Easter and Raymond Carver: A sermon preached by Dr. Larry R. Hayward: April 8, 2007

“Deep in the human heart is an unquenchable trust 
that life does not end with death.”

Not at all timely I know (other than the fact that it's Sunday) but I just came across this. I'm not a religious man but this is a beautifully rendered piece; a reminder of the importance of self appraisal and self love. Much as I adore my lady, I'm learning that to love oneself is perhaps the greatest love; 'you' are the only person that you can truly trust in a relationship so... you'd better hit the right notes. Of course, it's divine to be loved by others; more likely if you are not consumed by self loathing... The idea of a divine love from Him on high is beyond me. 
I've been accused in the past of over sincerity (by friends) but kindness, trust and loyalty are my only real demands from friendship. 
Call me mawkish, but love and hope remain my touchstones.
They surely endure 'beyond the bounds of vision'...

And did you get what 

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

EASTER AND RAYMOND CARVER

Luke 24:13-35

A sermon preached by Dr. Larry R. Hayward on Easter Sunday, April 8, 2007, at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Alexandria, Virginia

Nearly every funeral I conduct features a prayer from 1946 edition of The Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church. Those of you with Episcopal leanings will recognize it from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, revealing the fact that we Presbyterians are not quite liturgically-minded enough to come up with liturgy of our own. But in the case of this prayer, authorship doesn’t matter; for one sentence of the prayer is particularly beautiful, no matter who wrote it.

The phrase is this:

We thank Thee that deep in the human heart is an unquenchable trust that life does not end with death; that the Father, who made us, will care for us beyond the bounds of vision, even as He has cared for us in this earthly world.

“An unquenchable trust that life does not end with death”: these words lie behind, beneath, and around this sermon this Easter day. “An unquenchable trust that life does not end with death.”

I want us to approach the phrase “an unquenchable trust” first through the writings of a noted author as he lay dying of cancer, then through Luke’s account of two disciples walking on the road to Emmaus and encountering the risen Christ unrecognized. 

In my opinion, both the author and the disciples give evidence of “unquenchable trust” that “life does not end with death.” 

By looking at their trust, I hope to put us in touch with similar trust that lies in our hearts, draw that trust out, and connect it to the resurrection of Christ that it may empower us to live with hope beyond this morning’s lilies and music.

First, the author. 

His name is Raymond Carver. He was born in 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon. His father was a saw filer in the lumber mills and an alcoholic; his mother, a waitress and retail clerk. Carver lived a hard scrabble life. He worked his way through college, drank his way through low-paying, dead end jobs in his twenties and thirties, and wrote his way to fame in his forties. Along with Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, and Tobias Wolff, Carver is among the greatest writers of the unique and relatively recent genre known as the short story.

The story of his life is not pretty. 

· In 1976, at age 38, Carver nearly died of alcohol poisoning. 

· After his brush with death, he became sober. 

· He met and found genuine love with fellow writer Tess Gallagher. 

· In the Fall of 1987, Carver was diagnosed with lung cancer. 

· For ten months he struggled with treatment. 

· In the spring 1988 cancer returned as a brain tumor. 

· After a decade of life together, he and Gallagher married. 

· A few weeks later, he died, two months after his fiftieth birthday. 

While creating her own, respected body of writing, Gallagher has spent the twenty years since Carver’s death telling his story. 

What we have of Carver’s writings reveals a man who, in his last few months, sought to affirm life even as he faced death. Gallagher describes his reaction to the return of cancer. 

Much as Chekhov had kept reading the train schedules away from the town in which he would die, Ray kept working, planning, believing in the importance of the time he had left, and also believing that he might, through some loop in fate, even get out of this. An errand list I found in his shirt pocket later read “eggs, peanut butter, hot choc” and then, after a space, “Australia? Antarctica??” 

The insistent nature of Ray’s belief in his own capacity to recover from reversals during the course of his illness gave us both strength. In his journal he wrote: “When hope is gone, the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws.” In this way he lived hope as a function of gesture, a reaching for or toward, while the object of promise stayed rightly illusory. The alternative was acceptance of death, which at age fifty was impossible for him.

During this time of reaching for hope, Carver read a passage from Chekhov’s Ward Number 6: 

“And do you believe in the immortality of the soul?” [one character asks]. 

