As far as we know MAN is the only animal who is aware of his own mortality. We all know that someday we’ll die. Our job in life is to come to terms with death. Even if you don’t believe that every individual has an immortal soul and that this soul survives after death, no man is indifferent to life. Most of us hope to leave something of our self behind when we die.

In fact, mankind is defined by this belief that life goes on in one form or another. We judge the Neanderthals to be our distant cousin because the Neanderthals buried their dead with various artifacts, artifacts anthropologists tell us indicate a belief in an afterlife.

We have children to perpetuate life. We build our buildings to outlast us. We put our words down on paper or record them electronically so they will be around when we are not. In the act of living we commit ourselves to a future we will not see because we believe in life.

Just as personal death is frightening so is death on a larger scale: the death of a family line, the death of a tribe or a nation. The suicide bomber is committed to life even as he blows himself up. The act is a way of perpetuating the life of his culture or his people. Paradise is a plus, but it is the living family or tribe or nation that drives the act.

In one sense life for most of us has never been better. Despite the horror stores coming from places like Iraq and other war torn parts of the world, modern technology is improving the lives of billions of people around the globe, but for every advancement, there is a price.

There’s little doubt the planet is heating up and modern technology is the culprit. Antibiotics save millions of lives, but they are finding their way into the environment and causing hormonal changes in living creatures. Man’s success as a taxonomic group is putting pressure on the rest of life on the planet, and many nonhuman species are beginning to disappear. Biologists believe the loss is anywhere between 10 to 100 times the background rate. They tell us we are facing a time of mass extinction. Life on planet Earth is in jeopardy

Something else is happening. People are becoming depressed. Recent studies indicate that at some point in our life; about a quarter of us experience serious depression. What’s more, this condition is growing

Another phenomenon seems to be growing: religious fundamentalism. In his book on the Christian Right Chris Hedges calls fundamentalism a theology of despair. He believes fundamentalists have given up on life and think of death as a doorway to a better world.

Maybe the Christian Right has a different interpretation, but I’ve talked to a number of these true believes, and more than one of them has try to sell his theology as a form of life insurance.

Believe, they tell me, because if it’s not true you have lost nothing, but if it is true you have gained eternal life. There is a problem with this. There is absolutely no evidence for this eternal life – not in the traditional Biblical sense– while there is ample evidence for the veracities of this life on earth.

I see another factor at work, and it underlies everything I have to say today. It’s man’s propensity to deny what he is not equipped to face. Let’s not be too quick to judge. Denial arises out of need. Sometimes it the only thing that keeps a person going, but it comes at a price. I believe denial can cause depression because people aren’t as unaware as they seem.

In other words, on some level people know the truth. This was pointed out to me by a friend who spent years dealing with denial in a clinical setting, but I had a much more benign example of denial with my grand daughter.

As a small child Anna was fiercely devoted to a stuffed dragon she called Scorch. She talked to Scorch constantly and dragged him around with her everywhere she went. Consequently Scorch was often lost behind a sofa cushion or under a pile of toys. When Anna realized Scorch was gone, everything else came to a stand still. Meals, nap times, a trip in the car…. nothing could take place until Scorch was found.

But one evening bedtime came around, and Scorch could not be found. I was faced with a child in tears and a household in crisis. When it appeared that we weren’t going to find Scorch that night, I tried to comfort the distraught child as best I could. “Anna,” I said. “Scorch is a dragon, and dragons fly. Scorch sometimes gets lonely for other dragons and goes looking for them. It’s summer and the windows are open. I think Scorch has gone out to look for a dragon friend to play with. He will come back when he is ready. I promise.” Whereupon Anna put her hand on her hip, looked at me in profound disgust and said, “Grandma, Scorch isn’t real.”

