The Life That Now Is

"Immortality is not a matter of waiting for the next life, but in perfecting our humanity here and now." -Karen Armstrong

Often, we receive gifts of the spirit from we know not whence.

When we feel that we have nothing left to give, when we feel that we cannot go on, we mysteriously find the strength to do what must be done. From out of our weakness, from out of our lethargy or boredom, from out of our sadness or despair, we discover that we have been given powers we did not know or think we had. In the face of loss, we miraculously find the will to go on. In the face of death, we find a way to reaffirm life.

If you think about it, life is full of little resurrections. For me, this is part of the mystery of the life that now is, and has nothing to do with what might be. In the words of our responsive reading, "Life springs from death and shatters every fetter, and winter yields to spring eternally."

In a recent lecture on the subject of immortality, religious writer and former nun Karen Armstrong made the startling statement, "I think I can safely say that as a child my religious life was ruined by the notion of the afterlife." She said this because, she reports, "I was obsessed with the fear of Hell." "Religion," she said, "as far as I could see, was chiefly about ‘getting into heaven.’" She continues,

A stockpile of prayers and good deeds could ensure my entry ticket into paradise, but I also resorted to the gaining of indulgences, the wearing of scapulas, and the practice of attending Mass on the first Friday of every month. If you managed five consecutive first Fridays, you were promised that you would not die without receiving the last rites and having the chance to confess all to a priest.

This type of piety, she writes, seems no more religious than paying into a retirement annuity to secure a comfortable retirement in the hereafter.

Most of us, however, have a difficult time with this idea. We have a difficult time with the idea of giving up our egos, of letting go of ourselves. We want to live forever, and we want those whom we love to live forever. We want to go on, and on, and on, or at least we think we do. And herein lies the problem.

Karen Armstrong believes that this obsession with the afterlife is the cause of almost all of our worldly problems. Out of her wide-ranging religious studies she has come to believe that true religion is not about the afterlife at all, but rather it is about inhabiting the eternal in the here and now. And most important, it is about losing the self and acting compassionately toward others.

Her focus these days is on what the 19th century Unitarian minister Robert Collyer called "the life that now is." In a book of that title, Collyer wrote,

Dear Friend, whether man or woman, I ask you . . . whether you have kept this old wholesome faith in, and love for the life that now is; because I really know of no way so sure to the loftiest and holiest life of heaven, as that which lies directly through a deep, quick sympathy with the life on earth. When we lose that, we lose what the sap is to the tree; the mediator between our being and the life about us and above us; the secret of all our growth and fruitfulness, as of all our glory and joy.

In other words, she says, "Immortality is not a matter of waiting for the next life, but of perfecting our humanity here and now." And therein lies the challenge, and the rub. Because the only way to perfect our humanity is in some sense to forget about ourselves, and to begin to think more about others. Herein lies the way to new life. Herein lies the way to resurrection.

If Jesus’ only claim to fame was that he supposedly rose from the dead, I do not believe we would remember him. It was the way he lived his life--this life that now is--the things that he taught and the things that he did, that actually guaranteed his immortality, both in his own life, and in posterity in the immortality of memory.

The focus on the afterlife in western religion has meant that people tend to lose sight of the eternal now. The life that now is is dismissed in favor of a vision of future paradise. The compassion that lies at the heart of all the great religious traditions is downplayed and in some cases even disclaimed, a la Islamic, Christian, and Jewish religious fanatics and terrorists, with often tragic results.

The great truth taught by all the religious sages from Confucius to the Buddha to the Hebrew prophets to Jesus to Muhammad is that religion is essentially altruism. Forget what you may have been told: religion is not about your personal salvation, it is about the Golden Rule: it is about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. It is about kindness and practical charity and welcoming the stranger. What a paradise we would have if we only practiced that ideal!

The paradox is that immortality is already present here and now. The paradox, as Jesus so well recognized, as the Buddha so well recognized, is that it is as one loses one’s life--that is, as one abandons the ego and hopeless self-striving--that one finds one’s life. Or as Karen Armstrong writes, "Living a compassionate, empathetic life [takes] you beyond yourself and introduce[s] you to another dimension of existence.

As we give ourselves up to selfless service to others, we taste the eternal, because our self-forgetting unites us with all that is, all that has been, and all that ever will be. Eric Fromm wrote,

Let us proclaim the reality of resurrection--
Not the resurrection which is a creation of another reality beyond this life--
But a resurrection which is the transformation of this reality in the direction of greater aliveness.
People and society are resurrected every moment in the act of hope and of faith in the here and now--
Every act of love, of awareness, of compassion is resurrection--
Every act of sloth, of greed, of selfishness is death of the spirit.
Every moment of life confronts us with the alternatives of death or resurrection--
To live is to choose, and in choosing we give our answer--
Our answer lies not in what we say or think, but in what we are and how we act--
Let us proclaim, let us choose, let us live the reality of resurrection!

Those moments, few and far between though they sometimes may be, are more than enough for me to proclaim the sufficiency of the life that now is. It is enough to taste of immortality in the here and now. We do not need other worlds: we only need to make the very best of this one in order to find our earthly paradise. We do not need other days; this one will suffice. In the words of our closing hymn,

O day of Light and gladness,
Of prophecy and song,
What thoughts within us waken,
What hallowed mem-’ries throng!
The soul’s horizon widens,
Past, present, future blend;
And rises on our vision
The life that has no end.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock