Musings

Beyond the Afterlife

(I get a steady stream of email from people who are struggling with the great questions of faith.  It is a privilege to be in dialogue with them about these issues.  Here I share an email exchange with Mitch.  I got to know him when he and his wife brought their child to Sausalito Presbyterian to be baptized.  After the ceremony, Mitch and I got into a long dialogue about matters theological which has continued over email for a couple of years now.  He’s an especially thoughtful, sensitive spiritual seeker and I value our ongoing conversation a great deal.  Here’s our latest exchange, about a subject of practically universal interest:  the afterlife.)

Dear Jim:

We haven't spoken in a while, but I do think of you often.  I'm just getting around to reading some of your Musings and this one made me want to get in touch with you.

I've been kicking around this idea that in order to be true to Christ's message that one shouldn't believe in an afterlife.  Let me explain.  It seems to me that too many people turn to Christ (or even religion) because of some promise of great reward in the afterlife.  To me this seems to be off message of what Christ was saying.  It also seems very selfish.  "I don't really want to love my neighbor, but I have to in order to get a bigger swimming pool in my backyard in heaven."  This "afterlife reward" is not what Christ was saying.  One should find joy, peace and happiness by living a life of love.  That is the reward in itself.

So, recently I have begun calling myself a Christian without a net.  I believe in Jesus Christ and his teachings, but I'm doing it because it brings me joy.  I don't want the promise of an afterlife.

So here's my question - does this mean that I can't be a Christian?  Does one need to believe in "heaven" in order to be a Christian?

Thanks for listening.

Mitch

Dear Mitch:

Good news:  you definitely do not have to believe in an "afterlife" to be a Christian.  For one thing, when Jesus talked about "heaven", his words were put into his mouth by early Christians who literally believed that the structure of the cosmos had just been changed by Jesus' life and death and resurrection.  They believed that before Jesus, the ancient Ptolemaic structure of the universe prevailed, with heaven in the realm beyond the sky, and six levels of "heavens" below it, each in descending order of power derived from God from the highest heaven.  Through Jesus, the early Christians believed that God had broken through all the lower levels of heaven and had come to earth to rule directly and personally.  So the early Christian idea was that, literally, heaven had come to earth!  It wasn't about life after death, but about life on earth right then and there, and about an imminent end to death altogether.  They believed that when Jesus returned, which they expected to happen in their lifetimes, believers would never die and that believers who had died would be brought back to life.

Jesus himself appears to have referred to heaven as the rule of God on earth; he was very much focused on redeeming life here and now.  Eternal life was for him a state of being that we can experience while we are alive, a state of being in full communion with God.

The idea of heaven as we associate it with Christianity actually came later, as the Christians saw that Jesus wasn't coming back any time soon, and that the world was going on pretty much as before.  They went back to the Ptolemaic universe idea (the seven levels or spheres of heaven), and figured that at death, the saved were taken up to the highest heaven to be with God.  Hence all the imagery of heaven as a place with clouds and angels with wings flying around.

Of course, that idea began to fall apart when Galileo and others realized that the earth was not the center of the universe, nor were there any levels of heaven as the old structure suggested.

I believe that there is such a thing as "eternal life", however.  But it's not someplace in the sky.  It is a subjective experience that people have during life when they experience oneness with God, when they have powerful experiences of love and awe.  It is also a subjective experience in the death process, reported often by people who have almost died or been revived from heart stoppage.  As the body dies, it ceases to send signals to the brain that would give it a sense of "time" as we usually know it.  The brain is left with its own inner experience, which it never knows to end.  We never know that we are dead when we are dead - we only know we're alive while we're alive.  So it is possible to experience something we might call "eternal life" subjectively, even though objectively there is a moment when life ceases.  I believe that religion can be extremely helpful in preparing for this subjective experience, by encouraging us to meditate and know the presence of God, by filling our minds with positive images, metaphors, and stories, by feeding our "dream life" in creative ways.

What do you think of all of this??

Take care!

Jim

Parable of the Parrot

(A few years ago, I received a "spam" email containing a story about a parrot.  It had a dogmatic Christian punchline, which I can no longer remember.  I decided to re-write it and turn the theology on its head.  I just discovered my version of the story in my files this week, and thought I'd pass it along.)

Once there was a little boy who was walking down the street and came upon a preacher who held a birdcage in his hand.  In the cage was a beautiful parrot.

"What are you doing with that parrot?" asked the little boy.

"I'm going to turn it into a Christian preacher," said the preacher.

"I'm going to turn it into a Christian preacher," said the parrot.

"Hmmm," said the boy.  "How are you going to do that?"

"I'm going to teach it to say 'Believe in the Lord Jesus as your personal savior and you shall be saved'", said the preacher.

"I'm going to teach it to say 'Believe in the Lord Jesus as your personal savior and you shall be saved'", said the parrot.

The boy thought for a moment and then asked the preacher, "What would you take for that parrot?  Five dollars?"

"Make it ten," said the preacher.

"Make it ten," said the parrot.

The boy had just made ten dollars by taking care of his neighbors' pets while they were on vacation.  He handed the preacher a ten dollar bill, and picked up the cage with the parrot.

