The Great Arsenic Lobster
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
October 7, 2001

Reading: “Sixty” by Stephen Duinn

What is this that I can’t see	
	Whose icy hands take hold of me?
	I am Death and I can tell
	I open the door to heaven or hell
	O Death, O Death, 
	Please spare me over for another year

	This chilling traditional Appalachian song as rendered so unforgettably by Ralph Stanley, one of my childhood heroes, in last year’s movie “O Brother Where Art Thou” represents one pole of our feeling about death.  Death is something to be afraid of, it will come whether we are ready or not, and it’s goodbye to all these joys of life and it’s really our deepest fear, the worst thing that could happen, the thing we spend all our effort trying to prevent.
	The other pole of attitudes about death is represented by the last stanza of William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis, a passage I had to memorize in Mrs. Jeffcoat’s English class in eleventh grade:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
That innumerable caravan that moves 
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death, 
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
As one who wraps the slumber of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

These words counsel us to approach death without fear, not like the quarry slave, a prisoner of his own fears, but as one who is simply going to sleep.
	William Cullen Byrant was the son of a Unitarian physician and the grandson of a Calvinist deacon; he wrote Thantopsis when he was seventeen, and its sentiment was so Unitarian that he hid it from his grandfather and had it published anonymously.  
	Now, we have these two polar views of death, but I think the reading from Stephen Dunn this morning is somewhere in the middle: “Some people forget to live as if a great arsenic lobster could fall on their heads at any moment.”  This says that our mortality, the fact that we will die, is useful in telling us how to live.
	I have been preaching enthusiastically from this pulpit for two years in various guises and dressings the notion that it is death, our own mortality, which ultimately gives meaning to life.   I have called this dancing in the face of death.  So this morning’s sermon will take these words and serve them up appetizingly on a plate, garnished perhaps with a sprig of parsley, and we will consider whether I have to eat them in light of recent events. 
	We have now been through the experience of a sudden mass death of thousands of our fellow citizens in a shocking and dramatic atrocity.  And from that collective experience comes the acid which we need to test our proposition, to determine whether it will wash.
	For we may say almost anything in fair weather.  We may say things we don’t really mean.  We may say things for dramatic effect.  We may say things because to say them sounds neat, it makes us look like we know what we’re talking about.  We may say them to stir up an argument, or to stimulate discussion or to be a devil’s advocate or because we got out of bed on the wrong side that morning.  Even ministers do these things – I know that proposition will shock you.
	But death, real death, has a way of piercing through the hype, of giving us a seriousness which we need to make pronouncements such as the value of death.  Rabbi Irving Greenstein says “Say nothing of God and humanity that can not be said in the presence of burning children.”  Well, that is an arresting quote.  I hope that anything I would say in the presence of burning children would be said with a view towards rescuing them if that were possible.
	But rescue is often not possible.  There are situations where the awful has descended, the fate is sealed, and nothing you or I do is going to prevent lives from being lost.  We all felt so so helpless as we watched those buildings collapse and knew that what we were watching was but the outward shell of the destruction of thousands of lives.
	It is still hard to speak about this, still hard to bring back these memories.  We have been shaken to the core.  Of course it’s not the first time we’ve experienced death.  Most of us have had loved ones die and most of us were not particularly close to the people that died in this recent disaster.  In fact, several in this congregation are dealing more immediately with deaths of parents and other loved ones now.  But there is something about the collective experience, the public character of these recent deaths that makes them linger in our minds, to the point that we might be ready to agree with the proposition that we are changed as a people.
	But if we are changed, how are we changed?  To answer that question, I want you to go back in time to recall your first reaction to the attack, recall where you were when you first heard about it.  Recall how you felt and what you did in the first hours and few days after the attack.  It wasn’t business as usual for most of us.  It was a completely new set of concerns superimposed on our old lives.  I would submit for many of us, we looked at the world in a new way.  We had new priorities.  The usual games, the tally sheet of who won and who lost, the measuring ourselves against others to see if our bank account was big enough, if we had played our cards right, whether there was going to be enough to pay the bills, whether the new hairdo really helped our looks –  those concerns suddenly gave way to  – did we know where our children, parents, friends were?  Suddenly phone lines were paralyzed as everyone in America tried to phone home, wherever in this mobile society home might be.  We needed to touch base.  We needed to gather our loved ones around us.  We needed to feel safe.
