NO ALTER CALLS

I don’t dwell on long life or old age but things change when your reason for meeting the new day loses its salt. After they collect your keys and assign your parking spot to someone new, excuses and make believe are simply inadequate. It’s like driving through a strange town, needing fuel, passing stations on the wrong side of the street, then passing one on the right because of long lines. Before you know it  you are out of town and you still need fuel. So much for the perfect truck stop, feeling foolish for not stopping sooner. Turning around and going back are options. Still, fuel is one thing and living meaningfully is another. Without keys or a parking space there is no going back to a purpose that has been reassigned. If you don’t reinvent yourself, the journey can go from smooth sailing to running on empty.

I go back to my old school several times a year, walk in the front door but must register as a visitor and wear a security pass. With 40 plus teachers in the building only a few were there when I retired. Everything changes and the biggest change is me. I continue to grow with great, wonderful experiences every year but like a comet that has looped around our sun, I am speeding away from my solar system and I’ll not pass this way again. 

Mortality is the premise that we are born, we live and we die. Human beings not only associate bits of unrelated information to frame new meaning but also invent language to create stories. One story that keeps recycling is the one whence we can circumvent death by either restoration or rebirth. It necessitates a supernatural (god) being that is so thoroughly entrenched in  human history that I needn’t elaborate. With faith, people can be long lived without the fear, anger, anxiety or disillusion that impending mortality raises. 

People I’ve never met, don’t know their names or faces, they are very good about depositing money into my bank account, twice a month for as long as I live. I have no reason to think that financial benefit will dry up but I have no such expectation about immortality. Stephen Grellet was a Frenchman, assigned to the King’s personal guards. For whatever reason, he lost the king’s favor and was sentenced to death. But he escaped to the American colonies. His brush with death and exposure to Wm Penn and the Quakers led to his well worn quote, and I paraphrase: “I expect to pass through this world but once. Therefore, any good or kindness I can show any fellow creature, let me do it now for I shall not pass this way again.” I can’t speak to Grellet’s views on mortality but his words open a way to put it in focus. Life is a story with a beginning a middle and an end. The plot can take unexpected turns but the sequence is irreversible. Unitarians for the most part believe that people create their own heaven and hell, in the present, right here on the planet. So it would seem, skipping death and going straight to rebirth to collect your $200 is too long a stretch, too much to count on. Rather, the present moment should not be taken for granted.

          Modern day Unitarian Forrest Church put it this way; “Want what you have, do what you can, be who you are.” There is something about “NOW” that doesn’t resonate with people who think they can cheat death. They may be so new to the planet they can’t imagine growing old or trust faith enough to squander the moment with fiction and hyperbole. They miss the urgency of the present. Wisdom tells us to learn from the past and to save for the future but I’ll not pass this way again and I want to squeeze the moment for all it’s worth. If you like ‘Biblical’ then go to the bible, King Solomon in his frustration with mortality, the wisest man of all; “A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil.” That sounds like the moment to me. I didn’t know I was going to preach this morning but my sermons are short. There will be no singing, no offering and no alter calls. Like Nobel Laureate Ellie Wiesel, I write to understand as much as to be understood.