This page was updated 11/19/2007

The tomb is always silent

save for the heart-break of those who watch.

They hear the fading tread of familiar feet

and listen unbelievingly for the voice they knew.

Bereavement is always hollow save for the proud minds

of those who remember….

Who will roll away the stone?

Not professional mutes who wear the ribbon of grief;

not bland purveyors who proclaim eternal solace;

but the donors of life's continuities.

They give food and friendship, employment and mirth.

They show by their common deeds

that life is not irreparably fractured.

They are the living cells,

scar tissue for the healing of grief.

The tomb is always silent.

Out of the silence let there come a living image

of the dead which we dare not lose,

lest life that was vanish forever.

Out of the silence let there come a reckoning.

The dead have left a trace of love in the flesh

of those to whom they bequeathed life.

They left a touch of wisdom in the minds

of those who listened to them in quietness.

They left a mark in places made their own

by tool and spade

and by the craftwork of their thought.

We will speak of immortalities

as far as thought can reach.

Of light that carries from the nebulous boundaries

to the centres of creation,

Of motion that follows the grain of time and space

to bring a system of promise,

Of earth that outlasts and outwears

the living limbs that clamber on it.

Man has come a long way and death will not obliterate

the venture.

Each makes his reckoning and passes.

Light comes at dawn, Motion turns within the womb.

Earth will roll away the stone.

And still the tomb is silent.

From which we normally observe the world taking shape:

Not only though our personal endeavors --

As important as they are to each of us --

But also through the rich and varied life of the vast universe.

The world is so much larger and more immense

In scope and scale than our personal lives can encompass.

Only in our inspiration, our imagination and creativity

Escaping the every day into the wonder of imagination,

Can we find the ecstasy of life, beauty and order, hope and love.

May these few moments of insight, set aside from the week's affairs,

Be an opportunity for you to peek at this grand universe

From a "different perspective" -- a fresh vision is your reward.

There is so much available to us when we open our very being to all the world,

Not just the familiar and comfortable habitat we manage daily.

Seek these moments memory, of wonder and awe, of sheer ecstasy.

They are precious, all too often few, and the manna of life. AMEN.

"Donors Of Life's Continuities"

I am convinced that Leonard was correct. A primary reason for the existence of religious communities is to encourage us to be "donors of life's continuities." It may seem cynical, it may seem cruel or perverse, but I do not believe that we human beings, when left to our own devices as individual persons, are particularly adept at supporting life's continuities -- those values and activities that nurture the best of human life and civilization.

Truly, down through the ages individuals and groups have maintained the threads connecting themselves to one another. These people always recognized, however, that such maintenance requires regular and frequent support, energy, encouragement, and sanction if it is to be even occasionally successful. There are individual heroes in every age, but those who gathered to support and nurture one another in their best efforts brought civilization to the human animal and continue to buttress civility against the storms of rudeness, violence, plunder, rape, and murder that some humans continue to practice.

Very few agents of human conduct, even governments, seriously seek to preserve the full scope of life's continuity. Various agencies and organizations do keep minutes, statistics, and official communications, but usually only regarding a very limited range of topics or activities. Neither local or national governments nor universities attempt anything like a reasonably accurate history of all of life.

You might think that a much better resource would be daily newspapers, journals, television, and, increasingly, computers. They record a much more varied and open-ended history, including not only momentous facts and economic statistics but also births, deaths, birthdays, and the staggeringly uncountable numbers of mundane events. All these participate in maintaining life's continuities! These are, however, "merely the facts, Ma'am" (as Joe Friday would have put it on the old Dragnet TV series). Life is so much more than the details, so much more than the facts. Last Wednesday I visited Marie and C. J. Miklitsch and their one-day old baby Alexander (Xander). No factual description of a birth capture their meaning and role in our lives -- more must be said.

In olden days the church or its predecessors (tribal shamans, priestly administrators, and such) directed the "people's religion" (in quotes) and maintained the records of the village, the clan, and the people. Those days are gone. Our UU congregations, for example, make little effort to maintain a serious history of our people; no one would say that minutes of Board or Congregational meetings, not even the newsletter, would accurately or fully describe our shared life as the UU Congregation of Fort Wayne.

Yet, of course, people do want to know about each others' lives, and they want to know not from idle curiosity or malicious intent. This basic knowledge allows us to relate to one another, to connect our lives, to communicate our thoughts, feelings, values. Folks want to know about our religious beliefs and values because it introduces us to them as real people, unique individuals. We are more than the events of our lives. We are passions and commitments, relationships and values, beliefs and concerns.