	Now let me draw back to a wider framework.  I actually started to think about revisiting this topic of mortality back in the summer on Star Island as I was listening to a lecture on cloning and immortality given by Ursula Goodenough, the cell biologist who is one of the key players in the science-religion dialogue in which I’m involved under the auspices of IRAS, the Institute for Religion in an Age of Science.  In talking about immortality. Ursula said we need to distinguish life expectancy from life span.    Life expectancy is how long a person might expect to live in any given age, and in modern times life expectancy has been creeping up steadily with new advances in medicine and better understanding of the aging process.  Lifespan, on the other hand, is the longest time any individual is known to live, and that has held relatively constant over history – it’s about 120 years (if we discount some of those ages set out in Genesis).  
	Now the aging process seems to have something to do with a malfunction in the end of our DNA strings, the places called telomeres.  Some of us are already popping Vitamin E in the morning to try to induce our bodies to generate more telemerase, the chemical which assists this process.
	Apparently nothing now being done in mainstream science circles has much chance of affecting life span, of breaking through that 120-year barrier, but of course, a new discovery may be just around the corner.  We then can ask the value question, is it desireable to break through this barrier?  Would we like to live to 200 or 300 years.
	My instinctive answer is no.  There is a gut feeling inside me that says the arc of a normal life today from birth to age eighty or ninety has pleasing proportion and aesthetic and I would not want to monkey with it.  Yet I realize that this reaction is informed by my own time and my own culture.  Two centuries ago, fifty would have been an average life expectancy, and I would now be, at 53, in the small segment of the population which had beaten the averages.
	It is not just a mater of numbers, though.  I feel that my present projected lifespan gives me enough time to do what I want to do with my life, and the presence of death reminds me to keep focused.  If my own death was a couple hundred years in the future, I would have a different outlook.
	Also, while we are looking at this through a scientific lens, let us not forget death’s role in evolution.  Two years ago I preached a sermon called “Is Sex Necessary,” most of you who were here then remember the title, but I wonder how many remember the message of that sermon.  We can find in the plant and even in the animal kingdoms species which do not reproduce sexually, and we can find species which are for all intents and purposes immortal, where individuals do not die in the normal course of things – amoebas are an example.  
	It turns out that you can make a perfectly good organism without sex or death, but that organism will not evolve.  Sexual reproduction gives us the genetic mix which allows variations, and it is variations which allow evolution.   And mortality is tied to sexual reproduction.  
	So here is a scientific reason to praise mortality in general: if it were not for mortality, homo sapiens would never have arisen.   I like to think that this scientific truth was foreshadowed somewhat, in a converse way, in the Garden of Eden story in Genesis, where God punishes Adam and Eve for eating of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil by decreeing that they shall die.  Mortality is the price the human race has paid for its great cranial capabilities.
	That’s the wide view, that human mortality has bestowed incalculable benefits.  However, like many scientific insights, it’s counterintuitive and therefore doesn’t seem very warm and fuzzy.  Now there’s a nice evolutionary reason for that too.  Our instincts are to oppose death, to seek life.  We have a drive for life because our ancestors who had stronger drives for life tended to survive to reproduce while those of their contemporaries who were indifferent to life and death tended to die young and are not, therefore, our ancestors.  To survive to reproductive age in prehistoric times, one had to have the speed and strength to get out of the way of predators, the intelligence and awareness to know when one was in danger, and the will to live.
	That will is part of our genetic heritage.  It is a good thing to have.  That will to live is what makes us fear and hate death.  It will fight against us when we want to say that death isn’t so bad. 
