Death as Natural and Generative
and no less sacred than liferesources offered by Connie Barlow & Rev. Michael Dowd
www.TheGreatStory.org/death-programs.html
Perhaps there is no more alluring portal for experiencing the benefits of evolutionary spirituality — that is, a spirituality grounded in a modern, evolutionary cosmology — than by way of a profoundly new way of understanding death.
Thanks to the sciences of astronomy, astrophysics, chemistry, geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, cell biology, embryology, ecology, geography, and math, we can now not only accept but celebrate that:
1. Death is natural and creative at every level of reality.2. Death is no less sacred than life.
Online Resources for Learning and Celebrating Death as Natural and Generative
DRAMATIC SCRIPT: "Startull: The Story of an Average Yellow Star" A fun and poignant evolutionary parable (in dramatic script format) honoring the role that the death of ancestor stars played in the evolution of life: red giants creating carbon; blue stars creating other complex atoms (written by Connie Barlow)
CHILDREN'S STORY: "Tree Talks About Death" This story by Connie Barlow weaves a mythic tale grounded in science through which the deep understandings of the creative role that death plays at all scales of the cosmos can be grasped by both head and heart, child or adult. Click here to listen to free online AUDIO of Connie reading aloud this story.
SONG: "Death Has Lifted Us"
SONG: "Praise Birth and Death Amid the Stars"
LITANY: "Yes to the Universe"
LITANY: "The Gifts of Death"
BACKGROUND READING: "The Science that Grounds the New Understanding of Death"
DVD for sale online: Connie Barlow presenting "Death Through Deep Time Eyes" Video of Connie Barlow leading an hour-long, interactive "Death Through Deep-Time Eyes" program, before a live audience, as published on her DVD set, "Celebrating Evolution"Double click image at left to watch 3-minute sample.
Click here for information on purchasing the DVD
PODCAST: "When Death Gets Personal"
Half-hour audio conversation by Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, recorded August 2009, as part of their newly launched "America's Evolutionary Evangelists" weekly podcast series.
SERMON AUDIO: Half-hour sermon by Connie Barlow, "Death Through Deep-Time Eyes" in Ashland OR, 2009, supplemented with illustrations and songs.Six short YouTube videos
excerpted from Connie Barlow's "Death Through Deep-Time Eyes"
presentation
CURRICULUM: "Remember Who You Are: Living a Mythic Life" 12-week curriculum by Connie Barlow for assisting middle school youth in the life passage from childhood ("Explorers in the Garden") to early adolescence ("Thespians at the Oasis"), which uses the understandings drawn from the 2008 book by Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, and using scene-by-scene the Disney movie The Lion King as a beloved bridge and focus for the middle school mindset. Understanding the naturalness of death of elders and of periodic psychological deaths as one transitions from one stage of life to the next is central to this curriculum.INTERVIEW: "An Alluring View of Death," with Connie Barlow, published in the Sept 2005 issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine
HEALTH INSURANCE PROPOSAL: "Leaving a Legacy" Connie Barlow's proposal for a new form of Group Health Insurance to serve individuals who share a philosophy that death is a natural part of life — not something to be battled irrespective of the emotional, physical, and financial costs. STORY: "The Dance: An Evolutionary Parable Celebrating Death" by Larry Edwards, as published in EarthLight magazine. AUDIO STORY: "The Wishing Star" - online mp3 AUDIO of a terrific kids story on the naturalness of death of elders (on another website); written and read by Brenda Sutton, the 10 minute audio is described as, "a serious tale for older kids about life, death, and how to make a really important wish."
Stars that lived and died
before our sun was born
created all the calcium
in our bones and
the carbon in our cells.
Live Programs on Death by Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd Helping individuals find inspiration and hope in a larger and beneficent context for death is a core function of religions throughout the world. Our culture is reticent to talk and educate about death in meaningful ways, in part, because deep and unexamined assumptions about death hail from widely accepted understandings born of another era, and these old assumptions are not up to the challenges posed by death today. In telling the 14 billion year story of cosmos and life as a sacred story, we (Connie Barlow and Rev. Michael Dowd) have developed programs grounded in the new cosmological understanding born of modern science that present death as natural, generative, and something to be trusted and even celebrated.Both of us begin our programs with an important caveat: Individuals can adopt a new and expanded view of death as natural and generative while continuing to embrace the full diversity of beliefs about what happens to spirt, soul, or consciousness after death, and while honoring the teachings of their particular religious faith. Our aim is simply to offer individuals a larger, natural, sacred context within which to see and experience the material fact of death in a new and liberating way.
Whether given as a 20 minute sermon in a church on a Sunday morning or a two-hour graphically-rich presentation in a school, a retirement community, to hospice staff/patients, or a myriad of other venues, our programs on death consistently elicit gratitude, trust, hope, and deeply heartfelt stirrings in those who experience them.
Click here for more information on Connie's and Michael's programs
Living trees are built upon
the bodies of ancestors.Wood is nothing less than
dead cells filled with strong
and enduring lignin.
"I am at peace with his death."
In the summer of 2004, Connie and Michael were jointly presenting an evening workshop at a Unitarian Universalist church in Ohio. Connie did a component on the creation of atoms inside of stars, and the importance of those stars dying and giving back to the galaxy all that they had created during their lives. A woman sent us an email afterwards, which read: "During Connie's talk about stardust, I knew why I had come. My father, who took his own life in May, always told me I was made of 'star-stuff'. After hearing you, I am at peace with his death. His spirit is with the goddess, but even stars die, and his substance will continue on as new life. Thanks so much!"
As the years pass, examples continue to accrue of how this perspective can restore hope after the death of a loved one. In the summer of 2007, Connie's sermon on stardust at a Unitarian Universalist church evoked this tearful comment from a woman: "I lost my son six months ago, and this is the first thing that has helped me with my grief. Thank you!" In autumn of 2008, Michael's talk at a spiritual retreat center in Cleveland evoked another tearful expression of gratitude — this time from a woman who finally felt she could come to terms with the death of her three-year-old grandchild.
"Every day I deal with death."
Connie received this email in 2007, from a young woman, after Connie's sermon on death at a Unitarian Universalist church in the Midwest: "I am a funeral director intern and will be getting my license within the next couple of months. Every day I deal with death. Every day I hear sermons about Adam's sin and death's sting. I always feel strange, sitting at the back listening to whichever preacher happens to be the pick of the day. I always knew I didn't believe what they spoke.
I learned about evolution and the Big Bang from teachers who didn't believe in it, but who had to teach it. I watch programs on it on the Discovery Channel. I believe it. But I have never had it put into a story that could define me. It was always distant, something that heppened in the past. You brought to me the first creation story that I could relate to. No talking snake in a tree tempting a nude woman. No. You gave me words to a story that is based in fact — something I can make my own, something that is my own. And for that, I thank you."
