University Memorial Service Address By Alison L. Boden Several weeks ago I fell into a conversation in the Regenstein Library with a Divinity student, a Ph.D. candidate who has some years of congregational ministry already behind her. Our conversation turned to sermons, especially those offered at weddings and funerals. We were in agreement that weddings—joyous affairs, celebratory, filled with hopeful expectation and romantic love—that those were our less favorite occasions as presiders, because participants, while teeming with many lively, happy emotions, are often not present to the religious implications of the day. Memorial services and funerals are just the opposite. Even those persons present who have no truck with religion the rest of the year come to bid farewell to a colleague, friend, or relative with a sense of spiritual intention, with a spiritual gravitas, a seriousness borne of the curt reminder that life is fragile and finite and invaluable. It’s not that congregants are necessarily glum—many a memorial is a grand celebration of a life lived fully and well. But the great questions of ultimacy that attend any death lend such services a kind of integrity, one that sees through all busyness, that reveals how constructed are our usual notions of what’s important, one that helps us articulate for ourselves those things that really are important. This service is one that I cherish every year, hard as I find it to articulate something meaningful to all in this sanctuary, as different are the experiences and relationships that have drawn each of you here. Looking out now I see Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and Unitarians; there are probably many more traditions here and plenty of folks with no religious identification at all. Looking at the names of the people whom we remember today, I see those who were eighteen years old and those long retired, those who died in peace, those who died surprised, those who died in turmoil; I see those who died one year ago and those who died six weeks ago. I see the ingredients of very different mourning among us, and I see, I think, the deepest human commonality—that integrity, that spiritual intentionality to reflect on the very meaning of human living and dying. In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes, “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.” It’s a poignant suggestion—that we regularly deprive ourselves of life’s essential beauty—that we force ourselves to give it up—in a desperate attempt to immerse ourselves in institutions and ideologies that help us ignore the inevitability of our own dying and that of those we love. Are we that desperate to avoid the hard questions posed by dying, which are really the hard questions about how we are living? What have we valued, who have we become, what have we done with the gift of days? Is the beauty of life perhaps to be found in living in the grip of just these questions, and consequently, as Baldwin suggests, is this beauty completely qualified by engaging in death-denying, escapist, engrossing institutions—even religions? I think he has a point, although one that shouldn’t be made in sweeping generalizations. Some—but not all—ideologies and theologies sanitize the fear, struggle, ambiguity, and responsibility that are part of realizing that what we call living is actually dying. We are all dying at this moment, which is not horrible or a cheating insult to our humanity. It’s a fact and, at its heart, good. But Baldwin calls death “the only fact we have,” and that is a statement I do find hard to simply let stand. It’s probably because I am a religious person that the phrase seems too limited. All my spiritual sensibilities writhe at the thought that death is the only fact that we have. No—add love, I think—add redemption, add goodness, add grace, add hope, not because we need to add nice things on top of awful death but because the religion I practice asserts that these are facts of the most difficult or deprived of human lives, for if they are not evinced in relationships with other people they remain absolute facts in humanity’s relationship to God. Leaving any and all particular religious traditions aside there is still another fact that we have in common: life. I’ve just said that living and dying are simultaneous, but they are not synonyms. It is a different thing to be alive than it is to be dead (and some people are dead long before their bodies give out). There is such a thing as a spiritual persistent vegetative state. The German theologian Dorothee Soelle says, “Death is what takes place within us when we look upon others not as gift, blessing or stimulus but as threat, danger, competition. It is the death that comes to all who try to live by bread alone. This is the death that the Bible fears and gives us good reason to fear. It is not the final departure we think of when we speak of death; it is that purposeless, empty existence devoid of genuine human relationships and filled with anxiety, silence and loneliness.” Real life has to be a fact we share, that from which we pass to the fact of death, whether or not it comes to us while we’re breathing. Life is, as another theologian describes it, the “wondrous wedding of spirit to senses.” It is the uniqueness we bring as individuals, the sameness we bring as a species, to lifting our eyes to the mountains and the moon, meeting our spirits to that of glorious music, perking up at the aroma of lovely food or the timbres of a loved one’s voice, traveling over centuries or continents to match our minds with Plato’s thoughts, Augustine’s vision of God’s city, the wisdom of Solomon and the instruction of Confucius [Walter Burghardt, Interpretation, 7:3, p. 4]. Our very living—our breathing, heart-beating essential existence—has to be the other fact we have, the one that gives death its meaning, and conversely that which is lent its own ultimate meaning by the fact of death. To accept this, I think, is to be helped away from a sense that death is a kind of failure. How can doing what our bodies were born to do, and what every organism since the beginning of life on earth has done, be a failure? Woody Allen has said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my art. I want to achieve it by not dying.” Surely he said it in jest, and we all know it not to be possible. At the same time, viewing death as one last defeat in the struggle of life—as our final failure—is a kind of private acquiescence to this publicly preposterous idea that there is any alternative to dying, and so to succumb is somehow to fail. How liberating can this notion be to those—including some of us—who will die of a disease or injury in spite of all personal efforts to triumph over it. Hannah Arendt is right in saying that, contrary to seeing death as a failure, we should view it as “a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.” To claim the fact of life alongside that of death is to cast a new interpretation, I think, on one of those points of ultimate concern that our reflections on mortality often surface—the question of eternity. Many of us picture, I think, a continuum, a line extending infinitely through space, that is the concept of time. We have our place on it, the block of years during which we lived. But that block is finite, it has a beginning, a middle, and a definite end. The line, however, continues on without us. Time continues, other life continues, other lives go on without ours, people who will never know we breathed, people who also look to moon and mountains, who thrill to music and aromas and literature and nature and love, all in their own way, with no knowledge of the uniqueness of our way. Time continues but we are not present in human experience. But we must be present! It’s unacceptable to consider that we are not. How could our consciousness just vanish? There must be some element intrinsic to our being that endures. It cannot be anything to do with the body—that returns to dust in coffins, it vaporizes in bomb blasts. There is a spirit to us, then, or a soul, and that must be what exists into eternity. I offer you three perspectives on the question of eternity, three persons who agree on one point but disagree markedly on another. Perhaps one or all will resonate with you. The first is Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish mystic of this century and country. In Man is Not Alone he writes, “The cry for life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. God has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a herenow.” Heschel affirms the sense of time that I described, one of a continuum, but he makes a quietly passionate claim for the importance of the time spent alive. It is at this time that the seed of eternal life implanted by God may be nurtured, watered, helped to take deep root. If the life hereafter is one that we have ever considered to be one of pure spiritual vitality, Heschel asks us to consider living with that kind of spiritual intensity now. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence (not present, presence), presence before the mystery of the holy, a presence not magically achieved after death but in the very midst of life. To live fully before the Presence in the here and now is to be fully present to the presence in any moment in time called “the present,” now or centuries from now. Consider also the thoughts of Wittgenstein, “Death is not an event in life;” he wrote, “we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” Eternity, he suggests, isn’t actually about time at all but its radical non-existence. To live fully in the present without consciousness of time is to experience eternity, perhaps even to join the eternal. The point is to live life to the fullest in every moment. And then there is Paul Tillich. In The Eternal Now he wrote, “Many people—but not the Bible—speak loosely of the ‘hereafter’ or of ‘the life after death.’ Even in our liturgies eternity is translated by ‘world without end.’ But the world, by its very nature, is that which comes to an end. If we want to speak in truth without foolish, wishful thinking, we should speak about the eternal that is neither timelessness nor endless time. The mystery of the future is answered in the eternal of which we may speak in images taken from time. . . . There is not time after time, but there is eternity above time.” What is eternal is not rooted in perpetual time or the absence of it, it is not about continuously existing time at all. As his title suggests, the eternal is just now, and now is an eternal truth. There is always a now. These three men disagree on the appropriate conceptualization of time in regard to eternity, but their thoughts converge on the centrality of what Heschel calls the “herenow,” about the importance of living with the greatest spiritual intention and intensity in every moment, and so participating in the eternal. These are words to the living, which is to say they are words to the dying, not the dead. The dead don’t need well-intentioned human advice. The mysteries of faith, time, the cosmos are known to them now. Memorial addresses are never for the sake of the dead but of the living, the sermon about dying is one about living—it has to be. And it is one about living fully, about not avoiding the fact of life or the fact of death. It is a message, as my young colleague and I were noting in the library, that has a special chance of being heard when death and eternity lose their abstraction because a loved one has died. If the days or months since your own loss have been marked with a particular sensitivity to the fragile, invaluable fact of our living, if your senses have been fully alert to beauty and pain, if your appreciation of the marvelous and the mundane, the possible and the miraculous has been heightened, give thanks. I don’t mean to cast a rosy spin on heart-splitting grief, but I have often thought that if the dead could speak to us they would say, “Live now, the eternal now, the herenow, live and die as fully as you can. Now.” Amen.
