I found out that in California a will is not as essential as it is in other parts of the country, but it is still important. And basic wills can be done very quickly, easily and inexpensively. There are numerous lawyers that can help for a very modest fee. Every bookstore should have a do-it-yourself will book and there are inexpensive computer programs that can handle even some fairly complicated wills. Some of the most important questions to ask to help prepare a will are:

• Who is the best person to manage your affairs?
• Who are the best people to take care of people, animals and stuff that outlive you.
• Who are the best people to know what to throw away and what to keep.
• Is your money doing in death what you value for it in life.

One aside: Many of you give regularly to the church, some tithe even a tenth of what they make. One of the largest gifts, and often a very helpful one, you can give to a church is in your will. One tenth taken away from your family may not mean much to them, but one tenth given to a church or other organizations you care about can really help.

Who Teaches Us How To Die?

The country is involved in a difficult legal and ethical debate because some doctors who will help people die when it is the "right time". But, what are the criteria for determining the right time? We have the ability to prolong life far beyond "nature’s way". We can birth children far before "nature" could, we can offer a quality of life to those who in ages past would simply have died. The Pope pleas against the death penalty in Saint Louis. The United Methodist oppose the death penalty, and although we support a woman’s right to choose, we look very cautiously at abortion. We reject assisted death, but support families who choose to remove life support after careful thought and prayer. Each of these issues is so complex. We hope in the face of any of them, people are acting in the fullness of their faith and love and that they are relying heavily on prayer.

We spend so much energy avoiding death that we have become obsessively afraid of death and know next to nothing about it. With so much control and so little, who determines when is the right time to die and how? The church gives us vague phrases of comfort, but very little in the way of help. So, what are some helps in how to die.

Death is in God’s Hands, so Relax

This is not just a statement of humility but is a statement of ethic. Human beings must tread very carefully when we get into the world of making decisions about death. But this is also a spiritual discipline of trust. We approach, and our families approach this final act of life totally reliant on God by necessity but also by faith. As we grow toward death, and as our families move toward death, our faith teaches a posture of trust (even when death approaches violently in the case of war or injury or oppression. Relaxing in the face of death, letting go of fear, and putting ourselves in the hands of God are prime teachings of the Church about death. It is interesting that some of the best work in alternative healing reminds us that trust and relaxation help us heal better as well. We die better when we relax into God’s care.

Death as the Last Stage of Life is Learning When to Let Go.

Morton Kelsey’s has written about faith stages and his last one is death. Where life has been concerned with the dynamic between the concrete world and the spiritual world, death is a time when people must finally let go of the concrete world completely. Learning when to let go and when to hold on is a very difficult process of discernment and is made by intuition more than intellect. As with children, when people come close to death, the line between these two often becomes very obscure. As our parents and friends die, we too must learn the balance of holding on and letting go. For some this stage and learning process is very long and often very painful. For others it can be as quick as a movie scene where the friend clutches the dying one to their breast and says, "just hold on, hold on."

Attachment Non-Attachment

One of the largest points of discernment in a death is what to hold onto and what not to hold onto. Sometimes these decisions are conscious (I will stop driving because I am dangerous) and sometimes very unconscious (as with much of Altzimer’s). Grief is a process of letting go, but the process also gives the time and emotional attention necessary to let important connections seep deeply into the soul where they will remain. We die better when we learn in the process what is important and perhaps eternal, and what is transitory. This learning process in the face of death is one reason why so many people who have had close encounters with death, one way or another, find themselves and their priorities radically changed.

A critical barrier in learning all this is the distortion our society has against age and against death and sickness. There is a sense that if one can’t "do" anything that one is no longer valuable so that life is no longer worth living. This ties a criteria of death to a perception of value and it is far too easy to be misled by cultural descriptions of value that the Church rejects firsthand, but that we are far too influenced by in very subtle ways. But that is a criteria for dying that we must avoid at all costs. God’s word, in our faith is that from our first breath to our last, we are valuable in God’s eyes regardless of what we can or cannot do. Discernment about life and death come not at from a criteria of value or utility. The sickness that our culture has in its fear of death should not be a reason for allowing or encouraging death.

