You probably think that ministers, including me, go about choosing their sermon topics in a systematic and well-planned manner, trying to cover theological, social, topical, historical and psychological subjects in some kind of regular fashion.

Well, other ministers may well be better at this than I am! I have to confess to you this morning that the reason I'm talking on this subject today is that my companion John suggested I might like to tackle the same topic he's addressing this morning in the Elora-Fergus congregation. Seemed like a good idea to me, so here we are! But John's talking particularly about his work with the terminally ill, while I want to explore with you some of the effect that our mortality has on us even if we're in the best of health at present.

The premise of this talk is that all of us, individually and as a congregation and as members of the human race, are living with dying. As Forrester Church writes in the introduction to Unitarian Universalism called Our Chosen Faith,

Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.
Each one of us is aging and approaching steadily closer to our own death, although of course we hope the date is still a long way in the future. The illness or injury which will be the cause of my death may already be present, or it may develop at any time. Something will kill me; that something just hasn't been identified yet.

It's the same for you; you, like me, are a dying person, moving nearer to your death every moment. Your illness, also, may be present already, or not. You may have a day, a year, five years or many years yet to live, but you're dying. It started when you were born, the gradual movement towards death, and by now it's in full swing.

Does all this seem "morbid"? Well, in a way it is! Morbid means concerned with death, and that's what this service is about. But talking and thinking about death also involves talking and thinking about life, so if it's morbid, it's also lively! The old prayer-book says, "In the midst of life, we are in death", and it's also true that in the midst of death we are in life. When we're involved with grieving over a loss, or helping others in their bereavement, we're living very intensely, much more so than when we're uninvolved spectators of life, not feeling or doing very much that matters. Exploring matters of death and dying helps us to learn about life, and especially that part of life which has to do with loss and change.

We often make a rather artificial distinction between "the dying", that is, those who have some idea of the limit that's been placed on their life, and the rest of us -- those of us who have no idea how much life is left. I think it's partly because it enables us to avoid thinking about our own dying. We don't want to think about it or talk about it because it's frightening. If we think about dying people as a separate group, we can imagine that we are not dying; we can pretend that it isn't happening to us. But it is happening to us; we're all in this together; we're all mortal.

The reactions that most of us have to thinking about these things follow some predictable patterns, familiar perhaps to some of you. We're liable to experience various combinations of denial, anger, bargaining, sadness and acceptance. We may have to deny death to some extent because our minds can't comprehend it, and it may be too frightening, or thinking about it may make us unable to function properly.

So we don't think about it too much. That's reasonable: we don't dwell too much on other scary possibilities like earthquakes, or being attacked by strangers, or developing a painful illness, or losing everything we own in a fire. But whereas these are possibilities, our death is a certainty. Unless the world ends first! Some people choose to believe it will. Others join the cryonics movement and are deep-frozen. The rest of us choose less extreme ways of denying death. Acting as if it will never happen, and trying not to think or speak about it, is one of the favourites.

Another one, perhaps specially common among religious free-thinkers, is denial of the sorrow or fear connected with death -- we indulge in a kind of whistling in the dark which says, "Death's nothing to worry about; it doesn't bother me."

We all get angry about death, too, which is the second response. You've all seen the advertisements which say "I don't intend to grow old gracefully; I'm going to fight it every step of the way", and a multitude of variations on that theme. We see aging and death as an enemy to be defeated, not a friend to be accepted. If we didn't see it that way, we wouldn't have made any of the advances in medicine that we have; we wouldn't have increased our life-expectancy, we wouldn't be exercising to keep fit, or eating nutritiously or any of the other things that try to ward off death.

Anger against death is part of loving life -- not a stage to be passed through but an aspect to be integrated. But anger won't override our mortality; now matter how angry we are, we'll still die.

Another response to death is bargaining. When we adopt a belief in life after death, or reincarnation, or immortality in whatever form, or when we take a casual attitude to it, I think we're using bargaining of a kind. We're saying, "I'll face death on condition that it's not really the end, or not really sad, not really frightening." And this, too, can be integrated into our total response. We make it possible for ourselves to contemplate and prepare for death by our beliefs about what it will be like, or what follows. We put our faith in particular beliefs, and live our lives on the basis or condition of that faith.