Alison L. Boden is Dean of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel and Senior Lecturer in the Divinity School and the College.
Memorial Roll 1999 The following list contains the names of those whose deaths have been recorded with Rockefeller Memorial Chapel between September 15, 1998, and September 30, 1999.
Faculty Andrew Boxer Michael Danos James McCawley James Ryan John Sepkoski Walter Wild
Faculty Emeriti Martha Benson Benjamin S. Bloom Jerald C. Brauer Ida Brevard DePencier Humberto Fernandez-Moran Tetsuya Fujita Julian R. Goldsmith Henrietta M. Herbolsheimer Philip C. Hovda Nathaniel Kleitman Thomas W. Lester Frank W. Newell Robert Sachs William Weaver, Sr. Radovan Zak
Students Nabeel Darwish Jenifer Stenfors Ario Teoli Victoria Waters Anna Wiedmann
Staff Michael Borrelli Deborah Giertych Virginia McCreary Mary Megaro Joanna Winters
Retired Staff Pearl Allen Frank Arvia Robert Bardeau Ann Barret Ike Braddock Gumesindo Costello James Cox Mildred Davis Duilio DiConstanzo Lloyd Hanson Bertha Harvey Marvin Hollowell James Hopkins Jack Houston Florence Howard Anna Johnson Mary Johnson U. L. Jones Eleonora Kauffman Roy Kelly Florence Kosmal Robert Koster Jan Linfield Florence Lowenstein Rudolph Lukens Frank Malinowski Edna Marks Mary McGaw Bess Morrissey Lawrence Mullins Allie Murff Ann Nieuwenkamp Elizabeth Olevich Eva Phillips Lola Richardson Lore Rosenbaum William Schmidt William Sullivan Saleh Taiym Reinhardt Wagner Lillie Mae Ware Ramona Warnock Jule Whiting Eileen Williams Edna Woodbury
Faculty and Staff Family Edward Jordan Dorianne Gitlin Margaret Mitchell Margaret Fry Strandjord Cao Lan-Xi
Associated Staff Eugene Edson Barbara Foote Maurice Schwartz S. Susan Su
Family of the Chapel Common Roland Trytten Jane Kron Bradford
Alumni Bernard M. Abraham Therese J. Adams Harry R. Adler Inez M. Aikens Theodore P. Albrecht Edith C. Alexander Albert V. Alhadeff Donna Allen Mary D. Allen Christian Altendorfer Robert B. Anderson Wendell Barry Anderson Eugene Aserinsky Mary-Anna Patrick Askew Laura W. Atkinson Susan Auerbach Dale H. Aukerman Lawrence P. Avril Elice W. Baer Kevin Charles Baker Leon J. Balshone Griffing Bancroft Z. Irene Banks John M. Barbee James A. Barr Norman E. Bateson William M. Batten Melville W. Beardsley Charles T. Beeching Peter J. Beinar Barbara J. Bellman Edith T. Bender Richard Alan Benedetto W. Rainey Bennett Stella H. Bergman Sheldon E. Bernstein William J. Berthold Herbert C. Berthold Marvin J. Berz Martha Best Clifford D. Bidwell Irwin J. Biederman David S. Bigelow Rawson P. Birdwell John H. Blacklidge William A. Blake Daniel B. Blake Robert E. Block Arthur I. Bloomfield Charles P. Bluestein Dorothy A. Bock Robert G. Bohnen Eugene J. Boros Richard V. Bovbjerg John M. Bowen Dawson Bradshaw William M. Brandt Herbert C. Breuhaus Thomas Brill Elmer C. Brinkman Benjamin M. Brodsky Babette Stein S. Brody Ruth S. Brookens Jacob Brouwer Harry E. Brown George Hay Brown Ada S. Brumbaugh Marion A. Budinger Emil A. Buelens John H. Buie Harry Calvin Bull James H. Burrows Meyer Louis Burstein George E. Burton Elbert E. Bushnell Edmond Patrick Cahalane David Cameron Christiana McFadyen Campbell Louise Conner Carlson Robert C. Carlton Signe B. Carpenter John J. Carter S. Gordon Castigliano William D. Chapman Mae C. Chase Margaret Davis Clark Ruth Blackburn Clinard Harold M. Coleman Fanne L. Conkling George W. Connelly