How much does it cost to die?
Two Perspectives

You Can’t Take it With You

It costs nothing to die. You just do it. It can happen at any time in our lives and may seem inconvenient, but on the other hand, you don’t need to be ready. There is nothing to pack, nothing you need in your pocket. Your American Express Card or Visa doesn’t go and wouldn’t probably be any help if it did. Contrary to my great aunt, you don’t need clean underwear and death doesn’t care if you combed your hair. Nobody is really quite sure what you can take with you. Memories – Greek mythology has us leaving those behind as we cross the river. Intelligence – maybe not. That may be intimately interwoven with gray matter we leave behind between our ears. Our pain, worries, cares, priorities, our faith says all those stay behind. Our sins – we are now getting closer to Christian concerns, but we hope not. Our love, we hope so. Dying is easy, you just take with you who you are, and that is the grace and the judgment.

The Nuts and Bolts of Death

Dying is expensive. It is going to cost everything we have. However, although we like to think that once we die it is all over and we don’t have to worry anymore, that isn’t true. Any death causes an incredible amount of money and time for those left behind. Unplanned deaths can often lead to a lot of grief and expense and heartache for family members and friends.

My best friend says that he can’t die until he cleans his garage. What a great image. It is not fair to others to leave a situation behind they don’t have the resources to manage. It also isn’t good stewardship. I have a million books that probably are only interesting to another minister. And unless there is a minister around who can cope with that stuff, it is likely that Harriet would give it to someplace that has no use for the books.

I don’t know how many times that I have seen families who are otherwise tolerable around each other turn into enemies because of some great hurt when dividing up the spoils after a parent has died. Some of this is inescapable, troubles already present just waiting for an outlet. But some of this can be avoided if we think about it, and talk about it before hand.

Ask yourself two questions: who are the best people to figure out what to do with my stuff when I die, and who is the best person to call them together to deal with it. That is your executor and the people who will help honor your stuff. When you write a will, this is the most important element of it. Talk to these people and let them know what you want – even if you are twenty years old.

Some suggestions on nuts and bolts:

United Methodists in principle don’t have an opinion or suggestion about burial or cremation. We do recommend a memorial service over a funeral service. We prefer the service in the church instead of at a funeral home (whether or not the body is present) and held at a time when members of the church can be present. A good memorial service is a combination of remembering and celebrating the life lived and prayers that give space for the grief of loss.

Tell stories when you are in a situation of death. Remember someone and tell of actual times that you had with them. Remember the smells and actions, sounds and feelings that are the real heart of good memories. Tell your story to others as you die. Ask about stories of your friends parents when you support them. These stories can bring painful times, but it is good pain and helps in the grief process and in the process of life for others.

Accept your feelings and the confusions that come in the face of death. Gently let yourself feel whatever it is you feel. Funerals can be truly fun and funny as people tell stories about someone they love and then they feel guilty for happiness. Some people feel terribly betrayed and angry at death even though this may seem completely irrational. Some people feel relief. Some deep sadness to the point of paralysis of all emotions.

Don’t let the details of death keep you from feeling.

When someone dies, there are many people to contact. Each of these must be told and they all ask the same questions. Let yourself tell the story again and again. Don’t protect yourself or others from this reality or the pain of it because great healing can occur when we tell and retell the fact of the death and the stories of the life.

Many cultures cover up your mirrors or have you wear ugly clothes for a year after an important death. It is OK to look like hell for a time after a death. (Even our affirmation of faith says, Jesus was crucified, died and was buried, he descended to hell . . .) That look-like-hell-time is good for two reasons. It says it is OK to grieve for a while. It says that your priorities have all shifted, which they have. And finally, it says that after a year you uncover the mirrors take off the black clothes and find others to love.

Don’t let the division of property in a death destroy the family. There are two corollaries about this suggestion. Don’t wipe out your family to get something you think you have to have. And, don’t just give up on things you might want that remind you of the one you have lost. This is an extremely delicate balance especially in families that struggle over an estate (whether that estate is millions of dollars or an old toothbrush). It is very easy for the anger that accompanies the grief process to be played out in getting or defending stuff.

