Imbolc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Bridgit Moon<\/p>\n
The most optimistic page in the newspaper?\u00a0 The obituaries.\u00a0 Every day and especially on Sundays I see evidence of the hopefulness and optimism of Minnesota citizens.\u00a0 I imagine it’s the same everywhere.\u00a0 With no evidence for an afterlife at all, let alone a particular one, person after person greets their mother and father, relaxes in the arms of their Lord and Savior Jesus, are welcomed by God the Father or pass over to their next adventure.\u00a0 The range of metaphysical perspectives may be narrow, usually encompassing some version of the Christian afterlife or the less well understood world of late 19th century spiritualism, the passing over folks, but the confidence and clarity braces me every time I read it.<\/p>\n
I’ve not done a comprehensive study of obituaries, let alone a cross cultural one (though it would be fascinating), but it seems likely each place has its own, culturally specific brand of confidence about the unseen world.\u00a0 In ancient Rome a favorite epitaph mentioned here before:\u00a0 I was not.\u00a0 I was.\u00a0 I am not.\u00a0 I don’t care. represents a very different take on the after death experience, one more in tune with my own existentialist one, though I’m not as nihilistic.\u00a0 I do care, at least now, about my death, though, with my Roman fellow travelers, I’m pretty sure that after death I won’t care either.<\/p>\n
This kind of optimism has ancient roots.\u00a0 Certain Neanderthal remains have been found with ochre painted on the body, indicating some thoughts about life after the grave.\u00a0 Just what that thought was, of course, we have no idea, but burying a body and decorating it moves well beyond the animal world’s relative disregard for their dead; relative because elephants<\/a> do have mourning rituals*.<\/p>\n The new atheists like to lampoon all this as magical thinking or evidence that the human race has not yet grown up, but there are ways of looking at it.\u00a0 To my mind it is a poetic, metaphoric way of declaring that the person’s memory will live on among there descendants and friends.\u00a0 It also a means of consolation in the face of a forever event, perhaps the first one the family has experienced.\u00a0 Since there is no evidence, it is possible that one of the many perspectives has got it right.<\/p>\n Long ago I made a pact, a version of Pascal’s wager, with the afterlife.\u00a0 I will live my life in as straightforward and useful a way as I can, being true to my own understanding of the world.\u00a0 With Camus I stand with those who would make the trip toward the great river of death easier for all.\u00a0 If, as I suspect, death is a personal extinction event, then the wager ends.\u00a0 If there is a supernatural being who cares about living entities and their future, then the minor or even major screw ups in my life will be forgiven since their\/its perspective will embrace all things, giving a context to any individual life that even the most forgiving friend cannot.\u00a0 Either way, I’m ok.<\/p>\n So, I guess you could count me among the optimistic.\u00a0 I believe all the bardos and hells and underworlds and infernos of the human imagination reveal not a metaphysical reality but a long standing human awareness of the shadow, the parts of us we cannot, for some reason, include in our conscious lives.\u00a0 We suspect the shadow of great power and often equal\u00a0 malignity.\u00a0 That suspicion leads us to demand punishment either for the acts we have stuffed into our shadow or that we blame on that dark pool of energy swirling just below the surface of our individual lives.<\/p>\n It is my judgment, and a considered one given my theological training, that humans do not do unforgivable things.\u00a0 There are only those who lack sufficient empathy.\u00a0 This does not mean that certain acts should not be punished.\u00a0 Rape, murder, pedophilia, theft, abuse and other such crimes require sanction.\u00a0 But.\u00a0 They do not make the person unforgivable or even evil.\u00a0 Just bad.\u00a0 Bad acts need sanction; people who do bad acts need our forgiveness.\u00a0 Luther said it best, but he puts it in a theological frame:\u00a0 hate the sin and love the sinner.\u00a0 To that I say, blessed be.<\/p>\n However.\u00a0 There is one alternate view that I do find intriguing.\u00a0 It takes into account the nature of water and the imaginal cells of butterfly pupae.\u00a0 Here’s the idea.\u00a0 Water has three states:\u00a0 gas, liquid and solid.\u00a0 In the solid state water is lighter than its liquid state, a characteristic that keeps lakes and even the arctic and antarctic from freezing solid.\u00a0 This feature of water, that it is less dense than its liquid state, is unusual among earth’s substances.\u00a0 In fact, it’s not expected from the behavior other substances, which get more dense as they become solid.<\/p>\n Imaginal cells exist in the pupae of butterflies.\u00a0 They take the form of a caterpillar, bound up in the cocoon and change its form, the message its cells get as it goes through a metamorphosis, to that of a butterfly, a creeping earth-bound creature becomes a winged beauty.<\/p>\n Both of these unexpected events, water becoming less dense in a solid and a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, might serve as a way of understanding an after life of sorts.\u00a0 That is, consciousness or soul or whatever else you might call the essence of the human, could be like the caterpillar, could be like ice.\u00a0 It’s possible there is a next state, another phase to living that is unimaginable from our evidence, a phase so different from this bodily existence as to be analogous to a caterpillar’s transformation into a butterfly, as unexpected as the phase change in water from its liquid to its solid state.\u00a0 Could be, I suppose.\u00a0 It’s a nice image.\u00a0 A comforting one.\u00a0 Might happen.<\/p>\n *Elephant researcher Martin Meredith<\/a> recalls an occurrence in his book about a typical elephant death ritual that was witnessed by Anthony Martin-Hall, a South African biologist who had studied elephants in Addo<\/a>, South Africa<\/a>, for over eight years. The entire family of a dead matriarch<\/a>, including her young calf, were all gently touching her body with their trunks, trying to lift her. The elephant herd were all rumbling loudly. The calf was observed to be weeping and made sounds that sounded like a scream, but then the entire herd fell incredibly silent. They then began to throw leaves and dirt over the body and broke off tree branches to cover her. They spent the next two days quietly standing over her body. They sometimes had to leave to get water or food, but they would always return.[32]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imbolc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Bridgit Moon The most optimistic page in the newspaper?\u00a0 The obituaries.\u00a0 Every day and especially on Sundays I see evidence of the hopefulness and optimism of Minnesota citizens.\u00a0 I imagine it’s the same everywhere.\u00a0 With no evidence for an afterlife at all, let alone a particular one, person after person greets their mother … Continue reading Obits Optimists<\/span>