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The Veil Between Two Worlds
Reverend Brian J. Kiely, Unitarian Church of
Edmonton, October 23, 2005
I wish to begin this sermon with a kind of meditation or musing.
I want to pose a couple of questions and then offer a kind of personal
creed as a reply.
Who can say for certain what is real and what is not?
Who can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is or is not
a veil between the worlds, a spirit realm, an after life; Heaven,
Valhalla or the Land of Sidhe?
I can not prove anything.
I can say what I believe…what I choose to believe.
I can say what I desire.
I can say what I dream.
I can say what I can reason and even what I think I can know,
though they may not be the same.
But it is all beyond proof.
The notion of a world beyond the veil is about spirit and soul,
about desire and perhaps fear
and about other things and qualities unseen and unknowable.
Perhaps you find this kind of speculation a waste of time.
Perhaps you find this uncertainty frustrating or uncomfortable.
Perhaps you find this to be weak-minded emotionalism.
Perhaps it just bores you.
That is your right.
I find it intriguing and mysterious.
I find the uncertainty somehow comforting.
It’s not all fixed. It’s not all answered.
In uncertainty and unknowing I find room to live and grow and dream
and experience and allow for unimagined possibilities.
I find that life affirming.
I find it to be an affirmation of humanity, not just rational humanity,
but every aspect of our complex and still partly undiscovered being.
I do not find it desperate to want to live on in another form,
as long as I accept the possibility that I may not.
Is there a veil between the worlds? I cannot say for certain, but
at this time of year, I find it hard not to believe.
Many of you will recall from past sermons and newsletter articles
that I am not fond of November. To me it is a month for contemplating
dying as the leaves fall, the light fades and the chill sets into
my bones. I change a little every November. If I am going to sink
into a low grade depression in a given year, it will probably be
in the 11th month. I prefer to read darker books and watch darker
movies. I stream with tears at Remembrance Day ceremonies even though
no one in my family tree has ever served in uniform. For years I
tried to pretend this dark time did not exist. Now I have come to
accept it as an old friend who takes me to important places I would
not bother to visit alone.
Many of you over the years have acknowledged similar feelings and
moods at this time of year. There are lots of good biological explanations
involving the loss of light, slowing metabolisms, the animal need
to store fat for winter. Sleep therapists tell us we need more of
that in winter. Nutritionists tell us we need different foods and
vitamin balances and on it goes. Each of the explanations seems
valid. I certainly don’t have any evidence to refute them
nor do I want to try to find it.
Perhaps those physical explanations are enough for many of you,
and that’s fine. But they aren’t quite enough to calm
my restless Celtic soul.
Soul. Many years ago Thomas More defined soul as almost the opposite
of spirit. Though he never said it this succinctly, More suggested
that the spirit is that part of us that lives in the light. It is
high flying and joyous. It is outgoing and outward looking. But
he also contended that our society is addicted to the high of the
spirit and that we do not give the necessary equal degree of attention
to the shadow side where soul lives. For More, soul is inward looking
and contemplative. It is the part of us that listens for the still
small voice, the part that finds wisdom and strength in tragedy.
It is the part of us that looks in the mirror and sees us- warts
and all. It is the part of us that knows something about the veil
between the worlds. Soul sits quietly, waiting, while spirit flies
high, searching.
I read More’s book during a long ago November. My soul side
was listening and found validation. I don’t fight November
anymore. I accept it and even have learned to welcome the darkening
gifts it brings. Sometimes we just have to sit with death and loss
and grief and failure. In November that sad part of life demands
its due.
As I learned to accept soulful November, I began to understand
that I have always loved Hallowe’en for more than just the
costumes and the sugar rush. It is the gateway to the season, the
celebration of hidden things and shadowy wisdom. All Souls followed
by All Saints. I usually take the dog for a walk on Hallowe’en
night after the three foot goblins have gone home with their loot.
I feel the leaves blowing and somehow the possibility of spirits
reaching out through the veil and across the breeze seems very real.