You see the child knows the stuffed doll or imaginary friend isn’t real, but they cling to them just the same. It is one small part of life that they can control, and it provides a degree of security in a big and frightening world. The child will let go when he is ready, and not before.

he plain fact is life as we are living it today is unsustainable. We know it, but we aren’t equipped to deal with it. We are in denial. Man may face his own death with equanimity. Individuals can face even greater loss, the death of their children or the defeat of their nation, but facing the possible extinction of everything around them is different. Greed, man’s inhumanity to man, his aggressive nature: These things have been around since the beginning and still mankind has prevailed because the life force remained strong.

Now, however, that life force appears to have turned toxic. The age-old problem of mortality has reached a new dimension. How do we face an unsustainable culture realistically and still retain our enthusiasm for life itself? How do we accept, not just our own mortality but the mortality of an unsustainable society, and not become disillusioned and depressed?

We could argue about this. Yes, we’re running out of fossil fuel, but we will find some other source of energy. Yes, the earth is warming up and some areas of the world may become uninhabitable, but we will find other places to grow our food and build our cities. Yes, species are disappearing, but others will evolve to take their place. All this is possible, but it will take time…time we may not have.

Nevertheless, the geologic record tells us that after every mass extinction life rebounded and reached even greater heights than before. Dinosaurs dominated the earth for over 150 million years, but only when the giant reptiles became extinct did the mammalian line begin its ascendancy. Until then the necessary environmental niche was occupied. In a sense Mankind owes his existence to a meteor or what ever it was that changed the environment and wiped out the great lizards.

Today we face environmental change of our own making. Everything else is changing as well, and at an ever-increasing rate. Morals are changing. Family life is changing. Technology is advancing geometrically and threatens to outdistance man’s ability to control it. People are frightened and trying to hold on to the past.

But resisting change is taxing. Resisting technological change is nigh impossible. Resisting political change is also out of most people’s hands, so the fundamentalist focuses on resisting social change. A rise in conservativism and religious fundamentalism is to be expected. Fundamentalism deals in absolutes, and absolutes insolate the individual from change.

But what of those of us who are not fundamentalists? One doesn’t have to retreat into religion to be in denial. One simply says as Scarlet O’Hara did in Gone With The Wind, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” But tomorrow comes and goes, and we wonder why we are depressed.

So what is the answer? If we life in a world that cannot continue as it is now and population that can’t or won’t change its life style, if we live in a world that is not united and consists of individuals willing to kill rather than compromise, if we don’t believe in a supernatural god who will protect us against our own folly, how do we get out of bed in the morning?

This is when it gets personal. I’ve asked my self these questions for years. I’ve been an activist, gone on peace marches, attended workshops, written innumerable letters to Washington and to the papers, and in the end I wonder if it has made any difference at all. I’ve taken courses in theology, studied meditation, and gone for long walks in the woods and still don’t have all the answers to life’s questions, but I do have faith in life itself.

And life in all its manifestations is beautiful. No matter how many awful things we see, no matter how difficult and even painful life can be, there is a grandeur and a beauty that give meaning to existence and even to death.

There is a passage in Hindu scripture, in the Bhagavad-Gita, where Arjuna says, “God you are everywhere and always perfect.” I repeat this daily, and I still struggle with it, but when I seek beauty in everything and when I try to accept life in all its forms and manifestations, my life is richer. The sky is bluer. The rain is sweeter, music more magnificent.

Let me give you some examples of what I mean. The first is from a work of fiction, but it is fiction that has delighted and inspired quite a few people including Bob Prim, pastor of Nacoochee Presbyterian Church, who quoted it in one of his sermons. It is from THE LIFE OF PI by Yann Martel, a story about an Asian boy cast adrift in the Pacific with a tiger he calls Richard Parker. The boy and the animal have survived for weeks only to be engulfed by a terrible storm. Lightening is everywhere. The sea roils. The noise is deafening.

The animal is lying flat on the floor of the lifeboat, limbs splayed and visibly trembling, but the boy finds himself in a state of exalted wonder. He is dazed, thunderstruck, —nearly in the true sense of the word, ”But” the boy insists, “not afraid.” He calls on God using the opening lines of the Koran: “Praise be to Allah, Lord of All Worlds, the Compassionate, the Merciful, Ruler on the Day of Reckoning.” To the tiger he says, “Stop your trembling! This is a miracle. This is an outbreak of divinity.”

