Reading 1: "Yudisthira at Heavens Gate" from the Mahabharata
The great king Yudhisthira had ruled over the Pandava people for many years, and, among his many achievements had waged a successful war against the forces of evil. It was time for him to withdraw from the world, and to enter the Celestial City of the Immortals.
King Yudhisthira set off on the long journey into the northern mountains, along with his four brothers and his beloved wife Drapaudi. They were soon joined on their journey by a small, ill-kempt stray dog.
The journey was hard. They tired. And in the course of the journey first one brother and then another, then the third and then the fourth, fell, exhausted, and died. Unable to do anything for them, Yudhisthira and Drapaudi continued on the journey, followed by the dog. Eventually Drapaudi, too, fell by the wayside and died.
With utmost sadness, Yudhisthira turned and continued, the dog faithfully keeping pace. At last Yudhisthira and the dog reached the gates of the Celestial City, home of the Immortals. Yudhisthira bowed humbly and asked to be admitted. The great sky God Indra arrived to meet Yudhisthira and to welcome him to heaven.
But then Yudhisthira said that without his beloved wife and his four brothers, he did not have the heart to enter. Indra replied that these loved ones were already in Heaven, they had come before him.
This lifted Yudhisthira's heart, but he had one more request.
"This dog has faithfully accompanied me on this long journey, never left my side. I cannot leave him now outside heaven's gate. My heart is full of love for him."
Indra shook his head. The earth quaked.
"You, Yudhisthira, through your goodness and courage, and by enduring this long and difficult journey, have earned your way into heaven. But you cannot bring a dog into heaven. A dog would pollute the Celestial City. Leave the dog behind Yudhisthira. It is no sin."
"But where would he go? He has given up the pleasures of the earth to be my companion. I cannot desert him now." Yudhisthira turned to leave.
Indra asked, astonished, "You would abandon heaven just for the sake of a dog?"
Yudhisthira declared that long ago he had vowed never to turn his back on anyone needing his protection and help. "And so," he concluded, "I will not abandon my loyal friend."
Yudisthira turned from heaven's gate and began to walk away.
At that moment a remarkable thing happened. The faithful dog was transformed into the god Dharma, the god of righteousness and justice.
And Indra declared, "You are a good man, Yudhisthira. You have shown loyalty and love to a small, faithful dog and compassion for all creatures, ready to renounce for yourself all the rewards of heaven for this humble dog's sake. You shall be honored in heaven!"
And so Yudhisthira entered heaven and was reunited with his wife and with brothers to enjoy eternal happiness. [1]
Part 1: Do Dogs go to Heaven?
Today is Easter. Most Unitarian Universalists approach the day only obliquely. Meg Barnhouse, one of our ministers and wonderful writer fictionalizes this in a brief piece on the UUA website (thanks Jennifer for popping this on Facebook):
The Worship Planning Group at Honey Springs Unitarian Universalist Congregation—a mythical UU congregation where we are all the way we are, only more so—was seated around the table in Classroom 6 discussing the upcoming Easter Intergenerational service. Someone had put a scented candle in the chalice, and the room was beginning to list a little to the raspberry side. The Rev. Cotton Lovingood, the new minister, was having a little trouble breathing, and briefly wondered if it would be seen as sacrilegious to ask if they could put the chalice out for the rest of the meeting. Mindful of his previous two very brief settlements since seminary, and wanting to have a brightly successful ministry here at Honey Springs, he decided to endure.These are the times when it is not fun to be the minister.
“It’s in the name,” a tall woman dressed in gauzy green layers was saying. “Easter is from Eostre or Ostara, the Saxon goddess of spring. In ancient Greece she was called Astarte, in Assyria she was called Ishtar. Hear it? Easter, Ishtar, it’s the same word. Her worshippers would have egg hunts at dawn on the day of the Equinox, and the rabbits were sacred to her, too.” She looked at the minister.
“Easter is about Jesus, people!” A slender young man leaned both of his forearms on the table. “Why is it so hard just to let the church talk about Jesus once in a while? Is Honey Springs going to be like that place where the only time the name of Jesus is uttered is when the minister stubs his toe?” He looked at the minister. [2]
But it is Easter, the primary holiday for devout Christians, and we should at least examine and maybe contend with and perhaps even learn from what Easter has to offer us.
