I overheard a friend recently say, “My young son asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the truth – that most of us go to Hell and burn eternally – but I didn’t want to upset him,” (…a quote he borrowed, I believe).
He was responded by a couple other people saying: “Sounds like you did the right thing… To tell you the truth, the first is probably more the truth than the later… at least that’s what I’m betting on…”

I got to thinking about these statements, (go figure), and about destiny.

Destiny…

What happens when we die?  Where do we go?  Do we in fact simply go back to the dust from whence we came?  Is that the end?  Is there something for us after we die?

Author Deepak Chopra said in one of his books,

“On the material level, both you and a tree are made up of the same recycled elements.  Mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements in minute amounts.  You could buy these elements in a hardware store for a couple of dollars.  The real difference between the two of you is between the energy and the information.  Your body is not separated from the body of the universe.  Because of the quantum mechanical levels, there are no well defined edges.  You are like a wiggle, a wave, a fluxuation, a convolution, a whirlpool, a localized disturbance in the larger quantum field.”
Read the rest of the entry »

“People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can’t rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right.”^[1]

Just as the stork is associated with bringing a baby into this world, the crow is associated with carrying the soul out of this world.^[2]  Movie ideas, old legends and other belief systems have a mass of stories about birds bringing death (or life).  Many of these are so very fantastical and one has to wonder how they ever came to be.  One of my guesses is that perhaps it was simply an attempt to make sense of the unknown.  While you and I may not believe in babies coming from storks or crows carrying the soul, there is one thing that is real… life is real… and death. 

Last April, I had the honor of officiating my grandmother’s funeral
Read the rest of the entry »