The next morning, after breakfast, Richard worked on his essay about Dylan Thomas. His feelings about the poem were different now. He was beginning to wonder whether Dylan Thomas hadn’t been giving his father some very bad advice.
He didn’t know what was supposed to happen to a person, but he was now pretty sure what wasn’t supposed to happen. One wasn’t supposed to become a hateful, snarling ghost, and perhaps that intensity of attachment to the things of this life were what caused it. But he didn’t know for sure.
On the other hand, he thought that accepting death, like they did in the Fellowship of the Daylight Moon, was just as wrong as fighting it tooth and nail. Death was wrong, but fighting it, clinging to life, was likely wrong too. Then what was right?
He put some of these thoughts into the essay. Finally he finished, then set off to pick up Julie. Julie was waiting in her dorm lobby. She was wearing a lightcolored dress that fell just below her knee. It followed her figure and left her arms mostly bare.
Richard was pleased and impressed. “You look, well….” He had been about to compliment her on her appearance but he wasn’t sure how she would take it.
“Well what?” said Julie, who was used to this and had developed methods to deal with it.
“Well, uh, great! You look beautiful!” blurted Richard.
Julie smiled. They walked out into the clear morning. The weather was a precursor of spring. The sun shone. There was a light breeze. Richard felt that Julie was like the beauty of the world made manifest. “You’re like the goddess of spring, floating on the wind,” he said to her.
“Gosh, once you get going you’re pretty good!” she said, laughing. “But I’ve floated in a little too early,” she continued. “I’m still cold.”
Richard took the cue and put his arm around her. “Did you sleep OK last night?”
“I slept fine. I was really tired after you left and fell asleep almost as soon as I went to bed. How about you?”
“Oh, I was pretty excited. I thought for a long time before falling asleep.”
Just then Laurie walked up. “Julie, you look wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Hello, Richard, nice to see you.”
“You too, Laurie. Thanks for inviting us. You look great.” It was easier to say something like that after he had just said it to someone else. Richard knew Laurie from high school and felt that she was one of the nice people, though she didn’t really stand out in his mind in any other way.
“Thanks, Richard,” she said.
“Well, we’re all here,” said Julie, after giving Laurie a quick hug.
“Let’s go, then,” said Laurie.
They walked over to a large church that for some reason reminded Richard of a MacDonald’s restaurant, perhaps because of all the glass windows. It held a large number of people, perhaps 500 or more.
The organ was playing a Bach prelude. It was a large organ, a real pipe-organ, and it filled the building with its sound. Richard suddenly felt that the music had some of the harmonic wildness of the Chinese music they had heard the other night, but at the same time it was held together by the unity of the composer’s conception. It was a kind of freedom that did not tear things into pieces.
They sang some hymns. Richard had never sung a hymn before and so didn’t have any bad feelings about them. He found the words in one hymn interesting—”But though despised and gory, I joy to call you mine.” It made him think that church wasn’t just warm and fuzzy sweetness and light. Maybe there was something deep here—something to do with life and death. This was good—it would give him another perspective on the questions that had been forced upon him by recent events.
The sermon began. The speaker spoke without notes, slowly and clearly, looking directly at the audience.
“This is a special season for Christians,” he began. “During this time we recall the death and resurrection of Christ. We remember that he overcame death not only for himself but for those who are bound to him by personal trust in him and what he has done. His death identified him with humanity in its bondage to death. His resurrection introduced—I should say, re-introduced— the power of an immortal life into dead human nature.
“For the bible speaks of death as the ‘last enemy,’ but in another sense it is the first. It is the great leveler, reducing all our deeds to nothing. It is a specter that haunts our future, waiting patiently for its inevitable moment of triumph.
“Yet we know that death’s triumph is somehow illegitimate, that it is not a mere natural end to life, but a travesty, even an obscenity. We ‘do not go gentle into that good night’ because in our hearts we know that it is not a good, but rather an evil, night. We were not meant for death but for life. We were not meant for oblivion but for eternity.”
Richard chuckled, childishly proud of himself for recognizing the Dylan Thomas quotation. He also chalked up another point against the Fellowship of the Daylight Moon.
“But what is the tragedy of death? It is the end of knowing, of relationship. The consolation that many take from faith in Christ, and it is a valid consolation, is that ‘we will meet one another in the air’. That which was lost shall be regained. Love shall continue.”
Richard thought about the ghost again. He now believed that hatred, at least, did continue. Here was the claim that the same was true for love.