The boy has seen horrors. The sinking of his ship, the loss of his family, entrapment in a cramped space with a wild animal, days and days of thirst and starvation; but overtaken by the power of the storm he is caught up in its majesty and it transcends his fear.

That’s still fiction, but an incident recounted by Alan Watts concerning a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp was presented as fact and has stayed with me for years. Alan Watts was a philosopher, a student of Eastern religion, and author of many essays. In one of them he wrote about a man who like Pi had experienced the loss of everything. The man sees death and despair all around him, but as all his efforts to seek meaning and redemption in his situation fail, he reaches a point of acceptance. Only then, he said, does he realize that he is now absolutely free, and like Pi, he passes beyond fear and regret.

I heard this story years ago on an audiotape. I didn’t understand it then and I’m not sure I do now, but the message behind the story keep appearing over and over again. I believe it’s the message in the Book of Job. Ultimately we have no choice but to surrender and accept our fate, but in doing so it is possible to pass beyond suffering and even death because of the magnificence of life itself.

Finally I want recommend to you an author who inspires in me this faith in life, a writer whose vision for Man transcends both time and space. When I was a child my father used to entertain me with a science fiction story he remembered from his youth. It was a wonderful tale of humanity’s journey into the future. The book was written in the 1920’s. It predicted the conflict between east and west, between Russia and the United States. It predicted the development of atomic energy and finally the destruction of world civilization when science loses control of the power it has created.

Mankind reverts to an almost subhuman state, but in time Man repopulates the earth and goes on to develop an even more powerful technology and a greater civilization. However, that civilization too is destroyed by human frailty. The cycle repeats itself over and over again. Eventually man’s descendants immigrate to other planets in the solar system and finally reach out for the stars.

I wanted desperately to read this book for myself, but unfortunately my father couldn’t remember either the correct title of the book or the name of it’s author so I searched in vain. Years later stumbled upon it by accident. The author was Olaf Stapledon, a British philosopher of some renowned in the early part of the last century.

Stapledon was best known, however, for his science fiction, stories that might more correctly be called prophecy. He was well received in his day and counted among his friends people like H.G. Wells, J.B.S. Haldane, and Arthur Koestler. Stapledon called himself a pious agnostic, but he wrote quite eloquently about spiritual matters. In Thoughts on the Modern Spirit, written in the late 1920’s Stapledon talks about the despair he saw around him as educated individuals realized that not only are they mortal, but ultimately mankind may be as well.

However, Stapledon is no prophet of doom. He realizes that Man is but a speck in a vast universe, but he believes that man has the ability to continually recreate himself and he believes that mankind may one day reach out to the stars.

Stapledon suggests that universe itself is alive, and in one of his essays he presents this truly glorious image: Perhaps, he says, the living universe expresses its unconscious nature as a plant does, but with minds for flowers. We are those minds and are as eternal as the flowers that bloom and die and bloom again.

If you are interested in Stapledon, I suggest you look Olaf Stapledon up on the Internet. You might also try to find THE OLAF STAPLEDON READER and sample a cross section of his writing.

Maybe it was sitting at the dinning room table and listening to my father talk about THE LAST AND FIRST MAN (Stapledon’s story about Man and his descendents), maybe it was reading Isaac Asimov and the other sci-fi writers of the 40’s and 50’s, maybe it was watching the first man walk on the moon back in December of 1969, but I believe Man destiny IS the stars. Not as he is now of course, but we are still evolving, and in this we can find hope. In this, and in magnificence and glory of life itself.

We live in an exciting time. Look back. See how far we have come. It has not been in vain, but we can’t stand here tittering on the edge. We have to step out into the unknown. It’s frightening, but we have no choice. What ever our fate, we are fortunate to be who we are and to be living here now, in this time and in this place.