Learning To Die — Embracing The Fullness Of Life

This is the Sunday talk by Josh Reeves at Mile Hi Church on September 7, 2025. Life and death are two realities that constantly fill our own existence. To reduce death to the process of dying is like reducing life to being born. Explore what spiritual teachers have taught about life and death.

Transcript

Rainer Maria Rilke at the beginning of the 20th century wrote a letter to a young poet about the importance of living in the question.

That in spiritual living it is so important that we don't rush to the answer but that we're willing to live in the question.

Rilke shares,

Have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like closed rooms,

Like books written in a foreign language.

Don't try to find the answers now.

They cannot be given anyway because you would not be able to live them,

For everything is to be lived.

Live the questions now.

Perhaps you then may gradually,

Without noticing one day in the future,

Live into the answers.

Joseph Campbell said,

Life is not a problem to be solved,

It is a mystery to be lived.

And it's one of my favorite things about the spiritual teaching called religious science.

We're not here to give you superficial answers to life's most meaningful and authentic questions.

We are here to provide the tools for our individual journey so that we can live in to those answers.

We do not have a doctrine,

We have principles and virtues.

And each of us gets to live the great questions in our own way with trust and faith that life has wisdom and magic in it to provide us the answers.

Do you believe that?

Powerful,

Powerful.

Two of the biggest questions that we ask I want to address today.

The first question is what does it mean to fully live?

What does it mean to fully live in this life,

To know what it's like to love truly and be loved profoundly?

What does it mean to take this pea-sized little bit of awareness and expand and evolve it to be a volleyball-sized level of awareness?

What does it mean to live with a full heart even in the midst of a broken heart?

What does it mean to be brave and become that which we were made to be?

What does it mean to fully live?

And the second question,

What does it mean to fully die?

For death is an essential aspect of life.

What does it mean to become conscious of this human form to the degree that I'm ready to let it go?

What does it mean to say goodbye to this life as we know it so that it may become what it could be?

What does it mean to recognize that this thing called the other side is not something unfamiliar to me,

But perhaps there's a part of me there already that we call our soul or our spirit that seeks to be known and to help us realize in this life a little glimpse of what eternal life may be.

My answer to these questions to share with you today is the heck if I know,

But can we be spiritually courageous to live in the questions together,

To put aside limited feeble understandings of what could be and open up to the glory of what may be.

An essential spiritual teacher of mine,

Especially in my early years,

10 to 13 years old,

Was Matt Groening,

Who would go on to become a millionaire because he created The Simpsons,

But he was the artist and author of my favorite comic strip called Life in Hell.

And one of my favorite strips involves this question of what are your plans for the afterlife?

You may have to release your inner ten-year-old to enjoy these,

Okay?

Plan to attend seances and make Ouija boards spell out gibberish.

Hope to catch up on back issues of The New Yorker.

We'll spend eternity in limbo learning how to limbo.

Big party in hell,

Be there or be square.

I was like there's another comic strip where it's famous last words and it's see you in hell.

I always liked that one too.

Next,

Hope to elude my ex-husbands.

Intend to return as a poltergeist who specializes in hiding TV remote controls.

Plan to go on a strict diet.

I mean it this time.

Hope to jam with Hendricks.

And last but not least,

My tomb or yours.

Late 80s humor.

My dad died last year and not only was that a difficult experience to walk through,

But part of that process was walking my inner child through his greatest fear.

Losing my dad was walking my inner child through his greatest fear.

When I first heard the concept of death,

I have a feeling I looked at my father who represented to me something invincible and eternal,

Was God-like to me.

And I had to accept that one day he will die.

And I think from that moment forward the fact of his death hung around him like an aura.

I always knew it was there and I was always so afraid of losing him.

Psychologist Julia Samuel said we tend to think that grief begins with death,

But really grief begins the moment we sense something precious slipping away.

Grief begins with love.

Two sides of the same thing.

Learning to live,

Learning to die.

Loss and grief and incredible gratitude and love and blessings.

We are wise enough people to walk in both and realize they are not separate,

But they go together.

The gift of my dad's passing is a return to a most primal love.

Daddy.

I haven't called my dad daddy in 40 years.

He's daddy now.

And the gift is realizing as much as the fact of his death was always present in his existence like a principle,

So even in his passing is the presence of his life.

The fact of his life is just as present.

What gets in the way?

My limited understanding.

My own reservations about confronting death,

Thinking about it,

Considering it.

My own resistance.

When if I can just overcome that,

That love of my father,

Even though I have to learn to have a relationship with him in new ways,

Is as present,

If not more so,

Than ever.

I love my dad more than ever before.

I am so sad,

But so grateful.

Learning to live,

Learning to die.

The great spiritual teachers tend not to tell us what death is,

But they tell us something about how to face it,

How to confront it.

I think of Socrates,

The wisest of all men.

Now I've known women in my own lifetime to be wiser than Socrates,

But he's the wisest of all men.