“No, [a second character responds]…I … have no grounds for believing it.” 

“I must own I doubt it too,” [the first character admits]…but there is a little voice in my soul that says, ‘…you won’t die.’” 

Carver underlined the words “a little voice in my soul.” 

The frontispiece of his final edition, published after his death, contained this inscription: 

All of us, all of us, all of us

trying to save

our immortal souls, some ways 

seemingly more round-

about and mysterious than others. 

Perhaps, facing death, he began to consider – to hope – that his life might continue after his death. “Deep in the human heart is an unquenchable trust that life does not end with death.” 

~

Once cancer returned, Carver frantically strove to finish his final books. They did not even tell friends his cancer had returned; for rather than face “a parade of sorrowful goodbyes,” they preferred to focus on “the things we wanted to do.” 

One of the things we decided to do [she writes] was to celebrate our eleven years together by getting married in Reno, Nevada, on June 17. 

The wedding was what Ray called a “high tacky affair” and it took place across from the courthouse in the Heart of Reno Chapel, which had a huge heart in the window and spiked small golden light bulbs… Afterwards we went gambling in the casinos and I headed into a phenomenal three-day winning streak at roulette. 

After the wedding, Carver wrote a poem called “Proposal.” In the final stanza, he commented on getting ready for the hastily arranged wedding: 

We were getting ready, as if we’d found an answer to 

the question of what’s left

when there’s no more hope: the muffled sound of dice coming

down,

the felt-covered table, the click of the wheel,

the slots ringing on into the night, and one more, one

more chance…

A few weeks later, he wrote a poem called “Cherish,” in which he describes the warmth of human love he feels watching his new wife out the window, even as he lay inside the house, dying: 

From the window I see her bend to the roses

holding close to the bloom so as not to 

prick her fingers. With the other hand she clips, pauses and

clips, more alone in the world 

than I had known. She won’t look up, not now. She’s alone

with roses and with something else I can only think, not

say. I know the names of those bushes

given for our late wedding: Love, Honor, Cherish –

the last the rose she holds out to me suddenly, having

entered the house between glances. I press

my nose to it, draw the sweetness in, let it cling – scent

of promise, of treasure. My hand on her wrist to bring her close,

her eyes green as river-moss. Saying it then, against

what comes: wife, while I can, while my breath, each hurried petal

can still find her.

The hope for “one more chance,” the eternity of “cherish”: “Deep in the human heart is an unquenchable trust that life does not end with death.”

~ 

In another piece written during those last few weeks of his life, Carver seemed to accept his imminent death. This piece is entitled “Gravy.” 

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.

Gravy, these past ten years.

Alive, sober, working, loving and

being loved by a good woman. Eleven years

ago he was told he had six months to live

at the rate he was going. And he was going

nowhere but down. So he changed his ways

somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?

After that it was all gravy, every minute

of it, up to and including when he was told about,

well, some things that were breaking down and

building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”

he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.

I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone 

Expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”

~ 

The final piece Carver wrote, before he slipped into the silence of death, is entitled “Late Fragment.” 

And did you get what 

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

Of this piece, Gallagher writes: “Ray…knew that he had been graced and blessed.”

“Deep in the human heart is an unquenchable trust that life does not end with death.”

By all accounts Raymond Carver was neither a believer in God nor a Christian. Once, when asked if he were religious, he replied: “No, but I have to believe in miracles and the possibility of resurrection.” It is as if Carver believed in resurrection but not in God. 

So why am I spending so much time in an Easter sermon on his writings? 

I do so for this reason. 

· I believe Carver’s sense that at the end of his life he was “beloved on the earth” reveals a sense that he was loved not only by himself – which as an alcoholic he struggled to achieve – but that he was also loved by a power higher and larger than himself. 

· I believe as the cancer gnawed away at his body, his heart became focused on something larger than the fifty years of his life. 

· And I have a hunch that this focusing on something larger than himself marked the beginning of a belief in God, the beginning of a belief in life after death, the beginning of a belief in resurrection. 

· I am willing to say that his writings reveal not only “an unquenchable trust that life does not end with death,” but also one way such belief can materially alter the quality of life, leading to greater commitment, greater acceptance, deeper love, and most of all, hope. “Deep in the human heart is an unquenchable trust that life does not end with death.”