I have noticed in the novels of Patricia Cornwell and now in some
of the various crime scene television shows that they like to portray
pathologists talking to the corpses they are about to autopsy. It
is as if there was still some residual life listening. Some I am
sure, find that ghoulish. It has never struck me as odd. I have
talked to the dead all my life, sometimes in their coffins, sometimes
at their graves. As fatherhood approached with all its unnerving
possibilities and attendant self-doubt, I often leaned over my back
fence and chatted with my late father under the night sky.
Now before you get too worried about my mental health, no, the
dead don’t talk back. My rational brain is fully aware of
what I am doing. I am summoning the lessons people have taught me
in life from some deeply archived file and applying those lessons
to my contemporary concern. I think. At least I am satisfied with
that explanation. But it is comforting to have those lessons sound
in my brain in the voice of my father or mother or uncle or teacher.
It is probably the closest I come to traditional prayer.
But it does beg several questions: Is there a veil separating the
reality we know from some other level of existence? Does some part
of our essence or spirit live on in another plain before we are
born and after we die? From time to time Tom Harpur, longtime religion
writer in the Toronto Star has asked that question of his readers,
inviting them to send in their stories. Each time he has been inundated
with replies. They tell of near death experiences or contact with
the departed, and do so with such conviction that the skeptical
Harpur was forced to reconsider his views and do further research.
The result was a book a decade ago called “Life After Death”.
He concluded that volume with this: "I am today persuaded
that death is very much like birth. It is the traumatic, but essential
passage into a new phase of life...it will so far surpass anything
we have dreamed of as to make present attempts to describe it seem
tawdry and utterly inept." (p. 243)
There are millions of people in the world who believe there is
another kind of existence beyond the veil, not because they have
been so taught, but because of personal near death experience (NDE).
And remember, we Unitarians set personal direct experience above
all others in our statement of the Principles and Sources of our
personal beliefs.
Many skeptics will argue that these NDEs are dreams or even wishful
thinking influenced by religious teachings. Perhaps they are, but
not even the firmest skeptic can deny the power of the experience.
In his book The Omega Project, Kenneth Ring concludes from extensive
evaluation of NDEs that people emerge from them with a greater sense
of their own spirituality and a stronger to commitment to one's
fellow beings. Curiously, Ring also studied people claiming UFO
encounters. Comparing the two groups against each other and against
non-experiencing control groups, he found a much greater tendency
in the experiencing group to report mystical episodes. Clearly some
of us are more prone to such events, but does that mean they are
not real? More importantly, if the experience is powerful and positively
transforming, does the reality of the encounter matter? The more
I read the less concerned I am with the 'facts', and the more likely
I am to believe simply that something important is happening.
There was a time in my life when I was highly skeptical about life
after death. My personal motto was, and remains, "Live the
best life you can, for this may be all there is." My agnostic
corollary was, "Just in case there is an afterlife, living
the best life possible can only help my cause."
In the last 15 years, however, I have found myself being more open
to the possibility of an afterlife. Both of my parents’ deaths
had eerie qualities to them. When my father died unexpectedly I
had my one and only ever premonition, one of a phone message pinned
to my shared flat door with the words “Call your brother”.
It was hanging there when I arrived home 30 minutes later. I knew
its meaning before I made the call, and I was at peace.
When I learned of my mother’s death…on a Remembrance
Day, I was being comforted the embrace of a close friend. Suddenly
she stiffened, then relaxed. Apparently my mother appeared for a
few moments sending a wordless but calming message of peace discovered.
It wasn’t the first time someone saw an apparition in my presence,
but as always, I was personally oblivious. I’m no seer, though
I may be some kind of magnet.
My encounters with people in hospital, and most especially with
the eerie qualities of my parents’ deaths have suggested to
me that there is something more beyond death, something wholly and
entirely and indescribably other. Carl Jung, who did experience
an NDE wrote, "What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious
that our imaginations and our feelings do not suffice to form even
an approximate conception of it." Well, since I can’t
know the nature of any afterlife, and since I am bent on enjoying
this one as much as I can, frankly I don’t spend much time
pondering the quality of possible future existences. I figure I
will deal with it if and when I encounter it.