Sorrow about death is also part of a full commitment to life. If we weren't sad at the end of someone else's life, or our own, it would mean that we weren't very involved with that person or our own life. The sadness that we feel brings us very close to acceptance. When we can acknowledge our denial and our anger and our bargaining and our sadness, we can grieve. Then we're accepting the reality of our dying and we can live with it. I think we'll still be anxious, at some level, about death, but I also believe that's all right!

Some of you may be surprised to hear me suggest that anxiety is a fact of our human condition, part of what makes us truly human, and not to be overcome or destroyed. I'd go so far as to say that anxiety is what human life is all about. If you're not anxious, you're not a living, growing human being. Do I mean that you ought to be constantly stressed out and worried and tense? Not at all. What I mean is that if we are to grow in spirit we need to be open to unsureness, doubt, questioning, stretching, reaching out (and in), repentance, exploration, trying again.

What I mean is that a state of complacency or self-satisfaction is a state of deadness, and that only where there is anxiety is there growth.

Let me describe a little bit more this upper-case anxiety, "existential anxiety" as the philosophers call it, or "free-floating anxiety". It's not a fear of snakes, or of being murdered, or of driving in traffic (that's one of my favourite worries) or of contracting necrotizing fasciitis. Those things may be anything from sensible caution to displacements or masks of the real anxiety I'm talking about.

That anxiety is about concerns such as: Is there any justice, in this world or another? What and who can I trust? How can I know what's good and true? Are we living right? What will my death mean? ..... These, I suggest to you, are the things we are rightly anxious about, and our anxiety about them will enable us to grow. And when we have specific fears about mice or muggings or being a bag lady or atomic warfare or AIDS, we can ask ourselves how they embody our underlying, existential anxiety, and how we can grow from those fears. Our anxiety has in it the very stuff of human life. We are vulnerable, we will die at some uncertain time, and we need to know that our lives will not have been meaningless.

We not only live with the fact of our own dying and the responses that calls forth from us, but with the deaths of others. Bereavement is one of the most extreme sorrows human beings can know. Bereaved people have lost part of themselves -- you know this from your own experience; we know it as we mourn the loss of people dear to us. When you're bereaved, it's not just that you've lost someone outside of you; you've lost an aspect of yourself, part of your image of yourself, part of your mind and feelings. It's very hard to think of that part as not existing.

Whether or not we've ever been deeply bereaved, we've all experienced some loss of our identity, and the sense of unreality that comes from that loss. The congregation is different without Eleanor Torrie and others who've died; our personal lives are different without our lost family members and our lost friends, Tui Menning's father, Jackie Forster's mother, Julie Hagedoorn's mother, the husband of Dorothy Harder's long-time friend. We miss our dear ones; we miss them; something is missing from our own life.

I think this is one of the reasons why it's important to us to remember those who've gone, and why we also want to be remembered. Being remembered is one way to be sure we won't be entirely gone, lost, extinguished. And when we face the death of someone dear to us, whose death means a part of ourself is gone, we may be able to bear it, or accept it, integrate it into our experience a bit better, if we remind ourselves of the person's life, the interactions we had with them, the images which are now part of our memory. I think it may help, too, to remember these words of Helen Keller:

We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world--the company of those who have known suffering. When it seems that our sorrow is too great to be borne, let us think of the great family of the heavy-hearted into which our grief has given us entrance, and inevitably, we will feel about us their arms, their sympathy, their understanding.

Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not vain.

Despite all our modern technology and expertise, we still have very little control over death, except to live wholeheartedly, so that we're as ready as possible, and so that the memories we leave behind will be good ones. People tend to die as they have lived. It's living fully and consciously in the here and now that seems to prepare us best for dying.

Conscious living means being as aware as possible of each moment we live. This includes remembering the past, but not living as if in the past. It includes planning for the future, but not living only for the future. Above all, it means doing as many of the really important things as we possibly can, and spending as little time on the unimportant things as we possibly can.

Both the life ahead of us, and our death, are purely imaginary and unknown at present. All that is known and real is the present moment. And in the present moment, we know that death has not annihilated those whom we remember. As long as memory endures, their influence will be felt, and, most vitally, we are now responsible for their share of love, and joy and laughter. If we live our lives fully and deeply and joyfully now, we'll best honour all those who have left us.

Here's a reading that I nearly always use at funerals and memorial services because it so beautifully expresses the way in which mortality, the fact of death, is intrinsically part of the gift of life. It's from the novel My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, and it's a remembered incident from the author's childhood:

I remember the way my father once looked at a bird lying on its side against the curb near our house. It was Shabbos and we were on our way back from the synagogue.