	The other instinct which our evolution has given us is the instinct to protect our offspring.  We are programmed to think babies are cute and to want to protect them.  That is why Rabbi Greenstein’s quote – say nothing of God and humanity which cannot be said in the presence of burning babies – is so hard to hear, for it conjures up some very elemental fears.  The instinct for protection of one’s family has in more recent human history been broadened to protection al any other humans who might be in danger.  It was this instinct which led over three hundred New York firefighters into the World Trade towers when everyne else was leaving.  It is why we all felt that helpless feeling watching the building collapse.
	Our instincts tell us when faced with death to do something, to save ourselves and save everyone who is threatened.  This instinct is frustrated when all we can do is stand by and watch.
	And yet it may be that the spirit grows more when all we can do is stand and watch, to be present and to bear witness.  Mary the mother of Jesus stood by the foot of his cross because she could do nothing to prevent his crucifixion.  We have all sat with loved ones, holding their hands, hearing their stories of pain and injury and feeling small inside because there is nothing we can do about it.  
	Of course, in a way we are doing something about it.  We are listening.  We are watching, we are bearing witness.  We are making the tragedies of others our own in some way.  And we are lightening the load for them.
	But enugh of the scientific perspective, back to the great arsenic lobster.  Some of us forget to live as if one could drop out of the sky.  But now four of them have.  They dropped out of the sky and onto some of us and into the hearts of the rest of us.  Maybe we won’t forget to live as if it could happen again.  
	Death is horrible, particularly when inflicted in such a cruel way to masses of people in the same blow.  And yet I say in the dust and rubble of the wreckage there are blooming a thousand stories of heroism, dedication, caring and love.  One of them happened to people right in this room.  Michael and Patricia Judy, a couple whose wedding I performed last fall, spent the disaster having a baby.  They came last week to show her off to me and described what it was like to be creating new life amidst such destruction I was so enthralled I asked their permission to share this news with you.  They will never be the same again.
	The mass death has refocused us as a people.    Death is a gift, and close encounters with death help us to see what is truly important in life.
	Buddhist monks know this; one of the meditation practices they undergo involves touching a rotting corpse. Robert Fulghum, the writer and UU minister, wrote of buying his grave plot and then going down with a loawn chair and sitting beside it, to get acquainted with the place where he will spend eternity.  One of the great ways we can explore where we are spiritually is to write our own obit or deliver a premature eulogy for ourselves.
	What would it mean, anyway, to live as if a great arsenic lobster could fall on us?  It is different for each of us.  What do we do with the epiphanies we have when we stare death straight in the face?  Do we snap down our everyday masks and go on?  Or do we try to build on what we saw clearly about our priorities in the time when we were most acutely sensitive?  Can we figure out from there what needs to be done first and either start it ourselves or look around for others who may be moving in the same direction?  Can we use our consciousness of death to focus ourselves on what we are about?
	I don’t think we completely discard all resemblances of our former way of life, but I don’t think we quite settle back to business as usual, either.  I think where we are at is some middle ground.
	In that regard, I want to leave you with another poem from Stephen Dunn, this one is the title poem from the book Different Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize.  The protagonist basically snaps down his mask after his brush with death, but it won’t stay snapped.  And where he is after his brush with death, I think is where a lot of us are a month after the attack of 9/11.  I should explain that the term Sturm und Drang is from German Romanticism and means storm and stress.
	Different Hours       
As the small plane descended through
the its-all-over-now Sturm und Drang
I closed my eyes and saw myself
in waves of lucidity, a vanisher
in a long process of vanishing,
of solitary character, truant heart.
When we landed, I flipped down 
my daily mask, resumed my normal dreamy life of uncommitted crimes.
I held nothing against me anymore.
And now, next day, I wake before
the sound of traffic, amazed
that the paper had been delivered,
that the world is up and working.
A dazed rabbit sits in the dewy grass.  
The clematis has no aspirations
as it climbs its trestle.
I pour myself orange juice, Homestyle.
I say the hell with low-fat cream cheese,
and slather the good stuff on my bagel.
The newspaper seems to be thinking 
my thoughts: No Hope For Lost Men, 
Link Between Laughter and Health.
It says scientists now know the neutrino
has mass.  “The most ghostly particle 
in the universe,” one of them called it.
No doubt other scientists are jealous
who asked the right questions
too late, some failure of intuition
leading them astray.
No doubt, too, at this very moment
a snake is sunning itself in Calcutta.
And somewhere a philosopher is erasing
“Time’s empty passing” because he’s seen
a woman in a ravishing dress.
In a different hour, he’ll put it back.

Amen.