Mary Elizabeth Connors Arnold G. Cook Russell P. Coopersmith James P. Corbett Ruth E. Cortell Fred G. Cotnam Marian Coulbourn John S. Coulson Thomas Cowley Edgar H. Craig Vivian Beatrice Craun Ruth R. Crawford Jean A. Crockett Arnold Crompton Henry O. Cubbon Frederick Plumer Currier John M. Dancey Gerrit Dangremond Ronald L. Danzig Logan Harvey Davis Arthur E. Davis Cyrus C. De Coster Will S. De Loach Lester B. Dean James J. Deegan Reuben Deitz Jeanne Doyle Delgado Henry Demler Lucille A. Dennis Ethel S. Deutsch Jane M. Dickerson Violet Marcia Dodd Robert J. Dolan Jacob Donshik Audrey Holzer Douthit Katherine M. Droegemueller Horace A. Dulmage Norwood C. Dunn Jessamine M. Durante David M. T. Durkee Evelyn M. Duvall Donald Frank Dvorak Richard H. Earle Patricia James Eberlein Joan Eggan Marguerite E. Elder Frances Eldredge Harold R. Ellman Margaret N. Elmer Joseph H. Emerson Marguerite H. Ephron James A. Esterly John E. Fagg Alexander Spencer Farkas Samuel L. Feldman Harry W. Fischer Arnold M. Flamm Albert W. Forslev Theodore A. Fox Robert Lawrence Franklin James M. Fritz Arthur M. Frutkin Jean M. Fultz Harold J. Funkhouser Arthur S. Gay Martin S. Geisel John S. Giffin Ruth Moulton Gilbert John E. Gill Warren D. Gilreath Philip Glotzer Melvin B. Goldberg James A. Goldman Marcella F. Goodman George R. Gordh Virginia Graham Jack W. Greene Esther May Grim Paul M. Grissom Harold H. Grothaus Wilfred K. Gummer Robert E. Lee Gunning Virginia Lora Gupta Werner H. Haak Lynn L. Hageman Charless Hahn Sylvia Flanders Halpern Gertrude V. Ham Lewis B. Hamity Maurice B. Hamovitch William W. Hand Ira Bowers Hansen Harold R. Harding Robert H. Harlan Eleanor L. Hartmann Arnold D. Hasterlik Ellen Baum Hauer Robert Hall Haynes Robert E. Haythorne Alice O. Hedenberg Hazel E. Heffren Richard T. Hemsley Elsie Spira Herman Walter D. Herrick Lucia G. Hewitt Alan I. Hillman Herbert L. Hinstorff Bess House Hopkins Ferdinand L. Hotz Hazel Ruby Houghton Margaret R. Houston Roman L. Hruska Grace Wei Li Huang John Hudson Phila A. Humphreys Marjorie Hutchinson Harriett S. Iglauer Margaret C. Irmiger Rosalia P. Isaacs Henry S. Ishizuka Lawrence A. Istel John M. Jackson Theodore D. Jayne Gerald J. Jellett Richard A. Jensen David H. Johnson James F. Kahnweiler Marshall A. Kaplan Peter J. Karabas Toyse T. Kato Stephan Z. Katzan Judith D. Kaufman Walter R. Kearney Henrietta Z. Kelso Hiram Langdon Kennicott Dennis Neal Kessler Walter P. Kincaid Ray K. Kistler Richard C. Klein Henry W. Knepler Carolyn D. Koff George Kolettis Abraham R. Koransky Richard A. Koretz John Korf Jane Koukol Mildred Kramer William C. Kramer George Krikorian Akira Kutsunai Vera H. Leaf Ora Brown Leaming E. Everett Lefforge Grace D. Lennartson Edward Lewison Thomas M. Linehan John H. Lion Robert J. Lipshultz Joseph Logsdon Elbert Monroe Long Katherine S. H. Long Harriet Fawcett Lorenz Eileen Lovejoy Robert F. Lusher James Duncan MacBeth Anne M. Macpherson Earl W. Mahan Walter S. Maker John R. Malone Robert W. Mann Sydney B. Mannel Gwendolyn M. Manson Allan M. Marin Mary Paul Markham Georgia Jean Marks Marie Elizabeth Martinka Robert W. Mathews Marion L. Matics Norman L. Matthews Robert D. Mayo Morley J. Mays Mary Constance McCarthy Paul F. McCullagh Nancy M. McCurdy John C. McGlynn Marian F. McGourty George W. McGurn Willard O. McKnight Joseph P. McMahon Jacqueline B. McPherson Jack W. Meiland Ruth H. Melamed John