And he's put on trial for corrupting the youth,

For asking people too many questions,

For being a pain in the butt,

For questioning the existence of the gods.

All of this would come to be called philosophy.

And no one wants Socrates to die,

But they threaten him with execution.

He's so damn annoying.

But Socrates,

He'd agree with the great Aldous Dumbledore,

Headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,

Who said that to the well-organized mind,

Death is but the next great adventure.

Socrates thinks to himself,

I've lived a great life.

I'm ready to explore this thing called death.

And so he almost forces the jury into sentencing him to death by drinking the hemlock.

And he shares as he's leaving the trial,

People talk about death like it is the greatest curse.

But how do they know it's not the greatest blessing?

In jail,

Surrounded by his disciples,

His students,

Before he's carried off to death,

He shares with them his last words,

And so I go to die,

And you go on to live.

But which of us is on to better things?

Nobody knows.

I'm trying to give a spunky talk about death today.

How am I doing?

Maybe we should try to bring some energy,

Some life to it.

But for those of us,

Myself included,

Who fear death,

There's a consequence in that.

It begins to feel alien to us.

My fear of death has to do with that little control freak part of myself that likes to be in charge of things,

That is a little afraid of stepping into the unknown.

If you have a fear or a disconnection from death,

What is it for you?

For some of us,

It's not the death part,

It's the dying.

We don't want anything to do with.

For a lot of us,

It's not the death,

It's the leaving.

It's the saying goodbye and being told goodbye as well.

I was in a hospital room with a dear congregant who was near making her transition,

And her daughter was there.

And her daughter said,

Mom,

Mom,

This person could not speak.

Mom,

Mom,

Are you afraid to die?

No,

No.

She shook her head.

Is it okay for me to go home now?

No,

No.

Her fear was being alone.

Learning to live is learning to die.

Learning to die is learning to live.

Not saying you have to be happy about it.

But just as life is familiar to us,

We should do our work to be just as familiar with this thing called transitioning,

Changing.

And perhaps when we embrace it,

We live a better life,

A clearer life,

A more profound life.

John Muir,

The great naturalist,

Said,

On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death.

Let children walk with nature.

Let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life,

Their joyous,

Inseparable unity,

As taught in woods and meadows,

Plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star.

And they will learn that death is stingless indeed,

And as beautiful as life,

And that the grave has no victory,

For it never fights.

When I talk about Jesus from this stage,

It's almost always from the position that the story about Jesus to me is not as profound as what he taught,

And that what makes Jesus divine is his teaching.

That's what made him a spiritually realized person.

But that doesn't mean there's not great metaphysical and metaphorical meaning for the life cycle of Jesus that I think can replay itself in our own lives.

There's the symbolism of the virgin birth,

The symbolism of the baptism of Jesus,

Which Jesus would define as his spiritual rebirth,

How we enter the kingdom of heaven.

He's baptized,

And a dove descends,

And a voice shouts out,

This is my beloved son,

In whom I am well pleased.

Then there's the temptation of Christ,

Or his self-imposed exile before he fulfills his short but profound ministry.

And then we all know there's the end,

There's the crucifixion,

And there's the resurrection.

And there's this other important piece that we don't talk about a lot called the transfiguration of Christ.

Jesus and James and Peter and John,

They walk up to the top of a mountain,

And the disciples see Jesus literally transform before them.

He's filled with glorious light,

And Elijah and Moses appear.

They're so visible to Peter that he's thinking about,

Where am I going to put these guys up for the night?

And Jesus says to them,

Do not tell anyone of what you've seen here today.

So obviously someone squealed.

But there's another thing that happens.

There's this booming voice that comes forth and says,

This is my beloved son,

In whom I am well pleased.

The metaphysical meaning of this message is that it's for all of us,

That when we have a spiritual birth where the human is absorbed by the spirit,

There is a divine voice that recognizes itself in us that says,

This is my beloved child,

In whom I am well pleased.

And in the transfiguration of Jesus,

It's almost like the human is embraced in the spiritual.

These two events are somehow connected.

And some early Christians refer to Jesus as a twin spirit.

There was the human in fully spiritually realized form,

And there was the spirit in fully realized human form.

Almost as if there were these two things coming together.

It's almost metaphorically for us like there's a part of us on the other side already.

And that life is about taking this thing called our soul and our spirit and our human life and learning to entwine them together.

In another dialogue of Plato,

It's called the Symposium,

And it's about the virtue of love.

There's this myth,

Everyone knows it's not factual,

But there's this myth about soulmates and true love.

Some of you may have heard it.

It's the idea that we were all born in pairs,

Four eyes,

Two heads,

Four arms,

Four legs,

And we were getting along great.

But the gods,

You see,

Those Greek and Roman gods,

They get jealous.

They don't want us human beings to realize our true nature,

That we are just like they are.

And so Zeus,

He's had enough.

And so he takes his lightning bolt and he splits all of us in two.

So from now on,

We have two eyes,

Two arms,

Two legs.

