Dabney - Our Comfort In Dying

Sermons conjure up tedious bloviations from people more interested in presenting themselves than anything else. Yet here is one that redeems them all. Robert Lewis Dabney was a contemporary of Herman Melville and actually equals Melville in ways, in using language, here in this sermon.

The sermon is about death, and the stark experience of it we will all face.

One point that is central, and interesting from a Work perspective, is where Dabney is talking about the soul (or spirit) and how it exists separately from the flesh. In one part of the sermon he writes this:

"The spirit, the conscious, spontaneous, thinking, knowing, feeling thing, which constitutes the true man, the I, which alone can hope or fear, or experience the tooth of pain, will have soared away to a brighter realm before these abhorred scenes overtake it. Only the poor, disused tenement, the unconscious clay, will be their victim."

What is interesting from a Work knowledge and being perspective is where he writes "the I." The "I" is associated with the spirit, or soul, that is released from the body at death. If that "I" is merely Imaginary 'I', a nebulous cloud of "I-ness" but no unity or realization of a degree of Real "I" then you can imagine your state at death. If that "I" though is at least the level of development of Observing I then there will be something substantial upon the death of the physical body. Better yet if that "I" is Deputy Steward level of development, or Steward, or Master (Real I) itself then you can see how that would be a much better state of affairs for you at death.

That internal rising scale of unity and realization of Real I that is what Work development is about is literally a developing, or realizing, of your immortal soul.

You sow your spiritual body at death; the better the seed you sow the better your spiritual body.

The entire sermon is worth reading not only once. Pondering your own death, to begin with, is a valuable exercise. It's a great sermon.