"What are you going to do with the parrot?" asked the preacher.

"Set it free," said the boy as he opened the door of the birdcage.

"Set it free," said the parrot.  "Set it free, set it free!" it squawked as it flew, joyfully flapping its wings into the distance.  "Set it free, set it free, set it free!"

"Why did you do that?" asked the preacher.

"So that it would go preach the gospel of Jesus everywhere," said the boy, walking away with the empty birdcage.

Outburst

(written after a hike up Mt. Tamalpais)

So much life exploding from the flanks of the mountain;
Each redwood tree an outburst.
Branches lingering in view like traces of fireworks. 
What a show!
My body roars up the dirt track,
Zig-zagging through the chaparral,
Sucked toward the stony summit by the same anti-gravity
That drew the trees up the sides of the peak.
My body juiced through roots unseen by my eyes,
Mind fevered by sun searing energy
Into scrubby oaks, sinuous madrones, flowering monkeyweed,
Into bees frantic for manzanita nectar,
Into lizards dashing over rocks, in a rush as mad as mine
To get up this mountain!
Oh, you know me! I feel you getting it:
Why I gotta go!  Why I gotta do this;
You get it, you out there, painting that cargo ship
With a slow brush stroke against the ocean,
You down there, pushing that stand of redwoods
Up from under the shadowed folds of the mountain,
You, piling up rocks and then tumbling, humbling them
Down the rivulets glistening the redwood roots,
You, crystallizing that distant city out of silica and steel,
You, driving the bugs wild as they hover over the stream,
Spinning around each other in eccentric orbits,
Aglow in sunlight shafted by looming trees.
It’s 4-D and 360 degrees of shock and awe.
Eighty in the shade, and I’ve got it made;
Was I worried about something once? Troubles?
Washed away like thirst
With a slug of water from the jug.
Hah!  A turn in the road up ahead, gotta be a view from there,
Let’s go! 

Guns to Garden Rakes

When I was thirteen years old, I looked forward to our family’s regular visits to my grandma’s house in Taft, California. At that age, the highlight of those trips was going out in the desert oilfields with my dad, who would let the kids drive the car on the dirt roads. He would bring along the 22-caliber rifle he kept at my grandma’s house, and we’d go shooting at tin cans and at jackrabbits in the dry gullies and ravines. I hit many a tin can, but, happily, never hit a jackrabbit. They were too fast, and my dad wouldn’t let us shoot at them if they dashed onto the top of a ridge where we could get a clearer shot.  He didn’t want stray bullets flying very far across the desert.  He was very strict about gun safety, and all of us kids respected what he told us.

 

I lost interest in firing at tin cans and jackrabbits with a rifle when I grew out of puberty. It’s just as well, because the days of sport shooting are over in the oilfields of Taft. Security guards are on constant patrol out on the dirt roads, protecting the oil wells and pipelines from terrorists or others who would damage equipment.

 

Strangely, it would seem that the jackrabbits of Taft are safer than the students at Virginia Tech.

 

There are nine guns for every ten people in this country. It’s fine for folks to have hunting rifles, as long as they use and store them safely. But a great many of America’s guns have no function except for killing people, and it’s time to get rid of them. Our horrific murder rate is largely about the easy availability of pistols and assault weapons. Let’s gather them up, melt them down, and make them into golf clubs and garden rakes. Let’s have an NRA that’s just about hunter safety, as it was in the days when I took its class as a Boy Scout.

 

Cho Seung-Hui wouldn’t have been able to kill so many people with only a 22-caliber rifle. But even one victim would have been far too many. There’s more to ending this murder and mayhem than instituting sensible controls on guns. Something has gone terribly wrong, and it is not just one young man’s psychiatric crisis.

 

Cho Seung-Hui came from a decent and well-meaning family, grew up in a church full of caring people, and went to a college where staff members saw his plight and tried to help him. While he did experience ridicule as a teenager, most of the people around him, most of the time, were kind and respectful. What happened at Virginia Tech was not so much a failure by the individuals around Cho Seung-Hui as it was a failure of our culture.

 

Our president led us into a “war” on terrorism, violently over-reacting to a problem that can be solved only by politics and behind-the-scenes police work. Our movies, televisions, and computer screens relentlessly feed us images of violence. We’ve glorified killing, we’ve filled our minds with “eye for an eye” propaganda. At the same time, there is less and less community life in our country. Millions are isolated from others, existing for months or years with hardly any intimate, face-to-face contact. At some point, they lose touch not only with others, but with themselves. Mix together violent imagery and deep loneliness, and terrible chemistry can happen.

 

But mix together peace and communion, and wonderful chemistry can happen. Faith communities can reach out to troubled people, making sure they do not fall through the cracks of our congregations and neighborhoods. We can offer community life that is engaging enough to convince lonely people to come out of the shadows. We can organize to pressure the media to stop producing the propaganda of murder, hate, and fear. We can demand that our politicians abandon their bellicose rhetoric and start modeling a cooperative, creative approach to the world’s conflicts. We can rise up and demand reasonable gun control laws. If we want to live in a culture that embodies divine compassion, we will do no less.