The Rapture of Being Alive

Author’s Note: This was written several days prior to the Facebook fervor surrounding the death cafes.

Some would argue that perhaps we don’t sufficiently ponder death, that one of the ways we successfully navigate our day-to-day journeys is by shunting aside notions of mortality. That’s not to say that we ought to be morbid, to walk about in fear of the end (or, perhaps worse, in fear of some kind of punitive afterlife); the suggestion is instead that by maintaining some level of awareness that we are all mortal, we gain helpful perspective that can be both motivational and soothing. Perhaps. 

Believe it or not, there’s an app available called “WeCroak,” and it’s just as strange as it sounds. A quote from the description in the app store: 

“As seen in 10% Happier, Atlantic Magazine and The New York Times.

Find happiness by contemplating your mortality with the WeCroak app. Each day, we’ll send you five invitations at randomized times to stop and think about death. It’s based on a Bhutanese folk saying that to be a happy person one must contemplate death five times daily.”

I’m guessing I must have read about it in one of those outlets because a couple of years ago I gave it a whirl. From a technical perspective - and I work in software so I care deeply about such things - the app worked exactly as promised. But did it make me happier? To be honest, it mostly made me feel weird. Maybe a couple of times a week (and remember, these reminders come five times a day), I’d have a moment of increased perspective. Mostly I’d be in the middle of a meeting or rushing off to pick up a child somewhere and see this alert come up on my phone and want to respond to the inanimate device, like “Yeah, okay, I know, I get it, just shut up right now!”

All that said, I still think it’s probably a helpful thing to have a healthy and continuous acceptance of one’s own temporaryness. But inasmuch as it’s true that we don’t often enough consider death, I would argue that it’s just as true that we don’t really spend much time considering life. 

My first impulse is to say that life is a spectacular and rare thing in the cosmos, but I immediately argue with myself about it. It’s tempting to do a simple and materialist sort of accounting on this: to look at the (loosely estimated) count of all of the atoms in the universe and compare it to the (also loosely estimated) count of all the atoms in the universe that belong to living organisms. Obviously, the ratio isn’t even going to be close. And then I’m tempted further to count the atoms in the universe that belong to living organisms who are sentient or conscious - us animals! - and to conclude that this is an even more spectacular and rare condition.

But then, there are many - and not merely those who would drink ayahuasca in the jungle but mainstream botanists and biologists - who would argue that plants too exhibit characteristics that may resemble consciousness; when it comes to many types of fungi, the arguments are even stronger. On top of that, those who ascribe to an animist worldview (or even a pantheist or panentheist one) would argue not only that animals, plants, and fungi have consciousness, but that algae and bacteria do, too, and so even do rocks and water and planets and asteroids and stars - that all of these things, everything, in fact, is both alive and aware of that fact. Considering all this, can we really say for a fact how rare life is? 

Regardless of who has it “right”, even if we drop the claim that life is rare, we can surely agree that it is pretty strange and certainly still spectacular. Almost undeniably important, right? Even if we believe that all this is completely random and that our collective existence has come about by accident, the fact that we nonetheless do exist, right now and right here, still compels most of us forward, urges us to do something with this time. 

These are, of course, the many questions that arise when we do make the time and space to consider the nature of life. We don’t just want to know how we got here but why we are here. (Sometimes those two questions are the same and sometimes they aren’t.) Whether we choose to believe that purpose is created by us, within, or is given to us from without, we can’t help but wonder what the point of all this really is.

*

I’m still a long ways off from achieving my reading goal for the year, but I’ve done a pretty good job when it comes to my consumption of prestige TV. 

One show I was introduced to this year, one which perhaps became my favorite, is HBO’s The Leftovers. Without giving away any spoilers, I’ll briefly explain the premise. We begin season one in a small town in upstate New York - perhaps a town not all that different from this one - three years after a world-shattering event known as the Departure in which around 2% of the world’s population simply vanished all at the same time. It’s sort of like the Evangelical concept of The Rapture, except there’s no discernible religious pattern or nature to these disappearances. Like so much in this world, it seems to simply be random. The people of the town, through whose eyes we are brought through the story, don’t necessarily handle this well, even several years after the fact. Longstanding beliefs break down, along with, more subtly, some social norms. People are constantly on edge, ready to burst at the slightest provocation. Everyone is dealing not just with varying levels of grief, but varying levels of confusion and insecurity with the utter confusion and chaos of it all - just as we are, to some degree, all of us. Even as people manage to hang on, one day after the other, one foot in front of the other, they are slowly driven mad by the weight of the unanswered questions. 

One of the main themes in the show is expressed by the opening theme song featured in the second of three seasons. Iris DeMent’s catchy, head-bopping, upbeat folk tune, “Let the Mystery Be” seems an odd choice for a show with such intense and heavy subject matter, until one pays attention to the lyrics:

“Everybody is a wonderin' what and where they all came from
Everybody is a worryin' 'bout where
They're gonna go when the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be
Some say once you're gone you're gone forever
And some say you're gonna come back
Some say you rest in the arms of
The Saviour if in sinful ways you lack
Some say that they're comin' back in a
Garden, bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
I think I'll just let the mystery be.
Some say they're goin' to a place called
Glory and I ain't saying it ain't a fact
But I've heard that I'm on the road to
Purgatory and I don't like the sound of that
Well, I believe in love and I live my life accordingly
But I choose to let the mystery be.”

