Declining the Fountain of Youth

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church--Unitarian Universalist

November 4, 2007 

      Human beings have yearned after immortality perhaps as long as we have understood that we die.

      The great Gilgamesh epic, which had such influence on Ancient Near Eastern religions, begins with the quest for a plant that will grant eternal life.  In Western culture we have had legends of the Fountain of Youth, which was part of the lure that brought conquistadores ravening into North and South America.  Alchemists in medieval times and many since then have sought the philosopher’s stone, which will transmute lead into gold and mortal into immortal.  It isn’t only Lord Voldemort who wants to live forever.  Many more ordinary and very real human beings have made the same quest.

   And in some very practical, non-mythic and non-magical quarters, the quest goes on today.  The whole thrust of modern medicine is the extension of life, by ending or delaying the conditions and assaults on our bodies that bring us to our deaths. 

      At the frontier—or the fringe, some say—of science and medicine is an English biogerontologist—that’s a student of the biology of human aging—named Aubrey de Grey, who has come to believe that it should be possible to “cure” aging and allow people to live for hundreds of years, perhaps forever barring accidents and natural disasters.  De Grey has grouped the causes of our physical decline and death through aging into seven kinds of changes that happen at the cellular level as we grow older.

      All of these changes should be repairable by new technologies using stem cells, gene therapies, cloning, and chemical treatments directly on cells.  Those technologies are under study right now and there is no reason, de Grey thinks, that they could not be sufficiently developed to begin having a direct impact on human aging within the next 25 to 50 years. 

      I won’t spend our time on the arguments for and against de Grey’s work from a scientific point of view.  It’s enough to say that he is being scoffed at and taken very seriously by equally serious members of the scientific community.  What he suggests isn’t impossible, though many believe it’s unlikely and some allies find his timetable is wildly optimistic.  What I find compelling, as we observe All Souls Day in the presence of these beloved ones we have missed so much, is whether it is a good thing.

      If the Fountain of Youth turns out to be true sometime in the future annals of science, would you want to drink from it?

      The appeal of immortality is obvious and enormously powerful to anyone who is in love with life.  Just imagine—never to let go of this beautiful world, to stay here and to stay active long enough to see the fruition of our dreams of peace and justice, liberty and equality for all humankind.  If the purpose of human life is to observe and understand the Universe, to savor its infinite well of experience and to discover and nurture the connections that make it all a coherent whole, how much more could we do if our time was unlimited?

      Imagine if our future was free of the constant knowledge of loss and sorrow, the ever-present awareness that what we love is mortal.  What new ways of being together might we find if we all lived unclouded by the fear of pain and loss, of grief and of the harsh realities that aging subjects our bodies and minds to now?

      Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

      Yet not everyone thinks so.  Even among those who believe an end to aging and death is scientifically possible, there are those who say it should not happen.

      De Grey and others who seek an end to aging argue that these are people caught up in a “pro-aging trance,” people who are so used to living with the shadow of decline and death that they are unwilling even to imagine something different

      As far as the anti-aging folks are concerned, any reluctance to give up the assumption that aging and death are inevitable is just short-sightedness—and worse: it’s a dogmatic willingness to condemn countless individuals, who might have lived on into a healthy and endless future, to a nightmare of physical and mental deterioration and an eventual and unnecessary death. 

      For myself, I would be delighted to see research that would ease the ills and infirmities of our later years, and allow us to spend a longer and longer span of days on this beautiful earth with our beloved companions, doing the work of compassion and justice.  There are many of us in this room today who might only be present as a picture on this table and a memory in someone’s heart if it hadn’t been for the work of scientific and medical explorers who were scoffed at when they claimed their work might add years to human lives.  But I do not see aging as a disease, nor do I see death as an enemy.

      For me, the key question that must be answered in the quest for extended life is: What is the purpose of that life?  Are we, as human individuals, the meaning and purpose of human existence?  Or are we part of something larger, individual manifestations of a life that is common to all, shared with those alive today and with those yet to be born?

      The biogerontologists who see aging as a disease and death as an enemy are unambivalent: The purpose of human life is individual self-fulfillment.  Each of us is meant to live as long and happily as we wish, they say; any denial of that is a violation of human rights.  They don’t seem to think humankind has a place in a larger evolutionary scheme. 

