Maybe we are just afraid of death?

We just seem to keep ourselves so busy. We seldom take time to think about those things that matter most in our lives. When we are young, there is always another tomorrow. When we are raising our families, there is always the career and paying the bills. When we grow old, we begin to dread the increasingly frequent invitations to Memorials.

Why are we that way? Maybe we are just afraid of death? If we keep ourselves busy, if we pay attention to important matters, if we attend Memorials out of duty, maybe we are refusing to allow ourselves to think about the most important thing: eternal life.

Eternal life. Boy, that is a hard thing to get your hands around! It's right up there with trying to imagine a God without beginning and without end! We try to understand things we have never experienced by relating them to things we have experienced. And who of us has experienced living forever? Living forever is impossible to imagine on this earth and in this universe. Especially when our body becomes a constant source of annoyance as we approach 80, 90, and 100. As my Dad said as he reached into his mid 80s: "What use to be loose is now hard. And what used to be hard is now loose!"

When we do get the courage to think about our impending death, we often try to think of ways to defeat the Grim Reaper. Death Becomes Her is a story like that. Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep receive a concoction from Bruce Willis that gives them eternal life in the body. But like the Egyptian mummies, they learned that life in the body forever is less enjoyable then they had hoped.

It has been said that the contemplation of death is the beginning of philosophy. And that of all God's creations, only humans can contemplate their own death. We can, but we don't. Why? Because we can not image a life after death. We find it impossible to picture ourselves in an eternal spiritual world. What the heck would we do there forever, anyway!?

I studied with a famous Methodist theologian at Southern Methodist University, Shubert Ogden. I recall during one lecture on his renown series on Systematic Theology when he said: "Could you image living with the same woman for eternity! That would be incredibly boring!" A famous theologian? And he doesn't understand the first thing about life in the eternal, spiritual world after death?

The eternal spiritual world is the atmosphere of love, at least in the realm called heaven. There we breathe love like we breathe air here. How do we know? People are traveling often to the spiritual world and reporting about its nature. Shamans have voyaged into the spiritual world for many thousands of years, held only by a golden cord to their earthly body.

Emanuel Swedenborg wrote volumes on his experience in the spiritual world in the 17th and 18th centuries. He had established himself as a scientist before venturing into the spiritual world, seemingly spending more time there awake than awake on the earth. Of course, we can easily discount experiences like Emanuel Swedenborg. Yet his logic is strong. In Conjugal Love, he writes that the sexual union between husband and wife is the highest spiritual experience of love in heaven. Yet he testifies that that love is far, far more than a sexual experience. It is the complete merging of a man and woman in ecstatic love forever.

You see, that is where Shubert Ogden missed the boat. He spent so much time trying to understand things that he failed at the most important task: Experiencing the highest form of love with his wife.

So, what is the eternal spiritual world that awaits us all like? Why are we so afraid of it that we will do almost anything not to think about it?

Like life before death, the eternal spiritual world is about relationships. The most important relationships here are the most important relationships there. The relationship between husband and wife, between parents and children, between siblings, and between friends. The eternal heaven in the spiritual world is like life in a family, a great extended family that embraces all people who ever lived.

Will there be people who hold esteemed positions in heaven? Probably. They are the people who showed the way of love on this earth. They are the ones who taught us the way of love that jives with heavenly love. You see, if we live the way of heavenly love here, we are ready and able to live in the total freedom of love in the eternal spiritual world.

Just as nature is extremely important for living a life of love and peace here, nature in the spiritual world is extremely important for living a life of love and peace in the eternal spiritual world. From accounts of those who have been there and returned, the spiritual world has many realms. Maybe that is what Jesus meant when he said that in his father's mansion has many rooms:

In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. New International Version

So why are we so afraid of death if what awaits is so glorious? Maybe because our spirit tells us that we have been so busy taking care of ourselves, our careers, our families, that we have forgotten to embrace and live the love of heaven? How could we neglect to do that? I doubt that any of us could say no one told us how to do it! Read the scriptures of Shamanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and in each and every one we are taught the way of heavenly love.

If we do not know, it is because we choose not to know. We choose to keep ourselves busy enjoying our youth, building our careers, buying our toys, or hiding in our beliefs. Anything but living the way of heavenly love. Those who live the way of heavenly love now have nothing to fear from death.