E. Menzies Gordon P. Merriam James W. Merricks Max B. Milberg Herbert William Miller Donald S. Miller Eugene Miller Alfred F. Miller Richard Y. Mine Brian P. Monieson Edward A. Mosher Virginia B. Moudry Charles E. Muhleman Mary K. Mullane Raymond G. Murray Ruth M. Myers Frederick L. Nakarai George Nathan Anne M. Nery Irene K. Newlon Robert J. Newman Evans Walter Niehaus John Frederick Nims Ivan M. Niven William C. Norby Louise A. Novy Mark Nugent Isabel C. O’Brien Harold Odell Roger Edward Oesterreich Franklin F. Offner Bonnie Breternitz Olson Steven Thomas O’Neal Joel Orlen Franklin B. Orwin George H. Otto Stanley Owens Dorothy Ruwe Packard Alice E. Palmer Julia Palmer Russell J. Parsons Tom D. Paul Alphonse Pechukas C. David Peebles Lawrence M. Perlman Harold Persky Arden L. Phillips Mary F. Piercey James C. Plagge Leo C. Powelson William J. Powers Lewis F. Presnall Lester E. Przewlocki Raymond Scott Rainbow George D. Ramspeck Louis M. Rapoport Edith A. Rathjen Lois V. Raths George E. Reedy James Allan Reep Alfred D. Remson Timothy R. Renner Lester Augustus Reynolds Winfield Canady Rice Esther S. Rich Leonard M. Rieser Dean L. Robb Paul H. Robinson Olga E. Rogers Michael N. Rolfe Rostislav Romanoff Hildegarde M. Romberg Judith L. Rose Merwin S. Rosenberg Gladys M. Rosenkrans Alvin S. Rosenthal Lawrence Clyde Roskin Herbert V. Ross Frank J. Ruck Katherine Duffy Rudden Charles F. Russ Lewine Hoefer Russell Anna Sabara Joanne C. Saltz Harold Salwin Josephine M. Sana Belle S. Sanford Melvin L. Schlesinger Jay H. Schmidt Leonard Schram Kathryn M. Schultz Suzanna Schweer Harold W. Scott Velma Scott Charles C. Scott Marjory Seeley Rogers Oscar E. Shabat George E. Shambaugh Om Prakash Sharma Margery B. Shepherd Warren Sikora Kenneth D. Sill Abram M. Silvers G. Northrup Simpson Owen C. Sladek William Larew Slayton Irving B. Slutsky George L. Snyder Frances L. Spain Sidney Spector Robert C. Spencer Priscilla J. Spiess John G. Sponsel Charles E. Springer Leo S. Stafford Walter Tell Stelzel Hope Hooe Stepan Raymond D. Stephens Norval B. Stephens Lynn R. Sterman James E. Stevens Anna Schumacher Stewart Robert A. Stierer Martha Kaufman Stone William Stone Helen L. Stout M. Robert Strange Kenneth R. Strom Martin J. Svaglic Helen D. Szold Taffee T. Tanimoto Jack Tanzman William P. Taylor Robert Page Taylor Tche-Tsing Tchen Donn M. Tee Elizabeth Teichmann David Temkin Alta Bernice Thebaud Jurgen A. Thomas Kenneth M. Thompson Morris Tish Frederick L. Tomblin Robert R. Trostle Tang Tsou Jerome H. Tucker Arthur N. Turnbull Henry A. Turner John F. Umbs Ervin E. Uttermann Matthew Joseph Valenta Margaret Van Deventer Marjorie Cahill Vane Charles L. Venable Jessica Millard Vernon Elizabeth Lam Vieg Frank Wagner Jeanne Marie Walles W. Allen Wallis Gung-Hsing Wang Shu-Yung Wang Ruth E. Warncke Charles A. Warner Louis R. Wasserman Victoria Rebecca Waters Rosalie H. Wax Josiah F. Wearin Alice M. Weatherwax Leonard M. Weinstein Elizabeth B. Wells Charles Arthur Werner Granger Westberg James W. Whipple A. Geraldine Whiting Roy W. Wilson Francis S. Wilson Catherine E. Wilson Janet Lewis Winters Estelle M. Wirpel Peter Wolkonsky John De Witt Worcester George R. Wren John P. Wright Fumi Yamamoto John E. Yarnelle E. G. Youmans Jeffrey Bruce Yurkofsky William F. Zacharias W. Virginia Zeuch Irene Zimmerman Sara R. Zimmerman
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