"Is it dead, Papa?" I was six and could not bring myself to look at it.
"Yes," I heard him say in a sad and distant way.
"Why did it die?"
"Everything that lives must die."
"Everything?"
"Yes."
"You, too, Papa? And Mama?"
"Yes."
"And me?"
"Yes," he said. Then he added in Yiddish, "But may it be only after you live a long and good life, my Asher."

I couldn't grasp it. I forced myself to look at the bird. Everything alive would one day be as still as that bird?

"Why?" I asked.
"That's the way the Ribbono Shel Olom made His world, Asher."
"Why?"
"So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever is never precious."

"Everything that lives must die." This is the basic, incontrovertible fact of our existence within nature. Equally true, but often neglected, is the truth illustrated in the story I read to the children earlier. "Everything that dies must live."

Surveying the earth in its mysterious, paradoxical life-and-death nature, Wendell Berry, the influential ecologist-philosopher, relates life and death in a way which has particular meaning perhaps on this day dedicated to awareness of the Earth. The pagans among us, and those whose spiritual life is Earth-centred, know well how intricately related living and dying are. Berry says:

If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, micro-organisms of all kinds ..... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

This is the Earth. Full of life and full of death; the stuff that we're made of, and nothing that we could recognize as human, in fact quite dramatically not us -- dirty and dark and primitive, and the absolutely essential material for everything from fruits and flowers to every little cutworm eating the grass in our lawns. No wonder it's inspired contradictory attitudes, from the Biblical injunction to Adam and Eve that they should "till it and keep it" to the perspective voiced by a chief of the Nez Perce Indians who was advised to use the land for agriculture and said:

You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's breast? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?

This image of assaulting and violating Mother Earth is a vivid and striking one, to which we do well to pay attention, but Nature herself is not all sweetness and light. As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, in his 1852 essay called "Fate", nature is often utterly ruthless:

The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and blood jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda, -- these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.

As far as we can tell, though, anxiety about death is not habitual to non-human animals. There is some evidence that other animals grieve for their dead, but I've not seen anything suggesting that non-humans are anxious about their mortality: that seems to be a particularly human experience, and perhaps to be treated with a similar respect to that which we give characteristics such as speech, religion and abstract thought of many kinds.

A couple of years ago I read a book called Death: the Trip of a Lifetime, by U.S. writer Greg Palmer, who describes himself as a lapsed Unitarian! (I wonder if that's an oxymoron?!) The book's a fascinating cross-cultural study of attitudes and observances around death, and as part of it Palmer looks at near-death experiences, and what has been read into them as evidence of an afterlife. He comes to a conclusion which I think serves as his summary of what "the trip of a lifetime" taught him. He asks himself whether near-death experiences are real glimpses of the life beyond, or the natural result of flooding the body with adrenaline and polypeptides, and in answer he quotes psychiatrist Carl Becker, who says,

If you walk down Waikiki beach hand in hand with your [lover], and you see the sunset and listen to the music, a scientist could evaluate what's going on in your brain, how that's being recorded, the wave length, the sound waves. He could tell you scientifically everything that's happening in your brain. But the more he looks at what your brain is doing, the less he knows about what the experience really means to you as a living human being. So to evaluate an experience as humans, we have to look ... at the inputs in the brain, but also at what the person is telling us about what that means to them. ... Human beings are looking for meaning. If we don't find meaning in our experience, no matter how chemically important it is to us, we'll forget it. If we find meaning in a coincidence, no matter how chemically irrelevant it is, it can make a big change in our lives.

It's meaning that matters, in the end, in the face of death. Greg Palmer tells us that the Malagash people of Madagascar answer the question, "Why do we have to die?" with a fable.

The Creator gave the first woman and the first man a choice. "You may choose between two kinds of death," the Creator said. "Death like the moon, being reborn over and over again. Or death like the tree, which puts forth new seeds before it dies, and then lives on through its progeny." For the woman and the man it was a difficult choice, but they finally decided to have children, even at the cost of their own eternal lives.

Remember that, says Palmer. Everyone you meet, everyone whose life you affect, is a seed that carries a bit of you into eternity. Act accordingly. The message to be taken from this death-and-life trip, this living with dying that we're doing all the time, the message I commend to you this morning, in Greg Palmer's words is this:

life is too important to waste on trivial matters. Better we should [find its meaning] walking ..... hand in hand.