I always associate Easter with an early spring funeral down in the country. It was an Easter about like this one, cold and rainy, but with a bitter wind, completely overcast. The sermon at this funeral for a great-aunt seemed to last forever. I was chilled to the bone, and I was afraid I would never be warm again.

That funeral was about continuities. It was everything most of my relatives expected in a funeral, but I appreciated almost nothing in the service. I was growing to be a young man in a totally different environment, and I felt dissociated, unconnected to much of what happened in the service. However, the old hymns and the little country church and its graveyard on a hillside were comforting, connecting me back through the ages to family long dead. These, too, are continuities, these symbols and songs of our culture that connect us to one another and to the history and heritage without which we are merely extremely large, aggressive, and destructive animals.

UU congregations are all about maintaining life's continuities, just as do all churches, temples, and religious gatherings. Religion is about connections, relationships, sharing ourselves. UUs are concerned with ethics, which has little to do with heaven or hell, obeying laws or leaders. Ethics is about human relationships: the how, more than the why, of human life. Unitarians and Universalists knew this centuries ago. Ethics is central to our religious life, more so than in traditional religions. As we downplayed form and creed, we increasingly paid attention to human relationships. We cared more about how we lived with each other than what we said we believed.

Perhaps we downplayed form and creed too much. Ritual actions are familiar dramatic replays that communicate important information. Creeds are easy ways to remember beliefs and values. Some rituals and creeds are no longer vital or accurate, but then neither is much of last century’s science (the twentieth!). Rituals and creeds (weddings, funerals, or Sunday worship) celebrate our heritage; communicating in direct and simple ways the continuities of our life together. Without these values, when ethics stands alone, it is legalistic, always outdated, with no possibility of consensus.

That is what I mean by continuity: maintaining contact with one another – physical, mental, historical, ethical, spiritual. These kinds of contacts lead to an intimacy of respect and trust that shares values, beliefs, emotions, anxieties, fears, hopes -- all intangible things. Only with established relationships can we hope to be donors of life's continuities. Without these connections even our greatest achievements are merely technical accomplishments, lost when new technologies appear. Without connections we cannot donate to one another the important aspects of our lives.

Love, concern, patient tolerance, generosity of spirit, and affection are never outdated by new science, technology, or different cultures or lifestyles. They are true "continuities of life" with no past and future, only an eternal present (Paul Tillich's phrase). That is why religion has nothing to fear from science. These values are not affected by changes in the human condition: war or revolution, change of location or job, aging or birthing, education or ignorance. If life's continuities are really not mechanical inventions, scientific discoveries, and sociopolitical structures, then we humans must take considerably more effort to maintain human communities.

Life's meaningful values – continuities -- rely upon the contact that creates an intimacy that shares values, beliefs, emotions, anxieties, fears, hopes. This is the only way prophets and heroes of the past truly live today. Books and other records are pale imitations of their exploits compared to the effects of their lives. The effect of Gandhi's life on Martin Luther King, Jr. is just one example. No book captures the tremendous contribution to human history of a Gandhi quite like Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life and work did.

The media are filled with examples of how the continuities that connect humans were severed. These events were not donors of life, but destroyers of life. Their actions represent values, but not life-affirming, life-enhancing values, but rather values of cynicism, despair, and selfishness; they describe a world where we no longer feel connected to one another.

We do not gather here to practice rituals or recite creeds, teach or preach, so much as we come to join in a mutual life of concern and care, of joy and love, of hope and comfort, of compassion and justice. We gather as a people who will not abandon one another, because our lives are interwoven with that of other people in such a way that our own lives are shallow and incomplete, without the familiarity of friends.

If we are donors of life's continuities, if we include in our lives the lives of others in deeply significant and meaningful ways, then we too shall surely live, long after physical death has turned us into cosmic compost. Our lives are part of a greater life, made more or less important not by our wealth, accomplishments, or power, but by our contributions to Life itself. Surely this is the ultimate goal of the Easter message. We become part of a larger life than our frail bodies can hold – we become a part of Life itself.

May we all be "donors of life's continuities" -- lovers of one another, capable of laughing and crying at the appropriate times, willing to sit beside the sick, lonely, or oppressed, easily accepting this or that temporary burden on behalf of another. Good marriages are like this, and good families, and great friends. In this way, each of our lives becomes so interwoven with that of other lives that no one of us ever really dies. We are all resurrected in the ongoing tapestry of love and hope, anxieties and joys, cares and concerns that are the greatest source of human fulfillment -- for any one of us or for all of us.

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