Carolyn Kolwicz and the Rev. Joshua Mason Pawelek
Unitarian Universalist Society: East
Manchester, CT
July 22, 2007
Carolyn:
There are bones and there are bones, some more important than others. For me it is the most ancient bones that capture the imagination and I am intrigued and, yes mystified, with the estimated five to six thousand year old skeletons of young lovers interlocked forever in a tender hug—discovered this past February, 2007. Fittingly they were unearthed in Mantua, Italy near Verona where Shakespeare set his tragic drama Romeo and Juliet. It was as if The Bard could have prophesied backwards.
Those who know me kid me about being preoccupied with passionate love stories and that I claim to be an out-and-out atheist. I stand convicted of both. Furthermore, since having had a near death experience in my thirties, I am fascinated with the dying process. My experience has left me convinced that the very end of life, the dying process, can be comfortable and seductive. That it will be very easy to succumb once the appropriate time has arrived.
When I first saw the picture of these bones, I felt enormously moved. It felt like these two young people—and they were young: scientists estimate they were about twenty years old at the time of death—were sending a message of some primordial truth: that love might triumph over death. And I am not talking about an afterlife. Take a moment. Look at these bones. There seems to be no agony in their comfortable juxtaposition—only peace. How did they die, these lovers, arranging themselves this way, exchanging sweet fatal breaths? Did they entertain a concept of heaven those many years ago or did they simply accept that their lives had been fulfilled? The pragmatist in Josh has pointed out to me that perhaps someone arranged them this way after death. That, at least would mean their love was recognized and respected. But being a romanticist I want to believe they decided between themselves.
Josh:
There are bones and there are bones, some more important than others. I, like Carolyn, am intrigued with and mystified by the 5,000 year embrace of the Mantua skeletons. Unlike Carolyn, those who know me do not kid me about being preoccupied with passionate love stories—I am not—and I cannot claim to be an out-and-out atheist—I am not. And although I am not fascinated by the dying process as Carolyn claims to be, I am drawn to it as a pastor. Like Carolyn, my experience has left me convinced that the very end of life can be comfortable and seductive; that it can be easy to succumb, to let go when the time is right.
I confess I still harbor a fear of my own death. I wonder: If I have the opportunity, will I fight death when the time comes, will I remain attached to life beyond the point where it makes sense? Or will I die gracefully, embracing my end, accepting my end? Mine is not a profound, debilitating fear, but it is fear nevertheless. Perhaps most forty year olds in our society share a similar mild fear of their own deaths. I don’t know. The original owners of the Mantua skeletons appear to have not been afraid to die. They appear to have died gracefully, perhaps at their own hand, embracing their end, and not only that, but embracing each other. They appear to be saying to each other and to those who would discover their remains: “we are in love; we leave this life—we leave this world—in love.” They appear to be communicating that primordial truth: love conquers death.
Carolyn:
We seldom regard bones as beautiful. We mostly take our own bones for granted. Uprightly they hold us together. We pay attention to them only when, in early years, we break them or as we age, they begin to ache with arthritis or become porous and bent in osteoporosis. Only then do we take notice but we are likely to rebuke them for not doing their job. Ugly entitlement rears its head again as we take our marvelously complex body parts for granted. Perhaps we need to cherish our bones as these lovers seem to have done.
Josh:
When I first heard Carolyn speak these words I thought, ‘Yes, of course, we need to cherish our bones. We need to regard them as beautiful. We need to take care of our bodies—not take them for granted. Our bodies are temples.’ Then I began contemplating bones less as physical bones and more as a metaphor for our lives. We need to cherish our lives, regard them as beautiful, take care of them, live them, and not take them for granted. In the midst of this contemplation I was drawn to this passage from the late essayist, Philip Simmons:
Perhaps you’ll forgive my eccentricities, seeing as everything I do these days I do with the urgency of a man whose days are numbered. Living with Lou Gehrig’s disease, seeking both physical health and spiritual healing, I have learned to accept help from any quarter: I’ve consulted priests and shamans and psychics, beekeepers and bodyworkers and aura balancers, naturopaths and homeopaths and neurologists, herbalists and acupuncturists and psychotherapists. I’ve even gone so far as to join a church and sing in the choir….
I don’t mean to say that my diagnosis makes me special. Life … is a terminal condition. Those of us with terminal illnesses simply have been blessed—and I mean blessed—with having the facts of our own mortality held constantly before us. But we all bear the burdens of the flesh. And all of us at certain times in our lives, in the face of failure, loss, illness, and finally, our certain ends, find ourselves asking: Why get up this morning?... What work is there for me to do in this world that can possibly make a difference?
Lately I’ve come to feel quite strongly that answering these questions begins with acceptance of our place in the natural order. Not only must we accept our own deaths as a necessary part of that order but we must come to see that it is our very mortality that calls us to act according to our highest nature. It is out of acceptance of all that we are, including and especially that we are creatures that will one day die, that we are called to our highest human duties.
Though we don’t know what sense of calling these two young people had in life, their final repose suggests, again, grace and peace and love—lives cherished, lives seen as beautiful, life lived with some sense of our highest nature. Lovely bones indeed.