Easter to Christians is about ressurrection, about the promise of a new life after death. Jesus is murdered, his dead body is buried, and on Easter day, the body is missing. Jesus appears in the flesh to a few of his followers on that day and for a few weeks afterward [3], reassuring them of this message. Part of the message is an apocalyptic one, what's going to happen to the whole world when things are made right, so to speak. Part of his message is eschatological, what is going to happen to you after you die.
Does heaven exist? Who goes to heaven? Do we all go to heaven? Do dogs go to heaven?
These are all questions that we Unitarian Universalists tend to avoid talking about. OK some of us will answer all of the above with NO, and be done with it.
It is this afterlife question that I want to spend some time on today. Now, lest you think that this concern about afterlife is primarily a Christian idea, let's explore one non-Christian tradition.
Our reading for this segment was from the Mahabharata, which is this huge epic poem from ancient India. Yudisthira is making his final trek to heaven, with his family around him. A mangy dog has joined him. One by one, his brothers die, and then his wife. At the gates of heaven, the god Indra welcomes him, and tells him he'll meet his family again in heaven, but he has to leave the dog behind as the dog is impure. Yudisthira chooses to stay with the dog, and as he turns away from heaven, the dog is transformed into the god Dharma, and both are admitted and Yudisthira is honored in heaven for his faithfulness and compassion for a humble creature.
Obviously this story has great moral lessons about loyalty and compassion, and it makes me want to explore other stories in this epic poem. But I want to notice some of the assumptions about heaven in this story. Heaven is a place that you travel to, and gain admission to. You will see your family when you get there. Only pure beings are admitted, so dogs are excluded.
Let's explore some of these questions. Do dogs go to heaven? I'm not surprised that this is a topic of contention among some Christians. I found a website [4], that attempts to prove, of course with many Biblical references, that dogs do not go to heaven.
On the other hand, I found a number of books, [5] including children's books [6] suggesting that dogs do go to heaven. There was even a sort of Universalist book, called 'Even Bad Dogs go to Heaven' [7].
What about people? If we do go to heaven, will we run into all our old friends and relatives -- at least the dead ones? Is heaven a place where we hang out with friends, eat ice cream, and watch what's going on on Earth as if it were TV, as the book The Lovely Bones projects? [8]
It turns out that the idea that we'd meet friends and loved ones in heaven has been in and out of favor in various religions for a long time. In American Christianity, it was out of favor until after the Civil War. At that time, there were so many families mourning their war dead that the idea that they would be reunited with these dead became popular. If that were not comforting enough, many believed that they could communicate with the dead directly, though seances and Ouija boards [9]. While the fad of spiritualism has faded, many who believe in heaven do believe they will meet their loved ones in the flesh there. So for many Americans, as heaven is a very real place, with friends and family and pets.
Reading 2: The Reassemblage by Virginia Hamilton Adair
Some myths are too terrible for our believing:
that the compendium of all our years and yearning,
that poor bundle of knobby bones and leather,
must wait through mellennia as scattered dust,
its bits and pieces digested by worms and beetles?
until the great dictator gives it leave to reassemble
and stand naked to be tried, not by a jury of its peers,
but a judge with far too many cases on His, or Her, or Its
agenda?
So the grave was after all a cell on death row.
Now come the rewards and punishments:
one verdict brutal beyond imagination,
the other by most reports an eternity of boredom.
But billions have lived and died by this myth,
evolved by sadists and masochists,
even by the great John Donne, napping in his coffin,
arrayed in frilled nightcap
just to get the feel of things to come.
Oh, you arbiters of the afterlife, let the soul go on dancing,
the mind exploring, discovering,
setting forth into unending wonders of the universe,
the wilderness of words,
the vast mysteries of the human mind. [10]
Part 2: What About the Rest of Us?
There are a zillion jokes about heaven out there, most involving getting past the pearly gates. Here are a couple:
A young couple were killed in an accident on the day before their wedding. When they arrived at the Pearly Gates, St. Peter asked if there was anything he could do to make being in heaven even more pleasant. So they explained about dying the day before their wedding and asked if it was possible to be married in heaven. "No problem," said St Peter, "leave it with me."And another:
A hundred years or so later they met St Peter and asked about the wedding. "Everything is being arranged," he assured them.