Indeed, because we aren’t likely to get answers to these mysteries - certainly not this morning and probably not any other time, either - we can only contemplate the nature of life in a fruitful way when we accept that the nature of life is - to us, at least - inherently mysterious. We have to accept that questions about definitive meaning are unlikely to be resolved. 

And that’s all right! On this point, I tend to agree with mythology and comparative religion scholar Joseph Campbell. In The Power of Myth, his famous series of interviews with Bill Moyers, he said this: 

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

Still, this clarification should yet produce within us new questions. First among them: what does it mean to experience life? 

Well, if it wasn’t already bad enough that we have to accept so much mystery, I think answering that question requires us to accept even more. True experience requires that we have some base-level understanding of that which we are experiencing. What’s perhaps the most difficult part of this comes in the form of looking at those little details of our existence over which we have very little control, and yet which will shape a very large part of our experience. 

By the time we get here and realize it, there’s nothing we can do about the age in which we are born, the place where we are born, or any of the other circumstances into which we were born. Such things don’t need to define who were are inside, as people, but they will in large part shape the nature of our experience of this life. Even the experience of those who manage transcend or overcome their origins is nonetheless primarily defined by those origins. 

But as we know, these at times cold and hard factors don’t tell our entire story. That’s because there’s still some things we can control, some things we still get to choose. Among such things, our task is to discern both what we need and what we value. 

Those are determinations we have to make on our own and we’re obviously going to come to different conclusions. That’s fine - it’s good, in fact. It’s both a symptom of freedom and one of the things that simply makes interacting with other people in society interesting. 

It’s also worth pointing out, however, that when our individual needs and values have too little in common - well, we know what happens under those conditions. We don’t need a dramatic premise like that of The Leftovers to explain this to us; all we need to do is look down at our phones. 

Humbly, I suggest a few very basic areas of focus we might consider in order to produce the kind of dynamic, connected, full experience of life Joseph Campbell was talking about. 

We have the ability to center our lives in a substantive and loving way around family. I use that term loosely, of course, knowing that many among us have complicated and unpleasant ties to biological family. I’m talking about committed, deep, long-term relationships that extend belong the walls of our respective homes. If these relationships aren’t based in blood, they are based in loyal friendship, or in being an active member of a church or secular social organization. We cannot experience life in isolation.

During this time on Earth, we have the ability to have pleasure, and to have pleasure without guilt. I don’t mean unbridled hedonism here - a singular, unbalanced focus on personal pleasure will undoubtedly prove destructive. But this world is filled with delights and they are ours to enjoy. This, I believe to be our birthright, and we do not experience life when we go through it in a spirit of constant grimness or sorrow, in self-abnegation and austerity. 

The world is also a wide one and one filled with marvels and these are ours to explore, in every sense of the world. We all, regardless of our limitations, have the ability to seek and find adventure, to go beyond the confines of the ordinary and the comfortable and find the new and foreign, and also the difficult, the fresh revelations that shake our carefully constructed foundations and help us to grow. We humans are designed for boldness, designed to burst free from lines that would contain us, and we don’t fully experience the rapturous life from behind the security and familiarity of those lines.

We have the ability to create things, and aren’t we lucky for that? We can express ourselves in the abstract, through writing and art and music and performance, all marvelous and critical in its own right - but our powers of creation are far broader. We can build businesses and social movements, invent both machines and unique ways to personally serve others, construct buildings and monuments, cities and civilizations. Whether considered with a wide lens or zooming in on the day-to-day, we have the ability to engage ourselves in meaningful work. It is of course correct to say that work should never be considered the meaning of life, but if it is in fact experience that we seek, we’ll be hard pressed to find it without setting ourselves about doing something. 

(What that is, of course, is yours to determine.)

And, on top of it all, we have the ability to celebrate. We can mark the changing of the calendar, observe holidays, conduct rituals, break bread with one another, and make merry. Personally, I believe it’s impossible to overemphasize this and I believe it should be at the center of everything we do. By committing ourselves to regular, shared celebration, we’re able to literally schedule a date to connect with this brilliant cosmos of ours, to experience it in the most heightened ways, and to know ourselves and our lives for what they truly are.

*

One of the books I did manage to get through this year was The Three Marriages by poet and philosopher David Whyte. In it, he cites a Taoist saying (which I haven't verified personally, so we’re gonna have to take his word for it): “Happiness is having someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.” 

That seems to me like a good way to experience our lives, to really get at that rapture of being alive - and though I’d never claim it’s easy for any of us, I believe it’s at least attainable. 

I don’t know if there’s life after death, if there’s some other place called an “afterlife,” if we reincarnate again here on Earth, or if this one incarnation is all we get. None of us do. But what we can know is that any life we get is special - and all life is strange.

While we have it, the only way to waste it is to fail to experience it.

This piece was originally delivered as a sermon at the Peterborough Unitarian Universalist Church on October 17, 2021 and has been modified slightly to make sense in textual form.