April 15th: The Day Abraham Lincoln Died

"The last breath was drawn at 21 minutes and 55 seconds past 7 A.M. and the last heart beat flickered at 22 minutes and 10 seconds past the hour on Saturday, April 15, 1865." Carl Sandburg marked Lincoln's last moment of life in his monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln had prophetic dreams about his pending assassination. He considered himself a man of destiny and believed that his life would end at the hands of an assassin. Few will miss the irony of his assassination taking place on Good Friday, the day that Jesus suffered crucifixion on the cross. Lincoln had lived in a way similar to Christ, carrying his cross throughout the four bloodiest years in the history of the United States of America as the leader of the cause to preserve the union.

Lincoln's death came a few days after General U.S. Grant received the surrender of General Robert E. Lee on Palm Sunday 1865. Although the Confederacy had yet to formally surrender, all expected a complete and unconditional surrender soon. President Lincoln had made a daring visit to Richmond the day after Grant's army rode into the city. Lincoln sat in Jefferson Davis's chair in the capital building, pondering the man who had sat as his adversary throughout the four, long, horrendous years.

Lincoln had not even wanted to attend Ford's Theater that evening. He had no interest in watching the British play, Our American Cousin. Yet is wife insisted, wanting to celebrate the expected end of the war with levity and amusement. Once the announcement had been made in the newspapers, Lincoln felt obliged to attend, even though he had forebodings.

The death of Lincoln, like the death of Christ, seemed destined and nothing could stop it. Just as the Civil War seemed destined to exact the death of 620,000 North and South, Providence appeared to require the death of Lincoln upon the cross for the nation's sin of slavery. Slavery, that horrific practice of owning men like animals, led the United States into hell fire and brimstone, into an apocalypse of fury and destruction.

Why had the English colonies in America received African slaves? Pure and simple, making a profit through selling agricultural products. During the 1600s in New Amsterdam, slavery had been admitted and then dropped. The Dutch plan to create plantations worked by African slaves failed. In Jamestown, the effort to plant slavery in the 1600s succeeded. The Southern way of life and slavery became inextricably interwoven, especially for the aristocratic slave holders like Washington and Jefferson.

Slavery. The cross upon which Lincoln died. Did John Wilkes Booth, the foremost Shakespearean actor at the time in the United States, assassinate Lincoln because he abolished slavery? No. Booth's reason for killing Lincoln lay simply in his fury at the disgrace brought by the South's defeat. He held Lincoln responsible for that defeat and humiliation. Ironically, Lincoln would much rather have attended a Shakespeare play with Booth on the stage than Our American Cousin.

If God had wanted to save Lincoln's life that night, he could have easily done so. A combination of events, all essential to the success of the assassination, coincided. Lincoln's preferred body guard had other duties, leaving a misfit to protect his back in Ford's Theater. Rather than stay at his post, he went out for drink and women in the street. That allowed Booth to take his hiding place next to Lincoln's box. Booth used a single shot derringer from five feet distance to kill Lincoln. Angels surely could have fended away that inadequate bullet. But, no, the bullet struck Lincoln mortally.

Why did Lincoln have to die, crucified on Good Friday? If he had lived, how very different the Reconstruction would have been. Lincoln's lack of desire for revenge, his single-minded intention to forgive and welcome back all southerns who took a pledge of allegiance to the United States of America, his commitment to ease freed slaves successfully into the fabric of American society would have made for a very different nation.

Instead, Andrew Johnson, the vice president sworn in upon Lincoln's death, had a far less charitable stance toward the South. He held that punishment for rebellion is the proper and right course. The North would force the South through Reconstruction. The long road for freed slaves into full citizenship began. A road that, under Lincoln, certainly would have been shorter and more successful. If Lincoln had served through his second term, maybe Fredrick Douglas would have eliminated the need for Martin Luther King 100 years later. Who knows? Who knows . . . .

Yet we are often pawns of destiny far more than shapers of destiny. We have parts to play in the grand unfolding of the Providence of God. Why did God require the sacrifice of Abraham Lincoln on April 15th, 1865? Why did God require the sacrifice of Jesus Christ the same day about 1830 years earlier? The ways of God are mysterious and past all understanding. Yet we know that great people who believe in love often end their earthly lives on the cross. And, although we would prefer---as surely they would---that they lived, through their life and death on the cross of the providence, the world is a vastly better place.