Another hundred years passed, and they met St Peter again. They reminded him about the wedding and said, "We know that in heaven, time is of no consequence, but we have been waiting over two hundred years." St Peter replied, "I am sorry. All the arrangements were made the day after you arrived and there is only one thing preventing us from having the wedding..... We're still waiting on a minister to show up here!"
A man arrives at the gates of heaven. St. Peter asks, "Religion?" The man says, "Methodist." St. Peter looks down his list, and says, "Go to room 24, but be very quiet as you pass room 8."As I looked around for versions of this old joke on the Internet, there were many variations on the religious group that was in room 8 (and it was usually room 8): Catholics, Baptists, Jehovahs Witnesses, Mormons.
Another man arrives at the gates of heaven. "Religion?" "Congregationalist." "Go to room 18, but be very quiet as you pass room 8."
A third man arrives at the gates. "Religion?" "Jewish." "Go to room 11, but be very quiet as you pass room 8." The man says, "I can understand there being different rooms for different religions, but why must I be quiet when I pass room 8?" St. Peter tells him, "Well the -- I'll let you fill in the blank with a religion here -- they are in room 8, and they think they're the only ones here!
If there is a common thread, it is that the religious faiths mentioned in these jokes teach that there is an alternate destination for some of us. More specifically, if we are not somehow saved in that particular faith, we don't get to room 8. We go to hell.
I suspect a great number of you are here in this church today because you, like me, could not accept that kind of faith. This particular kind of teaching is a "myth too terrible for our believing". We just could not see that the world could be made up this way. If there is a God, and if God is a loving God, God would not favor some, and damn others to hell.
Our own faith movement has a long history of exploring this issue. Our movement, Unitarian Universalism is formed from two distinct liberal religious movements that merged almost 50 years ago. While it is oversimplifying things to describe a whole denomination in one sentence, let me do just that with the Universalists. The Universalists believed that everyone was saved by God, period. They believed that a loving God would never damn people to eternal suffering, no matter how bad they were on earth. [11]
This idea was pretty radical in its day. Many more conservative Christians argued that this didn't make any sense, for why would people be good, unless they had the threat of hell hanging over them. The Universalists made their case by their actions, for they were very engaged in social justice work, such as opposing slavery, and working for women's rights, and public education. Universalism became one of the more popular religious movements in the United States by the mid 1800's. Unfortunately for them, a single-issue theology does not necessarily make a strong denomination. Other liberal Christian churches adapted the Universalist theology, and the Universalists ultimately merged with the Unitarians.
So if I have to believe in heaven, it is a Universalist heaven. We all go. No room 8 for UUs. There is no judgment day. No standing naked to be tried. No separation of sheep and goats.
As the reading suggests, we all go on dancing. We all go on exploring discovering, and setting forth into the unending wonders of the universe. If I must believe in an afterlife, let it be a wilderness of words, a journey into vast mysteries of the human mind.
Reading 3: The Hidden Singer by Wendell Berry
The gods are less
for their love of praise.
Above and below them all
is a spirit that needs
nothing but its own
wholeness,
its health and ours.
It has made all things
by dividing itself.
It will be whole again.
To its joy we come
together—the seer
and the seen, the eater
and the eaten, the lover
and the loved.
In our joining it knows
itself. It is with us then,
not as the gods
whose names crest
in unearthly fire,
but as a little bird
hidden in the leaves
who sings quietly
and waits
and sings. [12]
Part 3: Dreaming of Afterlives
Is it even worth the time to think about what happens after we die? Is this just a waste of time? Shouldn't we be using this time this morning to talk about things of importance, like food security, or immigration reform, or how we might get along better with each other?
I don't discount any of that, but I think talking about ideas of afterlife is important, if for no other reason than what we tell our kids. What do we tell them, when some school kid says 'you're going to hell', because obviously, our kids are not going to Room 8. We need to have done some of our own thinking so we can teach our children well, and ultimately to guide them to explore this on their own as they grow.
Here is another reason we should dwell on the afterlife. In the hospital, as a chaplain, I helped people confront death all the time. People who were afraid they'd die during a surgery, family members worrying about a person in intensive care, families beginning to grieve after someone did pass on.
All too often, these people had no place in their spiritual grounding to make sense of this suffering. So they reached back to the religion they learned in childhood. And much of that was poor teaching, poorly remembered and let me just say it, awful stuff. Some worried about hell and a judging God and punishment, and they lived in fear and anguish. Even when their childhood images were positive and hopeful, like the pearly gates and angels, they still had trouble integrating that with their adult understanding of the world. I could only offer spiritual first aid, first trying not to do more harm, then trying to help their spiritual selves begin to heal just as their physical selves faced healing.
I wish I could offer a nice easy explanation of the afterlife, but I cannot. But hey, if I cannot offer one answer, how about several? That's one of the beauties of being Unitarian Universalist, I can simultaneously hold several ideas at once, if I want.
Here's one possibility. For many of us, when we die, we're physically gone. We accept that. We live on, however, in the memories of those around us. Our work in the world, for good or ill, is our legacy, and it is in a way, immortal. I find that the idea of process theology extends this kind of an afterlife in an attractive way.
Process theology suggests that all things are intertwined with the creative force of the universe, that which some call God. The universe and the God co-create, that is, God creates the universe and the universe creates God. As time marches on, we are involved in this creation, as parts of the universe. We are not special, all parts of the universe, from atoms to grains of sand to wildflowers to galaxies are involved in this creation. And we, along with all these other objects, continue to contribute to the creation long after we are gone. So our afterlife is the creative effort we launch into the future, by living creatively now. [13]
Here's a different approach that I find attractive. There is an emerging speculative cosmology that suggests that our known universe exists as part of a vast number of other universes in a larger system called the multiverse. Universes like ours are constantly spawning new baby universes, which through a process of inflation, grow rapidly to full size, like our universe. Some of these proposals suggest that so many universes exist that they exceed the possible combinations of states of matter and energy within them. In other words, there must be numerous exact replicas of our universe out there. We are each duplicated many times over, perhaps exact duplicates in some universes, perhaps with variations in others. These copies exist in different time and place, if time and place really has meaning in the expanse of the multiverse. [14]
Now I know these theories sound a bit more like scientific hallucinations than reality, but they do propose to resolve some difficult questions in cosmology today. I find such theories fascinating and even comforting. We may be embedded in a universe, rather a multiverse far more complex and interesting than we can imagine.
And one final dream of the afterlife. Perhaps as Wendell Berry, and as so many other mystical thinkers suggest, we are part of something bigger, a 'spirit that needs / nothing but its own / wholeness'. And perhaps as we live and when we die, then, 'to its joy / we come together' Berry goes on, 'In our joining it knows / itself. It is with us then, / not as the gods ... but as a little bird / hidden in the leaves / who sings quietly / and waits / and sings.'
I've often pondered our little bird on our steel tree, up here, and wondered why that bird? Now I know. That bird reminds us that we are joined in a great interconnected wholeness. That bird is our wisdom and our joy. That bird is always with us, who sings quietly, and waits, and sings.
Notes:
[1] http://indaus.blogspot.com/2005/02/yudisthira-at-heaven-gate.html
[2] "The Honey Springs worship committee plans its Easter service" http://www.uuworld.org/spirit/articles/160453.shtml
[3] Acts 1.1-11
[4] http://www.godandscience.org/doctrine/pets_in_heaven.html
[5] Jack Wintz, Will I See My Dog In Heaven; Jean Holmes, Do Dogs Go To Heaven? Eternal Answers for Animal Lovers
[6] Cynthia Rylant, Dog Heaven
[7] Stephen Huneck, Even Bad Dogs Go to Heaven: More from the Dog Chapel
[8] Lisa Miller, Heaven, 2010, p. 216
[9] Drew Gilpin Faust, The Republic of Suffering, 2008, p. 182
[10] Virginia Hamilton Adair, Beliefs and Blasphemies, 1998, p. 102-103
[11] see, for example, "Universalism", http://www.uua.org/visitors/ourhistory/6904.shtml
[12] Wendell Berry, "The Hidden Singer", The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1998
[13] Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History, 1988. p. 346-349
[14] Amanda Gefter, "Touching the Multiverse", New Scientist, March 2010, p. 28
