We heard this morning in our centering prayer, Richard Feynman’s PS in his letter to his deceased wife D’Arline. Richard Feynman was a noted American physicist who worked on the atomic bomb, and he was a Noble Prize recipient in Physics. His PS —“PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address.” Death intrudes upon our lives, whether we like it or not. It is an inescapable fact of life. Everyone will die, and that includes each one of us. Feynman’s PS struck me funny the first time I read it, but it hits every person who has experienced lost and grief that they feel like Dr. Feynman. A dear one, just moments or day before alive, but the life force or spirit has moved on. Where do the spirits of deceased loved ones and friends go?
I co-wrote with a colleague Dennis Klass a book: Dead But Not Lost: Grief Narratives in Religious Traditions. It came from coffee each morning before class, where we shared our expertise in religion and the psychology of grief. The book is about the gap between the living and the dead and how people have tried to bridge that gap. First I need to tell you that Dr. Feynman was an atheist, for him there was no supernatural world for him to access his wife. But his love for deceased wife continued. Almost every human being has experienced the continued bond of love or friendship after someone has died. We all find ourselves there sometime in love, grief of love lost and closeness giving away to physical absence. I want to come back to this point shortly.
Our afterlife conceptions and theologies have been impacted by our modern cosmology, the story of the universe. Traditionally, the address was understood as God’s place as heaven, purgatory, and hell. It was this world, Earth, transitory illusory, sinful, and fragmented. The next world is real, eternal, and whole. Heaven was envisioned in sky with clouds, and that was where Jesus ascended to be with God. Hell was imagined as a place of fire underground. Heaven, hell, and purgatory were understood to be physical places until the 20th century. Because of death, in this this old model, we become cut off from the cosmos, for death separates us from time and space. God’s space is envisioned separated from the universe, above or outside of the universe. I think this is disincarnational as well as not connected to the story of the universe from the big bang on.

These afterlife images no longer hold our attention, and we are like Feynman’s dilemma of no knowing the address of his deceased wife. Where are our beloved deceased? What address can use to mail letters? Where do we find or speak to our deceased loved ones? Death is a stark physical absence. We miss our loved ones, and we would give anything to hear their voice, touch them, and be and share with them again.
My answer is simple but has a depth of unfathomable mystery as well. I look at human grief at loss of someone dear, and I find people across history and many cultures– bridging the gap between this world and the address of the departed.
For example, the Romans had feasts and picnics with the beloved dead at their tombs, a sort of Day of the Dead that Mexicans now celebrate. Other people have bridged death to access their loved ones through the dream world.
My colleague Dennis colleague Dennis Klass counseled, listened to, and remained a member of bereaved parents. Parents clung to pictures of their loved ones or some meaningful item, some wrapped the clothes of their loved one in plastic wrap to preserve the scent of their deceased. I have inscribed a Catholic Missal with words written by my deceased spouse Frank: ”You are my priest forever…” It is a linking object given to me, and I remember the occasion vividly. The missal stirs memories in myself, and I now can smile and feel his presence with that missal. We have all mementos because they are doorways to God’s space where are loved ones abide. And many folks will tell you stories how dead loved become present to them.

I want to read a section from Dead But Not Lost:
The most sense (of bridging the gap with the dead) is presence. Sometimes the presence is undifferentiated, a feeling of “something there,” but just as often the sense of presence is quite specific, as in one bereaved parent’s report, “I just knew that Jim was watching over me through all that.” Memory is a special kind of presence. Often the living recall the words or deeds of the dead as guidelines for present behavior. At other times memory is reverie in which the time becomes more plastic so that past and present can merge. Living people also maintain contact with the dead through linking objects. Being near the object evokes the dead’s sense of presence. The objects can be physical—for example, an article that belonged to the deceased—or nonmaterial—for an example, a song that deceased liked.
Presence can appear or become real in physical absence. Christ is present in the remembered ritual of breaking bread and sharing the cup, yet he is physically absent. He is simultaneously present and absent like of our beloved dead.
A clue may be located in our traditional Christian notion of the communion of the saints. When we celebrate our Sunday eucharist, our dead are with us. The living and dead come together at the table. When we intentionally or unconsciously remember our loved ones absent through death, we open a door way to Christ’s space and presence.
If our deceased loved one are with Christ, they are closer than we are to Christ. If Christ is active and present in our world, then those with them are active in some fashion in this world–through memory and the love in our hearts. Then our loved ones are present as Christ becomes present to us in the linking objects of bread and wine and the open table.
Heaven and hell have evolved into states of being, states of joy and states of suffering. All of us have experienced emotional/physical states of joy and pain. This is built in our universe. We are trained here in our worship to learn how to live in infinity. Our lives are attuned to resurrected life but also aligned with the suffering of the cross.
We are mixtures of attunement and estrangement. We live in a world of change, birth, decay, death, and rebirth. The cycles of life and the seasonal cycles of nature provide us a clue to our lives.
As a Christian person of faith, I turn to Christ’s death and resurrection. It points to change, dramatic change of Christ dying on the cross, and God resurrecting Christ from the dead. The continuity of God’s Spirit points to life and transformation. This has an impact on traditional and fundamentalist understanding of the end of the world.
Jesus ascended to God’s space. I use God’s space rather heaven. It is how Jesus phrase “on earth as it is heaven.” Jesus envisioned God’s space as interlocking space, inclusive of heaven and earth, which intersect and interlock in many ways. This sounds to me like quantum physics and a quantum universe, not above or outside the universe, but intersecting with our space and time. At the end of time, they will be one universe: God space and our universe. God’s space is not above or under the Earth or outside; God’s space co-exists quantumly with our space, whereby our universes are knitted together, which builds matter and energy into molecules, plants, other species and us together. This quantum universe preserves our consciousness after death with the possibilities envisioned by God of learning to live into infinity.
God is not out there, or above, or beyond. Jesus’ revolutionary way of speaking about God as God’s kindom is to proclaim that the kindom of God or God’s presence is within us. God’s space is where the presence of the risen Christ and our deceased abide. But they break through into our universe whenever we do something to remember them.
There are two folks whose thought impacts my notion of death.
The first is St. Augustine who wrote these words: You have us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. We have been created and intended to abide with God in God’s space.
The second is Wendell Berry—a great American author, farmer, and poet—who lived with the land and nature for some eighty years. Diarmuid O’Murchu writes,
People who work closely with nature, especially in environmental and ecological settings, often attain a high level of spiritual awareness. Their rootedness in creation awakens in them a sensibility to the sacred, which then becomes a catalyst for spiritual or religious exploration. (O’Murchu)
Likewise, Norman Wirzba, a Duke theologian, claims, “Gardens are places where people learn that death is not simply an end to life, but a vital ingredient and partner in furthering life.”
Wendell Berry speaks from a land wisdom from his rootedness in farming and co-living with nature. He speaks with a land wisdom, how God has given us God’s breath to breath. He hearkens to the Genesis story where God took a clod of clay and breathed into the clay to shape and form the earth creature (adamah).
He notes that at the end of our lives with our final breadth, God takes that breath back into God’s self. That unique breath abides in God. Our vitality, our energy, or consciousness is taken into God’s self at our death.