      I think that every individual life has worth, and at the same time I think we are coming increasingly to understand that life and rights are not purely individual.  Even as we recognize that the human experience is lived within an individual body and lifetime, with a single consciousness and a single set of sensory experiences, we are realizing that there are connections between us, at the cellular level and in ways that we have not yet fully understood.  We do not live alone, and our lives are not exclusively our own. 

      As I’ve come to understand and appreciate the evolutionary story of the Universe, I begin to imagine our human species with an extraordinary and unique place in that story:  We are the storytellers; we are the intersection of the energy of consciousness, the physical energies that sustain all life, and the material substance of the stars and planets.  Through us, the Universe remembers its own beginnings and witnesses its own unfolding.  We are not separate from the evolution that affects all other creatures, all matter and energy.  Humankind is evolving as well, as a species, and our evolution depends in part of some of us passing away and passing along our genetic material to the next generations which will shape it and be shaped by it in ways we cannot anticipate. 

      The other great assumption I find in the work of those who would end aging and death is that there is nothing after death as important as what happens before it.  Human religions that do claim some kind of after-life, in this view, have been part of the pro-aging trance; they have provided ways to alleviate our fear of the great nothingness which awaits us after age has its terrible way with our bodies and minds.

      For some, no doubt this has been the attraction of religions that promise eternal life after death.  If the promise is understood literally, it can lead to the expectation that we’ll continue the mortal life we’ve left, but without suffering pain, or sickness, or death.  Of course that isn’t the real theology of life after death in those religions.  In Christianity, in Islam, and in those small sects of Judaism that concern themselves with life after death, it’s our ability to experience the Presence of God in that eternal afterlife that is the true hope, but for many in the rank-and-file I expect it’s more likely the presence of beloved ones like these we acknowledged today that is more compelling.

      Think of these loved ones whose pictures are before us here, and all those we’ve called to mind today.  How many of us wouldn’t wish for one more day, one more hour, let alone an eternity without pain or fear or suffering in their presence?  When religion speaks to that longing and is interpreted as a promise never to be parted again, it is all too easy to slip the bounds of evidence and “let imagination rule our hope,” as the poet Wendell Berry says.  If it’s even possible that “the dead may dance to the fiddle in the hereafter, for all anyone knows,” as his poem “Testament” concludes, who wouldn’t want to hear that music and see those laughing spirited faces once again?

      This brings us to one of those bottom-line questions that Unitarian Universalists love to hedge on:  Is there something after death or not?  Our faith focuses us on this life and this world, but if we come to the point of deciding whether or not immortality in this world is a good idea, the issue is absolutely forced.  If there’s nothing after death, why should we go through it?  If there’s something, how could we possibly want to miss it?

      Unitarian Universalism has no official teaching on life after death.  But here’s what I believe:  I believe we go on.  We already know that the physical part of us dissolves with our death, and becomes part of the ongoing matter and life of our planet.  We are food for organisms that live because we die.  We are minerals and elements that combine with others to make new forms of matter, and to be part of new lives.

      Why should the energy of our animation and consciousness be any different?  It seems most likely to me that the elements of our identities and lives break up in the same way as the elements of our bodies, and recombine with the rest of the conscious and living Universe to become part of new lives, new memories, new imaginations.  How does this happen?  I don’t know, but we may find out some day.   What we do know is that lives are changed because we lived, and because we died.  We go on in forms that we would never have found if we did not die.  These late loved ones are my witnesses:  We are different because they lived.  We are different because they died.  They have gone on—in ways they would not have, if they were still living among as once they were.

      I don’t believe literally in any of the symbolic afterlives the world’s mythic systems have proposed. But I think they are all attempts to explain something very hard to articulate and understand.  I don’t believe our death is just a passive ceasing to be.  And I’m not willing to pass mine up.

      So speaking just for me, I would decline the Fountain of Youth.  I want to know what’s beyond the threshold in that unknown common destiny David Eaton speaks of.  I want to be found in the rushing of the wind, in the rattle of leaves on an autumn tree, in the bright eyes of a rabbit crossing a hilltop.  I want to become part of whatever shape the human species takes in the ages to come, in some part because I was here—and because I’m gone.

      On the other hand, if the elixir from the Fountain can give me a few extra decades or a century or so of healthy delight in this wonderful place before I go on to the next phase—pass the cup.