Critics claim that afterlife concepts come from people who are
afraid of dying. I don't think that's true...certainly not in my
case. I have been around family deaths all of my life, being the
youngest child by many years in my generation. And growing up in
an Irish Catholic culture, death was not sanitized. Open casket
wakes in funeral homes, just one step removed from laying out the
dead on the dining room table, is still a common part of that tradition
and of my experience. I have been seeing and touching dead bodies
since I was five years old. The proposition "dead is dead"
holds no fear for me. I will admit to a fear of dying in pain or
dying by inches, but being dead and forever extinct bothers me not
a whit.
It is the power of events surrounding deaths that have moved me
to reconsider the possibility of life beyond the veil.
For what it’s worth, the notion of afterlife is a worldwide
concept. Tom Harpur examined the religious record. Every major world
religion has some sense of an afterlife. Each of these doctrines
bears some resemblance to all the others. Images equating god with
light occur in most traditions as do concepts of spirit bodies or
existences. The element of judgment is very common, with the most
common form of punishment not being some literal hell, but rather
our own remorse when we discover how we have been hurtful.
But Harpur also looked at science in his quest. He observed that
physicists and physicians have moved away from a strictly materialistic
view of the world. There is an ever growing body of scientific thought
that sees the universe as a "cosmic dance of energy".
As renowned Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield noted, "The
brain seems to act with an energy all its own. It makes decisions
and puts them into action by employing the various mechanisms of
the brain, but it is something more than these mechanisms themselves."
(Harpur's paraphrasing p. 97) It is a humble view. Instead of believing
we are close to cracking the code of the universe or even the brain,
the new scientists now think that the universe is far more mysterious
than ever before imagined. Their new understanding easily allows
the possibility of spirit realms and as yet undiscovered realms
of consciousness.
This sermon doesn’t have a big finish, or undeniably right
conclusion. It only has the same questions and musings as at the
beginning.
Who can say for certain what is real and what is not?
Who can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is or is not
aveil between the worlds, a spirit realm, an after life; Heaven,
Valhalla or the Land of Sidhe?
I can not prove anything.
I can only say what I believe…what I choose to believe.
I can say what I desire.
I can say what I dream.
That is all I can do.
And you can do the same.
Reading
Next weekend is Samhain, better known in the Anglo-Christian world
as All Hallow’s Eve or Hallowe’en. Jessica Murray, an
astrologer, writes:
Halloween arrives with the brisk autumn wind, when our sensibilities
are undergoing the same subtle but profound changes as Nature
herself. The energy in the air is ambivalent, prickling with unease
but alive with the promise of connecting us to life in a new way,
a deeper way. Halloween reminds us of the existence of powers
we cannot see, and yet still somehow understand.
The keen sense of nostalgia many of us feel at this time of the
year may be due to cellular memory, which keeps us in touch with
Halloween’s long, rich history. Archaic collective imagery
of a very special kind re-awakens every year…
The last … [pagan] festival remaining in the Western calendar,
only Halloween has cleaved to its magical, primordial roots. It
is a holiday that fascinates without requiring us to believe anything.
Its allure is not intellectual, but visceral, dating back to a
time when people explored the non-physical realms – the
Other Worlds – as a natural and normal function of human
experience.
For untold … [centuries] before the Julian Calendar, Halloween
or Samhain to the ancient Celts, marked that poignant moment at
the golden end of the warm season when the veils between the worlds
are thinnest. Back in the days when people timed their lives by
the birthing of their herds and the ripening of their harvests,
Halloween served as a solemn gateway to winter, the Dark Time
(Dark meaning , not bad but hidden). This was the point of the
wheel of the year when ancient Europeans slowed down their activity,
gathered up what they had sown literally and figuratively during
the long days of summer, and turned their attentions within.
Before the modern era, the unseen worlds were considered very
real. Ancient practitioners of Halloween believed in the afterlife
as a matter of course; they would have found incomprehensible
the idea that cultivating a relationship with the dead was wrong
or evil. Nor did they think they had to go through high priests
to do it. Ordinary people sought wisdom through exploring dimensions
beyond death, and between lives; and exploration which had not
yet been declared taboo.
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