Being Human, Joe Black, and Beyond

Rob Lieb

Delivered on November 27, 2022
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Harford County
uufhc.net


Opening Words

Every thing that has ever enjoyed being alive must, at some point, die. There's the rub. It is not so bad for most life forms. Most just thrill in the time they are alive and die when it's over. Humans, however, have the ability to anticipate their own death. But that feature is not our most unique. What is most human is our ability to imagine things that are not real.

I invite you to look into the process of living and extracting the most from your life by regularly and willfully changing your perspective. If we include the input from expanding technology, what we are able to perceive changes dramatically as time goes by. What was seen and believed 500 years ago is much different than what we can see today due mostly to technology. This observation opens a flood of possible changes in perspective. Today I would like to consider the question about how changing your perspective, thereby getting out of your comfort zone, can enhance your view of life. This is done by checking your beliefs to be sure they are real. When we tackle a change of perspective, we give ourselves the opportunity to see more closely how the world can work differently. That, to me, is why we are here, to get a closer and closer idea of what is real.

Reflection I: The Human Situation

Galileo shocked popular beliefs when he peered through his new telescope and determined there were moons going around Jupiter. He changed his perspective which enabled him to see things closer to what was real. Humans had already determined that the God made the Earth for them and therefore everything revolved around the Earth. It seems that most people at that time were imaging things that just are not true. Carl Sagan said the following in his book A Pale Blue Dot, which will later provide us a perch to help us obtain a new perspective.

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant.'? A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

How can we, as humans, align our thoughts so that they become more true, instead of veering off track into the world of the untrue. I think that seeking new perspectives is a method that will help us keep on track. If you think this happens only to ignorant people, please note every morning we say that the sun is rising. We are still very prone to put ourselves at the center of the universe. A more accurate view is that we are rotating underneath the sun on this spinning Earth. But the sun sure looks like it’s coming up out of the east. A change in perspective might help us see sunrises more accurately.

Reflection II: Joe Black, Perspective Change

In 1999 I presented a sermon called On Being Human and it was based on the movie Meet Joe Black. The theme is that Death, who has been in business a long time, is puzzled by humans' reaction (resistance) to making the transition from life to death and is curious as to why humans react so strangely. So, Death comes into this world not as the reaper, but as a human, just to get a taste of what being human actually is. We all learned how to be human by growing up in the world we knew. The movie gives us a chance to change our perspective as we watch Joe Black experience humanness. In this change two things are different. First, we can objectify our human experience because we are observing someone else, Death, go through the learning. Secondly, there will be a freshness because of the many aspects of our existence we now take for granted simply because we have grown so accustomed to them. Humans, as you have probably experienced grow used to almost anything.

The sub-themes the movie deals with are timeless. Failure, betrayal, love, revenge, abandonment, trust, integrity, deceit, goodness, inadequacy, dedication, pride, and of course death. These and many other experiences are all encountered and dealt with, as we humans go about our business of living.

The human that Death becomes is given the name Joe Black. As he learns various lessons of human life, he teaches some lessons of his own. Tasting peanut butter becomes a major experience. Witnessing intimate deceit and betrayal surprises and annoys him. Falling in love confuses, thrills, conflicts, enrages, embarrasses, and surprises him. Ultimately, he reaches a resolution as a human and as Death, mostly through his experience with love. All of these things we see in a new light because they are happening to another. Joe Black came into our world from a perspective of raw justice honed by his previous experiences and proceeds to develop a modified sense of justice because of his change in perspective. Fairness is doled out, first with the impunity he has always fostered as a very powerful entity. He is used to having his own way and usually hands out fairness, in accordance with that reality. As he develops a concept of goodness, the fairness is practiced with compassion. As a consequence of this evolution, love is discovered. One of the best and culminating parts is Death's final acceptance of his appropriate role in the universe. However, with the living Joe Black has experienced as a human, he is unable to go back to his world without some of his newly acquired humanity.

As mentioned earlier, we humans grow so quickly used to just about any condition, whether it be extraordinary pleasure or abject pain. Humans get used to anything. The main purpose of the presentation is to take advantage of a change in perspective in order to become something better than we were before. Like Joe Black, we will carry our realization forward as we go.

