By: Jim Taylor

Clearing the decks


(Even a writer needs a summer break. So here’s a re-run, which first appeared in the fall of 2000.)

        Every now and then, I go down to the basement and clean out a box or two of my archives. I’m not sure what gets into me. Cleaning up is not an activity most people would associate with me—especially if they’ve seen my desk.

        Whatever the reason, I found myself sorting through two large boxes of old sermons and workshop notes.

        I started looking at them, and wondered why I had bothered keeping them.

        Even I had trouble understanding them. I speak from notes, not from a full script—it frees me to walk around, to maintain eye contact. But for years, most of those notes have been quirky little diagrams, sometimes called “clusters” or “mind maps.”

        Keeping them has something to do with ego. I want to imagine that someday, some doctoral student will want to write a dissertation about Jim Taylor, the famous author. He or she would be thrilled to find this mother lode of information about what I was thinking, how my understanding of faith developed, where and to whom I expressed my growing convictions…

        But I could barely make sense of those scribbles myself. Did I really think a stranger could find a coherent pattern in them?



Desire for immortality

Psychologists tell me that almost all of us have this strange conviction that we will somehow be present at our own funeral. We will hover there, somewhere over the center aisle, listening to what other people have to say about us. We’ll smile at their recollections of us. We’ll be pleased that they finally understood us. We’ll relish knowing how much they miss us. They’ll affirm our worth.

        This fantasy reveals our hunger for immortality. We desperately want to know that our influence doesn’t end when we die. That our lives were worthwhile. That people will remember us. That we mattered to them.

        That’s what we want to hear at our funerals.

        And I guess that’s also why I kept all those notes and records.

        But as I’ve grown older, my ideas about what happens after death keep changing. The late Rabbi Reuben Slonim lectured me frequently about the Jewish perspective. “There is one life,” he insisted. “When it’s over, it’s over.”

        I’m coming closer to his view. I don’t expect to hear my own eulogy, let alone watch over some doctoral student’s shoulder as she types that dissertation. After all, if I’ve just been set free from the limitations of this body, from the straitjacket of time and place, why would I want to hang around it any longer?

        I’m beginning to think of immortality more in terms of the difference one has made to this world. Did I leave the world better than I found it? Or worse? Because whatever difference I made is irrevocable. It can’t be changed; it can’t be taken back.

        That’s how I will live on.

        Not through boxes of unintelligible notes.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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