Carolyn:
The mystery of these unique skeletons leads me to wonder how anthropologists feel about finding ancient bones. Do they feel some kind of reverence along with the certain elation related to the historical significance and economic perks of such a find? It would be like a musicologist finding a lost Mozart symphony, surely an inexplicable joy. In his amazing book Mountains Beyond Mountains, a true story about a magnanimous doctor trying to save Haiti’s poor, Tracy Kidder says, “that anthropology concerned itself less with measurement than with meaning.”
The word anthropology comes from the Greek anthropos, meaning human being, and logos, meaning ordered knowledge. Paleontologists study the bones of ancient people to learn the origins and evolution of the human species. From their work we were told in school about Java Man from 700,000 years ago all the way to Cro-Magnon Man 30,000 years ago. The finds were mostly body parts—isolated bones, teeth, or skulls. In comparison, the Mantuan bones are relatively recent, dating back to Neolithic times which began around 10,000 BC. What was the essence of this life?
The Neolithic era was dubbed the New Stone Age and was associated with great advances in civilized life; humans had now learned to cultivate grain (wheat and barley), domesticate animals (goats, sheep, and cattle), build houses, weave cloth, and make pottery. They also learned to live in community. As Unitarians Universalists we know what an advancement and challenge that can be. I suppose all people of faith who strive to be together in community know something about how difficult it can be.
Although written history had begun about 6,000 BC, these lovers left no written testimony, if indeed they had even learned to write.
Josh:
No written testimony. No words. Last winter I preached a sermon about the first source of the Unitarian Universalist living tradition, the direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and openness to the forces which create and uphold life. The direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder. That sermon was called, “The Words Before Words,” a reference to a short poem by the Rev. Nancy Shaffer called “In Stillness.” She writes, “I have been looking for the words that come before words: the ones older than silence, the ones not mine, that can’t be found by thought—the ones that hold the beginning of the world and are never used up.”
No words accompany these skeletons. The truth of their deaths—the truth of their embrace—whether or not they even knew each other—is mystery and will always be mystery. But their embrace is so compelling and so rare in the paleontological record, it points to the words before words. It points us away from thought and analysis and rational synthesis toward intuition, toward emotion, toward feeling. It points us toward spiritual experience, toward the ineffable, toward love, toward that unspoken, often obscured but not ultimately forgotten sense of kinship across the ages with all humanity. Indeed, kinship with all life. No words accompany these skeletons, but they seem to say so much. Poor anthropology—we cannot measure the full extent of what they say; but we can certainly mine their depths for meaning to feed our spirits in this hot summer season.
I proposed in that sermon last January that if we “imagine everything we do in our lives, every decision, every emotion, every thought—everything; even the misguided and harmful things; if we look closely enough at why we do what we do and feel what we feel, if we look for the motivation underlying our motivations, if we look in the most intimate way, illuminating our most inner, vulnerable selves, we realize at our core is a longing—a profound and fierce longing—to return to [the] primordial moment, [the] sublime original unity.” Perhaps this 5,000 year old embrace is exactly that—an effort to return to that primordial moment—a prayer and a wonderful faith that love can and will conquer death. And perhaps when we witness the embrace, when we see it in the newspaper, we take one step closer in our own lives, back to that moment, that beautiful, astounding, eloquent, glorious moment where all is connected to all, where we hear the words before words—and we know, in a flash, love can triumph over death if we learn how to let it, whether we believe this life is the one life we shall live, whether we believe there is some existence beyond this life. Yes, love can conquer death if we learn how to let it.
Carolyn:
I talked about the Mantua skeletons with Dr. Nick Bellantoni, professor of archeology at UConn. Bellantoni said that while the professional usually knows what he will be digging up, he must remain detached and scientific. “Then there are the surprises, especially when you come upon something really old, when you cannot help but feel emotional—a sense of respect and connection comes over you. With the follow-up analysis of the bones, the life story unfolds. You get to know the stresses upon that life and you become even more connected.” Yes!
There are bones and there are bones.
Hugging bones are something else. I asked in the beginning how these bones came to be arranged this way.
Actually, I hope we never find out. We Unitarian Universalists call ourselves truth seekers and yet, if we knew all truth, wouldn’t our imaginations wither and die? Isn’t it that very mystery and wonder that feeds our souls? If we knew everything would we still feel ecstasy looking up the trunk of a giant sequoia, hearing the din of peepers in the Spring, finding the beauty in a friend’s face or a stranger’s, gazing at the ancient bones of young lovers?
Josh:
I also hope we never find out. Or, if we find out the embrace was contrived for some other less noble purpose, may we never stop hoping for love. May we never stop believing in the sacredness of love. May we never stop trusting in the power of love. The gift of the Mantua skeletons is not the hard, scientific data we can produce about who they were and what they were doing, although that is certainly valuable data. Their gift to us is their embrace, the image of intimate love they—or someone—hoped would be found. Yes, the limit of the human condition is death. But we do not have to face this limit in the absence of love. May this ancient embrace add to all the evidence we have of that primordial truth: love conquers death.
Carolyn:
May these beautiful bones keep their secret and our imaginations weave their story.
Josh:
And may we be strengthened in our own resolve to embrace the reality of death and thereby live lives committed to truth, love, justice, and peace.
Carolyn:
I wish each of you passion and healing hugs in your life.
Josh:
Amen and Blessed Be.
Simmons, Philip, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life (New York: Bantam Books, 2000) pp. 13-14.
Shaffer, Nancy, “In Stillness,” Instructions in Joy (Boston: Skinner House, 2002) p.5.