We likely have self-realization beyond any other being on Earth, yet we routinely refuse to exercise our innate facilities to appreciate the wealth existing at our fingertips. The entity Death is limited to a window of time in which to experience the human condition before he must return to his reality. At the beginning of his human experience Death is engaged with awe and wonder, then there is a period of discovery, and eventually as the window of time draws to a close, the anxiety of leaving this privileged place arises. Death faces a death of his own, similar again to what occurs in us. Then, he comes to grips with what Death's nature is. At that point, he realigns his reality with the that of the universe, as we all must do. The lesson should not be lost. We humans are offered the same choice. To experience life's fulfillment, we too must recognize our window of time. We must exploit our time and pack in as much as we can to take full advantage of this passage.

Reading: Poor Devil

Ric Masten was a Unitarian Universalist poet I met at SUUSI a long time ago. After he was diagnosed with cancer and had undergone a lengthy treatment, he wrote a poem very germane to our service today. The poem is called Poor Devil. I'd like to read it.

Poor Devil

in my early twenties
I went along with Dylan Thomas
boasting that I wanted to go out
not gently but raging
shaking my fist
staring death down

however this daring statement
was somewhat revised
when in my forties I realized
that death does the staring
I do the down

so I began hoping
it would happen to me
like it happened to the sentry
in all those
John Wayne Fort Apache movies
found dead in the morning
face down—an arrow in the back
Poor devil.
the Sergeant always said
Never knew what hit him.

at the time I liked that—
the end taking me
completely by surprise
the bravado left in the hands
of a hard drinking Welshman
still wet behind the ears

older and wiser now
over seventy
and with a terminal disease
the only thing right about
what the Sergeant said
was the Poor devil part

Poor devil
never used an opening
to tell loved ones he loved them
never seized the opportunity
to give praise for the sunrise
or drink in a sunset
moment after moment
passing him by
while he marched through his life
staring straight ahead
believing in tomorrow
Poor devil!,

how much fuller
richer and pleasing life becomes
when you are lucky enough
to see the arrow coming

Reflection III: Lucky Devil

On October 20th of 2014, I came up the stairs to go to bed and Marlene noticed I was acting a bit funny. I thought I was facing her when in fact I was turned around. I was totally fascinated by the four ceiling corners in our bedroom. I could not understand how I missed all these years why I never noticed how wonderful those corners were. Then, half my face drooped, and I lost consciousness. Marlene called 911, the medics arrived quickly, they took me to Upper Chesapeake, the doctors scanned my brain, they saw the two bleeds, I was loaded onto a helicopter, flown to UM shock trauma, stabilized, the decision was made not to operate, and then everyone waited. I woke a day tied to the bed in a windowless room and thought, God Damn it, my parents were right! I'm dead. At least I made it to purgatory.

In the days that followed, I found out many things. How difficult it is to fix brain cells, how many things had to go exactly right for me to wake up in this place, how wonderful the people I knew actually were, how much people cared about me, how much I was loved, how much people I did not know cared about me, and how much I still had to learn. These things did not come in this order and not all at once. My window, which could have closed abruptly had the arrow followed a slightly different path, was extended. It was extended and I had a chance to fix some things. (Lucky Devil!) I had a major shift in perspective. Then, the biggest understanding dawned. I am not that special. Every person has that same chance every second we push into the next moment. As long as we are alive, we have the chance to thrill in the now. So, how do we gain the perspective needed to keep the window open.

I knew the arrow was in the air, but I never saw it coming. I was living my life to what I thought was the fullest. Learning what I thought I needed to know, and changing perspectives to wring out of life all the meaning possible. Like every human, I had come to believe some things that were just not true. This experience allowed a major adjustment. I think it was mostly for the better.

Finally, I turn to Carl Sagan to leave you with a stepping stone to a possible jump-start on perspective change. The following video was presented at the end of the COSMOS series. When the Voyager spacecraft was leaving the last large planet in our system (Neptune), Carl Sagan convinced the NASA team to turn the craft around toward Earth and photograph the pale blue dot that Earth appears to be from that distance. The perspective is most different. It is of us, being together on this small mote of dust bathed in sunshine.

The Earth as viewed from just beyond Neptune

Sagan Pale Blue Dot Text

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, whoever lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Closing Hymn and Postlude: Blue Boat Home

Closing Words

Life has been on Earth for about 4 billion years. We have evolved into a state of self-awareness within the last million years, and humans have gained an overt consciousness within the last 40,000 years. These events caused the window we know to be thrown wide open. We should relish in the flow of life through that window. Now is the time to open any throttle you control as wide as possible. The Arrow is on the way. Know it is coming and appreciate the ride of your life.

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Copyright © 2022 Rob Lieb. All Rights Reserved.


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