Tombstones and Graveyards

Do you know anybody who talks about the details of money and deaths. The Ministerial Association met with Johnson’s Funeral Home and they gave us a sense about costs. There is an extraordinary range of costs that break down into three categories: dealing with the body, stuff, and memorial.

Dealing with Bodies: There are taxes, licenses, notices, transportation ,storage, disposal and dress of the bodies. In the Jewish tradition the family will gather to clean the body and prepare it for burial almost immediately. But this is very rare for most of us.

• Cremation: $1,100 you provide the container, $1250 if they provide a cardboard container
• Basic Burial: $1,800 min. you provide casket (yes you can do that) $2,350 if they provide one.
• Plots: basics $2,000 single and $3,000 double (two people). Cremains $1,000 for two.
• Medical Science: two important concerns, what you do with parts of your bodies, eyes kidneys, and most teaching hospitals need bodies for medical students to learn. Contact the hospital and most of this is free.

There is an endless amount of stuff that you can get.

• Caskets run from $95 to $8,000
• Urns from $65 to $8,000

Often a family or the one who has died has had a box that was special to them and that is often much more appropriate as an "urn" than anything gotten at the funeral home. The family is likely to receive the ashes in a plastic bag or box about four or five inches square and these ashes are almost indistinguishable from ashes from a fire place. They can be transferred to a box easily and often with some humor if children from the family are present.

• Grave markers from $350

There are a number of services to think about when you are in charge of someone’s funeral. Do you want a funeral (body present) or a memorial service? Will there be a committal (when you take the body to the ground wherein it will rest)? Will there be a viewing of the body or a time of preparation for the funeral (in the Catholic tradition a rosary)? Each of these can cost.

Funeral homes usually charge for each service provided or provide a package for a number of services. These can be several hundred dollars.

There are no charges or honoraria for the services of a the minister for a funeral if you are a member of a United Methodist Church. If you are not a member of a church, it is customary to pay for the minister. Some charge a specific fee and some receive a gift. This is generally paid by people before or after the service, but I would suggest, if you have a friend figuring this out, to give it early to a funeral home director to give to the pastor or send it in to the office of the church as soon as you think about it. It can be very awkward for a family member to "thank" the pastor after the service with a check, and yet, this is quite common.

Get ready for costs of transporting and feeding family members, and flowers. And as much as it looks like a little planning and saving ahead can make this much easier on those who survive us.

Plan Your Own Funeral

One of the great ways to think through some of the issues around your own death is to plan your funeral. This may sound morbid, but it is actually a quite life-affirming process and a great way to take stock of your spiritual life. Whether you are sixty or twenty, spend time thinking about who you want to memorialize you, Where. What do you want to be known for? Sit down with your pastor and sketch out some ideas.

Models of Death

The Ecology of the Universe

One of the amazing things taught to us by science now is something that persons of faith have proclaimed, probably since the beginning of time. You probably can’t destroy energy, you can just change its form. Burn up a piece of wood, and you destroy the wood, but the energy is released in heat and water vapor and ash, all of which are used again in something else. Bury a body and little critters from all over will come and gobble it up, feeding other little critters and becoming part of the vast cycle of life. At the end of our funeral service, we say, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. There is a sense of humility in this, but there is also the ecology of death that will, in time use everything.

This is one of the reasons I think many of our burial practices are fearful beyond usefulness. I think God designed a universe that needs our bodies after we die. Encasing them in bronze and concrete for a zillion years is just one more way we have of not giving ourselves back to the earth. One primary form of humility may be letting yourself die and turning back into humus to feed the future generations.

Live Each Moment As If It is Your Last

One of the results of near death experiences is that people gain a new insight on life. There is something about meeting death, living near death, that focuses life. I remember reading Carlos Castenedas’ books when I was twentyish and one image that sticks with me is Don Juan telling Carlos that death is always with us just over our left shoulder. He teaches him how to see this shadow following him around. In the last twenty years, I have often found myself looking over my left shoulder just to see. But Christianity says something very similar. The heart of our faith is the crucifixion and the resurrection. Resurrection isn’t just new life, it is life beyond death, perhaps within it. Our primary sacrament is a celebration of the gift of God’s grace in the image of death (a body broken and blood poured out). And to follow Castenedas image, Jesus says, take up your cross and follow me – I wonder if Jesus carried his cross on his left shoulder.

