(no subject)

[rivka]

Every year, our church runs a "Mystery Buddies" program in which kids from the congregation rare matched up with adults. They spend a month (I think it's March) trading notes back and forth, signing their notes with secret code names, until the end when all is revealed at a special breakfast.

Apparently, adults in the congregation have complained that they want their own Mystery Buddies program, because this year the program has been expanded with an adults-only version called the "Big Questions Exchange." Each Sunday in November, those who sign up exchange letters with a person they have been secretly matched to by the Director of Religious Education. At the end of the month, we'll meet our match. Each week, as the program name suggests, the letters are supposed to tackle big religious questions.

acceberskoorb assures me that my secret match doesn't read my LJ, so I'm going to post the letters I write each week.

Dear Mystery Person,

I'm supposed to start this letter by saying a little about who I am, without revealing my identity. That's a tricky task! Hopefully this is not too much information: I am a scientist and a parent. I've lived on both coasts and in the midwest. I've been a UU for almost a decade. I was raised in the United Church of Christ, a liberal Protestant denomination with a strong social justice focus. My religious upbringing was positive, and when I first joined First Unitarian I identified as a UU Christian. Over time, my Christian identity faded away, and I now identify as plain old UU.

So, this week's Big Question: "What happens to us after we die?" I know that this is supposed to be the biggest of big questions, a fundamental issue that all humans must grapple with, the universal problem that religion was created to solve, etc. So I feel a bit odd saying that it's never been a question that interested me. I don't worry or even think much about what happens after death. To me it seems... irrelevant, I guess.

Ultimately, what happens after death is unknowable. But if pressed, I'd say that when we die, our bodies return to the earth. Eventually, our component elements become part of other forms of life. So we remain within the great chain of existence, even if in unrecognizable form.

There's a poem I like on this subject, by Elder Olson:

Nothing is lost; the universe is honest.
Time, like the sea, gives all back in the end,
But only in its own way, on its own conditions:
Empires as grains of sand, forests as coal,
Mountains as pebbles.
Be still, be still, I say;
You were never the water, only a wave;
Not substance, but a form substance assumed.

From that perspective, substance endures even when its temporary forms have dissolved.

So what about our selves? I think they live on in the effects we've had on the world and the people in it. For better or for worse, the world is a different place than it would have been if we never existed. We live on in the things we have done, the ideas we've shared, the memories we leave in people who know us, and perhaps our biological descendants.

That's enough immortality for me.

Sincerely,

Otter

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Rivka. That's as good a summing-up of my own feelings on the subject as I could have written myself, right down to the "I don't worry or even think much about what happens after death."