All life comes to an end. Even mine. Even yours. The END is something most of us don’t like to talk about it. Maybe I am taking a chance in hoping that our zoom meeting on this END/BEGINNING theme will be uplifting. Our fears, anxieties, I hope will be lightened by sharing our guarded, hidden thoughts with others. Then again, you can keep your thoughts private by sharing thoughts you have heard from anonymous friends or from poetry or other literature.
Again, in my role of moderator, I will aim to give everyone an equal chance to talk. So please don’t be hurt if I cut you short. I just want to spread out the sharing chances to all. Especially to our more reserved participants.
Questions
1. What is the one most important unanswered question you have about life?
2. Why is life’s end a subject most of us seem reluctant to discuss?
3. Is it better to avoid talking about the subject? Any plusses in freely talking about it?
4. Should parents talk with their young children about life’s end? Should we embrace the chance to talk about this subject with those who seem close to life’s final gate?
5. What do you, a friend, a famous person or a work of literature say about life’s end? Does it lead to a new beginning? Should we even discuss it, or if we choose to, with only our closest friends and family?
6. Can a religious congregation that seldom brings up the topic of life’s end be a source of spiritual strength when faced with the inevitable?
7. What was your first exposure to the end of a human life? How did you react? Might you have been better prepared?
8. Would we be better off if life never ended?
9. How, if at all, has your attitude toward the end of life changed? What caused this change?
10. Should everyone have the right to choose her/his own ending?
11. What value, if any, is there in talking about life’s end to your friends, relatives?
12. Are people with traditional religious views better equipped to face the end of life than those who are atheists? Agnostics? Unitarian Universalists?
Quotes
Feel free to comment on these quotes. To view the source, just click on the underlined link before each quote.
“Most Unitarian Universalists believe that this is the only life we get.”
2. Unitarian Universalist Association
Unitarian Universalist views about life after death are informed by both science and spiritual traditions. Many of us live with the assumption that life does not continue after death, and many of us hold it as an open question, wondering if our minds will have any awareness when we are no longer living. Few of us believe in divine judgment after death. It’s in our religious DNA: the Universalist side of our tradition broke with mainstream Christianity by rejecting the idea of eternal damnation.
The state of death is one of two things: either the dead man wholly ceases to be, and loses all sensation; or according to the common belief, it is a change and a migration of the soul to another place... But now the time has come, and we must go hence; I to die, and you to live. Whether life or death is better is known to God, and to God only. — Plato
3b. Also from From the UUA.org website
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. — Mark Twain
4. From the First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto
Q. What is a Unitarian
Universalist?
A. Someone who believes in life before death.
A. Someone who faces all questions with an open mouth.
5. Goodreads
I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seeds every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree’s way of being. Strongly rooted, perhaps, but spilling out treasures on the wind. – May Sarton, poet