And the myth is that life is about finding your other half.

It's about your soulmate.

It's about that search for that lost half of yourself and coming together.

This is a sappy and beautiful love myth,

But I like to apply it to this idea of our human self and our spirit,

That our whole life is indeed this process of learning to live,

Learning to die,

This whole process of integrating our spiritual awareness,

That is eternal life,

By the way,

Not death at all,

Into this temporal human existence,

One and the same.

Two not often shared spiritual beliefs here at Mile High Church.

One is the one I opened with.

We are not here to make up answers to make us feel better so that we can better endure the challenges of life.

We're not here to make anything up.

We are here to explore the questions of life together and to live open at the top,

Transparent.

That understanding that I gained from my dad's passing,

I ain't going to get that in a book.

I'm only going to get it if I am conscious and willing to look deeper in this experience of life.

The second often unsaid teaching is that everything that you believe about the key ideas of life is affecting you each and every day.

A lot of people are like,

I don't like to pay attention to those big ideas.

I just want to get by.

But your beliefs,

It's called the mental equivalent,

About relationships,

About money,

About life,

And yes,

Even about death,

It's affecting and influencing how you experience your life and your relationships and your work every day.

Every once in a while,

I'll meet a brilliant person who has come to the following conclusion about death.

Josh,

This is how I see it.

Either there's an afterlife,

And it's all wonderful,

And it's a big party,

Or the lights go out,

I'm dead,

And I won't care.

Good philosophy,

But I challenge it.

I challenge it.

The goal of death is not to keep it at arm's length and not think about it.

The goal of death is to realize that back of it is a greater life,

A greater way of living.

We want to learn to befriend death,

Maybe not dying today or tomorrow,

But befriending death,

Realizing that on the other side of it,

Again,

Is that incredible love,

That incredible spirit,

And embracing it could help us realize our eternality,

Not in the future,

But right here today.

One of the greatest modern teachers on how to die was Steve Jobs,

The founder of Apple,

Someone whose ideas are as alive and influential on society today as ever,

And he had a very public dying experience with pancreatic cancer,

And he shared,

Especially to the children,

To the young people.

He said,

It is possible to prepare ourselves consciously for our own passing over,

And to spend our last days with love in our hearts,

And with the kind of support that will help us make this transition.

It is possible to meet the moment of death with openness,

Equipped with our expanded definition of what we human beings are,

And to prepare ourselves for what,

According to every mystical tradition,

Will follow after.

My challenge is to do that now.

You don't have to wait for the diagnosis or the experience to embrace that part of you on the other side already,

To integrate it into your life today.

Walter Isaacson was Steve Jobs' biographer,

And he shares a backyard conversation that he had with Steve,

And the topic of spirituality came up,

And Isaacson asked Jobs if he believed in God,

And Jobs said,

I'm 50-50 on whether or not God exists,

But what I'd like to think is that there's something about the wisdom that we cultivate in this life experience that will go on and continues to express itself in new and profound ways,

But maybe I'm naive and it's just an on and off button,

On one day and off the next,

And there's a long silence shared between them,

And Jobs smiles and he says,

You know what,

I think that's why I never put on and off switches on any of the Apple devices.

Let's have a prayer together.

I invite any of our practitioner prayer partners to stand with me.

They're available for prayer after service.

Learning to live is not something that happens when we're born,

And learning to die isn't something that happens when we pass away.

It is a daily encounter about facing the everyday transitions of our life,

For life is change,

And I know for each one of us that today there is a transition that is staring us right in the face,

A passageway,

A threshold crossing,

Something that we are being invited to step into,

But perhaps there is some resistance in us.

Perhaps there is something holding on to an understanding that we think is all there is,

To a way of life that we don't think can be different.

What do we call to do?

We are called to courageously let go of that perspective,

And to surrender with faith to a greater will,

To see things not as we think they are,

But to have an experience of what they really are,

A mystic's bridge into a deeper experience of our lives,

Whether it's a transition at work,

Or in relationships,

Or in saying goodbye,

Or being said goodbye to.

These transitions exist for all of us.

I am so grateful for the children of Mile High Church,

That we can behold them as they move through the passageways of their lives,

Knowing that the unchangeable is how loved they are,

That they are always guided,

And that they always have and are witnessing of them,

Their beautiful families,

And their spiritual community,

And anchoring to know that they are magnificent expressions of the divine,

And that change is not to be feared,

But embraced with great courage and tenacity.

I am also so incredibly grateful for the ministry of Patty Lukenbach,

Who has trained more spiritual practitioners,

More of us than even Ernest Holmes,

Who has,

Through the power of her prayer,

Showing up in her life,

Given her life to that prayer,

Which I know has enhanced her own life,

But blessed each of us immensely.

I honor that prayer as it continues to do its work in new form and new ways as we celebrate her life,

Her womanhood,

And her incredible ministry.

May we embrace the change that we are and discover all we need to know in the process.

And so it is.

Amen.