“Perhaps more than anything else, love tells us that we were meant for eternity. The language of love is the language of eternity. Just listen to love songs, at least those of my time. ‘I’ll be loving you eternally,’ they say. ‘Forever,’ they claim.”
This rings true, Richard thought. What he felt for Julie, it seemed inconceivable that it could end.
“The love songs, though, speak falsely, not because they are intentionally mendacious, but because they are ‘weakened by the flesh’, as it were. We die, and before we die, we are dying. Some of us are already dead long before we die—we can no longer look outside ourselves enough to love. On the other hand, some of us die daily to ourselves and so become alive to God, and to one another.”
Huh? thought Richard. He was totally lost. He was willing to bet the speaker could not have repeated that statement again if his life depended on it.
“We are told that ‘the sting of death is sin.’ Sin in its most essential form is simply failure of relationship, failure of love. We don’t love God and we don’t love each other. It is this sin, this failure, that alienates us from life. For God is our source of life, our eternity, and alienated from him we find only death. And because of that, we find death also in our relationships with one another.”
So sin is lack of love, thought Richard. Funny, he’d always thought it had something to do with sex.
“For relationships die before we do. We hurt one another. We murder, both physically and emotionally. We hate and destroy. And most of all, we cut ourselves off from one another, and from God. We refuse life: how can we avoid dying?”
That made sense, thought Richard, if it was true. But he didn’t recall cutting himself off from God. On the other hand, he hadn’t paid much attention to God, either.
“But if we die because we are alienated from life, we live when we are reconciled to life. And that is simply the meaning of Christian salvation. The bible tells us that God was reconciling us to himself through Christ. Christ’s death was God’s appeal to us to be reconciled—I would die to be with you, says God. And he proved it in the most practical way—by dying.
“In his death he became like us, became one with humanity. He died with us. But then he rose from the dead, and not just for himself. When he rose from the grave he took us with him. Or to put it another way, he re-introduced the divine, eternal life into the human condition.
“Eternal life is not just something that happens after we die. It begins the moment we are reconciled to God. If it hasn’t yet begun for you, it can begin this very moment. You, right now, can enter into eternal life. This is the meaning of this time for Christians, and this is my prayer for each of you.”
With that the speaker ended his sermon. “Brief and to the point,” thought Richard. “And interesting.”
A short time later the service ended. The three of them sat there, among with a number of others, listening to the organ postlude and a few encores. Richard looked over at the two girls. “How about lunch?” he asked. “My treat.”
They looked at each other. “Sure,” said Laurie. Julie nodded. They started walking down Telegraph Avenue looking for a place to eat.
“What did you think of the service?” asked Laurie. “Well, now I’ve got four views of death to think about,” said Richard. ” ‘Daylight moon’, ‘don’t go gentle’, ‘the ghost’ and church. Actually I thought it was pretty good—the music was great and the speaker was interesting.”
Laurie looked at him, nonplussed. Julie said, “Come on, Richard, don’t be so mysterious. Laurie, he really liked it. When we went to the Fellowship of the Daylight Moon on Friday he could barely hide his disgust. This reaction is a lot better.”
“How about you?” asked Laurie.
“It’s a lot to think about. It’s hard to accept. I know what he meant about death being the enemy and a leveler and a travesty. But he took such a negative view of humanity—’dead human nature’ and all. What did that mean?”
Laurie laughed nervously. “There’s something called depravity. It means that we’re all alienated by nature from God. Not only that, we can’t do anything about it. We can’t get to God from where we are.”
“But isn’t that pessimistic?” asked Julie. “I know lots of nice people. How can they all be so hopeless?”
“I think I know what Laurie’s talking about,” Richard broke in. “Imagine someone with cancer. He might be in great shape, have a great heart and liver, and so on, but the cancer will still kill him.”
“Hey Richard, that’s a pretty good metaphor,” said Julie.
“Thanks. I think I’m catching on to this literary stuff. I even got the literary allusion in the sermon!”
“Which one?” asked Julie. “Albert Camus, Dylan Thomas, or Tony Bennet?”
“Hey, that’s mean,” said Richard.
Laurie shook her head and sighed. Julie looked at her. She sensed that Laurie was starting to feel left out. She elbowed Richard surreptitiously. Richard nodded slightly.
“That organist was really good,” he said. “The sound is so powerful. I really like Bach. He has some wild harmonies and progressions but he holds them all together.”
“Yes, Bach is amazing, isn’t he,” replied Laurie. “I love the way the organist stays around after a while to play. She’s a music student at Berkeley.”
Julie looked at Laurie. “You know, that was a lot better than I expected. Thanks for inviting me.”