Reincarnation

United Methodists do not affirm reincarnation. Or, we should say that we don’t in principle because many United Methodists do believe in reincarnation. There are a few reasons that reincarnation is troublesome.

First of all, in the Hindu system from which we learn about it, reincarnation, that karmic cycle of life moving into another form of life endlessly, is a negative thing. In most systems of eastern religion, enlightenment lifts us out of the endless repetition of life. American reincarnation uses this system as a form of fountain of youth where individuals are constantly renewing themselves. Christian theology seeks, hopefully gentle, to reject this form of egotism.

Often belief in reincarnation is simply an expression of the inability to deal with the grief of fear of death and loss. Death throws us against the wall of value. And one life can seem awfully insignificant and this scares us. Our loves, our struggles, our memories take on a much more grand scale when they move from body to body growing through time. A subtle form of caste system develops with people who are "old souls". Without this, a life has to be valuable in and of itself. And this is terribly hard to justify in the criteria "of a very large and ancient world" Christian theology wants to look at the value of a human life in very humble terms.

Actuarial Tables

A lot of our lives below the surface are governed by death – not death actually, but deaths. Anyone who has a grain of sense in their heads knows that it is very dangerous to drive. But we drive because the odds are that we won’t kill or hurt anyone. When those odds get high, we make rules. When we increase the speed limit on our highways we know that is going to kill people. But certain numbers of deaths are acceptable. When we sell guns to people, we know that they will kill people, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. When too many of a certain kind of gun kills too many people, we put restrictions on them, maybe. We know that adding things to our food can kill people, but a certain percentage is ok and often we are trading off one thing that kills some people for another thing that kills, hopefully, less people.

Any business has rules of operation that are set by statistics of people who are hurt or killed. These decisions of life and death are all around us: fire extinguishers and alarms, crash bars on doors, enough doors to get out of buildings, fabric that doesn’t catch fire too quickly, storage places for things that children can kill themselves with, safe parking and safe car, building codes and date stamps on the food we buy. None of these things keep death from happening, they just cut down on the odds.

Death and Genesis

As we continue our study of Genesis, it is worth noting that death is a key actor in the developing drama of these covenant stories.

The Western tradition of the church has tended to read Adam and Eve and many of the following stories in light of sin and justice, disobedience and the separation from God, that we interpret as death. Jesus’s death pays the prices of this for all of us. In the Eastern tradition the Adam and Eve story and most of the following ones actually bring out death in their actions – the created fabric of the cosmos which God creates with a single word is ripped open, life seeps out, the whole cosmos is thrown into a spiral of death until Jesus, the Cosmic Word goes to the place of death and with his own death, plugs the hole remaking the Ordered Universe.

Why is there murder? What is going to keep God from annihilating humanity? Abraham constantly risks death to put his trust in the God of the Covenant. In Jacob we discover a spiritual process that comes about when someone running away from the fear of being killed is driven to a long life that is actually death. As he faces his fear of death, he can acknowledge that being away from home, away from the promises of God is worse than death. As he faces himself and turns toward home, his spirit is restored, his family reunited, and his faith affirmed. Joseph is the interior one who comes out of death, the Pit, to a new life that becomes the foundation of life for his family who thinks him dead.

Death and Ethics

Three of the most heated discussions in religion and ethics are abortion, death penalty and assisted dying. To be sure, I am not about to even ask some of these questions in this space, let alone answer them. However, these difficult questions revolve around questions about the beginning of life, the end of life and the value of life.

How do you value life and in what contexts does that make itself felt? How do you feel about cloning pieces of bodies to be used to prolong or enhance life? How do you feel about polution which may rob future generations of life itself, or a quality of life that we expect? How do you feel about the genetic engineering of chemicals and manufactured biologicals which could be used to enhance life, or could be used as weapons we may have no way to really contain?

What will you do to prepare to face the death that is all around us, woven mysteriously into the heart of our faith?