The Ghosts of Woodstock

August 14 to 16, 1969.

I wonder if you have noticed that this year is the year of Anniversaries? 400 years ago, Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson River. 200 years ago, Robert Fulton sailed The Steamship along the same Hudson River. And 40 years ago today, the three day Peace Fest began in Bethel, NY, named Woodstock. All those events took place just outside my Window on the Hudson.

When Hudson sailed the Half Moon up the river that now bares his name, Native Americans who had lived in the region for 12,000 years saw the strange creature move up the river like an ancient sea monster. His voyage marked the beginning of a new age in the New World, the age of European colonization in the region.


In 1809, Robert Fulton received the first patent for his steam boat. In 1807, he had sailed the Clarmont up the Hudson River claimed by the newly founded United States of America, wrested from the sovereignty of the British just twenty years before. Fulton's voyage heralded the beginning of a new age for the New Nation, the age of the Industrial Revolution.

In 1969, August 14 to 16, another epic event nearby the shores of the Hudson River, the mega outdoor peace revival in the tradition of the camp revivals more than a hundred years before, took place. Hundreds of thousands of youth gravitated together in the quest for peace in a three day music fest. That event launched the voyage of a million ships, people throughout the world who had been awakened to the hope of peace in our time. That marked the beginning of another revolution in the USA, the Peace Revolution.


I lived during the Woodstock event in another place so today I see the ghosts of Woodstock rather than real memories. The ghosts who hoped for peace, yet sought that through unbridled license. During the time of Hudson, and the time of Fulton, Asia knew the kind of peace that the ghosts of Woodstock sought. They sought peace through the use of opium and courtesans. The peace of the Chinese aristocrats, sexual freedom and opium, had become the peace of American youth.

How in the world did we get peace and freedom confused with drugs and illicit sex? How in the world did we become so very confused? Why did so many of us cast away common decency in the name of freedom and love and peace? What set the conditions for that great delusion?

Peace had been in the air. Our parents' generation had been engaged in a life and death struggle with Fascism in Europe and Asia. They had no illusion about the way peace would come to the world. Peace would come through the barrel of a cannon and values worth living and dying for, not through the hashish water pipe and sexual abandon. After victory had been declared over the armies of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the world geared up for another war, a more subtle and difficult to understand war. The war for peoples' hearts, minds, and souls erupted in the life and death struggle between international communism and democratic capitalism.



Here came the rub, though. The sermon of communist preachers---that we are all brothers and that we should do away with greed, ownership of property, and live like saints, giving to others according to our ability and receiving according to our need---struck a cord with what the Woodstock generation knew to be true. What is, indeed, true. God implanted that desire in every person's heart!

Yet, although we believed in our hearts that message, something seemed wrong about the preacher. Like Elmer Gantry, preaching with a tongue of fire while living a life of selfish seduction, the communist preachers seemed to have another agenda. Rather than set us free from our chains, they desired to chain us. Rather than free the people from opium that befuddled us, they sought to befuddle us with opium. Rather than show us the way of love towards all people, they showed the way of infidelity and broken hearts. They offered a dream of peace, love, and freedom but gave us a nightmare of murder, death, and slavery.

Yet the dream still lives because the message is true, although the messenger was a false prophet. In our hearts we know that peace, love, and freedom are the highest ideals. Our hearts did not betray us, we betrayed our hearts. The ghosts of Woodstock would have us believe that drugs, free sex, and communism will set us free, will bring us peace, and will blossom love in our hearts. How very, very wrong they are. They gave us drug addiction, broken families, and lives of unbridled license.


Banish those ghosts! In their place, let the heavenly hosts enter triumphantly! They herald a peace, love, and freedom that comes through holiness, through living as the children of God. The Heavenly Hosts will usher us into another Revolution on the Hudson. They speak to our knowing hearts of love between all people of all religions, of all races, of all ages, of all nations. Not a love couched in drugs and illicit sex, but a love embracing the sanctity of families as well as the sacredness of the person. There we will find the cornerstone of peace, love, and freedom, not in the ghosts of Woodstock.