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As I get older, I have been falling into one cliché after another. Downloaded the Merlin Bird ID app so that I can identify the birds singing in my backyard? Check. Complained about how tiny restaurant menu text is and cursed the dark lighting? Check. Started saving and liking all the cruise TikToks that have crossed my For You Page? You bet!
And this weekend, I logged into the Zoom session of my local Universalist Unitarian church.
But let’s rewind a little bit to get more context for my sudden spiritual conversion and interest in the afterlife as I have gotten older. I have never been a churchgoer. I inherited this from my parents. My father was a baptized Catholic, but his mother fell away from the church after they insisted that she shouldn’t buy him alcohol. My feisty grandmother wasn’t about to let them tell her what to do. He was a grown man (though not yet 21), and he was in the US Marines. Who were they to tell a man willing to give his life up for his country what to do?
My mother has always been fairly agnostic. And when she moved halfway across the world and struggled to assimilate into American culture, she looked inward rather than outward to keep her family afloat. She was so unaccustomed to the spiritual culture of the US that she blithely sent us to a Pentecostal church because they offered us free bus rides and snacks.
The Pentecostal teachings never stuck with me, though my sister loved the toys they gave during service, and I went on with the rest of my life not really tied to any religion. If I ever gave a thought to my soul, it was usually when I heard a particularly uplifting piece of classical music or when I was walking slowly through softly whispering woods. But, generally, my soul, if there was such a thing, was invisible to me.
After my sister died, though, I had a deep and painful ache. Something was hurting inside of me day after day. On a daily basis and at the most inopportune moments, a lump would form in my belly and then bloom and rise to my throat to finally burst out of my mouth as heaving sobs. Was it my soul? Was that what was hurting me so badly, even though my body was perfectly healthy? I felt the pain and the grief, not just in my mind, but in my body as well.
That was the first time that I went to the UU church in my neighborhood. And when I went, it was a revelation to me. The pastor, a woman, was brilliant. She shared insights from great literature, from scientists, and from the beauty of music, and she showed us how these insights could shape our resilience, our sense of community and compassion for those suffering around us (or even for our own suffering selves). This was a liberal, noncreedal service that actually seemed applicable to the chaos swirling in the world around me.
Of course, as my husband and I struggled to move up separate corporate ladders, to raise our child, and to take care of our aging parents, my will to go to church fell by the wayside.
And now, I feel like I have encountered yet another life milestone. It has been almost two years since I was laid off. My body is older, and I feel all of the aches and pains of age. Most days, I just wished that I could feel 100 percent healthy, free from anxiety and pain and knowing that that day becomes further and further away as I get older. That sense of mortality, that feel of my body’s actual molecules aging and changing has pushed me to think about spirituality again.
Yes, it is a cliché, but I have begun to wonder what the end of life will mean for me. Is it a dull and limp nothingness that will greet me at the end? The atoms that make up our bodies don’t disappear when we die; does that mean that some piece of me will still exist after I die? Some piece of my “soul” will still be floating around and become part of something or someone else, right?
It might seem morbid to think about death, but I think all people think about this as we get older. Dr. Laurie Santos of the “Happiness Lab” podcast used a recent episode to discuss how thinking “about our finite lives can make us better, happier people.” I think that this is true. Thinking about what will happen to me after I die has pushed me to find community, compassion, empathy, and joy in the now.
So, for me, this cliché of investigating the spiritual world as I get older is one that I will happily embrace.
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