Hell and Other Happy Endings
By Tom Reiber
August 11, 2002
OT: Micah 7: 18-20 and NT: II Corinthians 12: 1-6
m of the opinion that when it comes to religion, as with many subjects, many of us tend to have a pretty basic set of thoughts and questions. When it comes to religion and the afterlife, we worry about hell and hope we're going to heaven. Comedian Steve Martin plays on these anxieties in a bit in which he dies and goes to heaven and is shocked to find that everything he had been taught as kid had been true. Then he's told how many times he has taken the Lord's name in vain over the course of his lifetime, a number so staggering it prompts him to do so yet one more time.
No matter how
liberated we are we never fully escape some of the traditional ideas that were
drilled into us. I ran into Brooke
Laughlin the other day and she got to talking about her plant watering duties
here in the sanctuary. She told me
about getting locked out and feeling
the guilt of being the one who allowed the church plants to die, knowing that
that couldn't be a good thing in the bigger scheme of things.
Or consider this
email from Quimby, who's up in Main, overseeing the construction of his new
place:
I was painting my
barn today, and it reminded me of a time when I was I young man painting my
Aunt Ruby's House. As the day went on I
realized that I didn't have enough paint. If I drove to town to get more I
would never get done in time for Saturday night in Mt. Vernon (always a
swinging time.) So, I watered down the two gallons I had left, but just as I
was almost finished it began to pour a rainstorm like our town had never seen
before. As the paint began running off
the side of my Aunt's house I looked up and said "Lord what shall I
do?"
I was stunned when a booming voice
echoed from on high: "Repaint and thin no more".
In addition to this
humorous and anecdotal backdrop, we've also got whole theological movements
springing up around these issues. As
the idea of sin, hell and damnation played themselves out in the religious
world, you had your Calvinists asserting that God had predestined a select
group for heaven, the rest were doomed. The Universalists sprang up in reaction to the Calvinists. As their name implies, they believed that
salvation was intended to be a universal experience; that everybody was going
to heaven. In time the Universalists
joined forces with the Unitarians, giving birth to the modern day association
known as the Unitarian Universalists. Now before you all run out and join the UU's, let me say that I think
it's high time we re-evaluate our own thinking in relation to the threat of
hell.
I'm reminded of a
conversation I had with some of our middle schoolers in which I admitted that I
didn't believe in hell as it has been traditionally described. One of them (who will remain anonymous)
followed that all the way through to its logical end, asking, “Then why are we
here?” The implication was that the
only reason we would go to church or even pause to consider the good life is
because of the threat of everlasting punishment.
Even after the
transforming tidal wave of the scientific revolution, we can't help but wonder
what will happen when we die. That
curiosity and concern often blends into our general fear of the unknown, of
mortality and death, and we're left with a vague desire to be “good” as a way
of hedging our bets. But that doesn't
advance our understanding of the spiritual life all that much. In fact,
it really infantilizes us into
thinking in terms of rewards and punishments, as opposed to a bolder approach
rooted in an enthusiasm for life, for its beauty and harmony, its highs and
lows, its passions and challenges. I
think there's potential for us to push ourselves more on this front, so that
we're not doing the right thing in hopes of tilting some kind of cosmic scale
in our favor, but rather because we are being drawn into a more intimate
relationship with God.
These kinds of
considerations find artful and at times hilarious expression in the movie, Defending
Your Life. In it, Albert Brooks
plays Dan, a guy who gets hit by a bus and suddenly finds himself in Judgment
City, the place where you go after you die. At first glance it appears this is worst-case scenario: right after you
die you're put on trial and have to defend your every action. But it turns out there's a twist: you get
judged not on whether or not you lived a perfect life, but on the degree to
which you learned to overcome your fears. You sit in front of a big screen and scenes of your life are shown as if
you're watching a movie. Rip Torn, who
plays the heavenly equivalent of a defense attorney, breaks it down for Dan
this way: “Most people on Earth only
use a tiny portion of their brain,” he says, adding the aside that, because of
that, the attorneys in Judgment City refer to newcomers as “little
brains.” “Because you only use a tiny
portion of your brain,” he explains, “most of your energy goes into battling
fear. The purpose of Judgment City, is
to see how far along a person is in relation to your chief task during your
life on Earth: overcoming fear.”
As Dan's trial unfolds, we get the feeling that he
may not be moving on to the next plane of existence. The prosecutor mercilessly moves from scene to scene in his life,
showing repeated incidents of fear holding him back. In one, he asks his wife to role-play so he can practice asking
for a raise. He sets his sights very
high, and in the role-play his is firm about not being able to accept anything
less than the amount he has set. Then
they cut to the actual interview with his boss and he immediately caves in to a
low-ball figure.
The plot jumps forward when Dan meets Julia (played by Meryl
Streep). Julia is full of life and
wonder, personifying fearless love and feminine grace. She invites Albert over to one of her
screenings one day. He slips unnoticed
into the back of the courtroom and is immediately mesmerized by the image on
the screen. You see a house engulfed in
flames. Julia comes running out,
carrying one of her children and leading another by the hand. Then she dashes back into the house,
emerging seconds later with the family cat. Whereas in Dan's trial the judges look on with stern aloofness, in
Julia's trial they're actually oohing and awing over her bravery and
courage. When the lights come on in the
courtroom, one of the judges thanks everyone for indulging his desire to watch
the scene again for the second time. Suffice it to say that none of this helps Dan's already failing
self-esteem.
His struggle with his fear soon bleeds beyond the confines of his
courtroom experience to his limbo existence in Judgment City. The place has been intentionally designed to
look like the world left behind, right down to the new strip mall that's
opening up. One of the perks of being
there is the food is delicious and you can eat all you want without gaining a pound. Julia takes advantage of the opportunity,
enjoying the pleasure of good food and the newfound freedom from caloric
concern. But Dan is self-conscious
about overdoing it, afraid of what others might think.
Just when you think Dan is hopelessly mired in his little brain,
fear-based approach to life, he rises to the occasion and takes a brave
risk. After losing his court battle and
being informed that he's going back to Earth for another try, he climbs aboard
an Earthbound tram, crushed and dejected. But then he sees Julia in another tram, headed for a different
destination. And suddenly he gets it:
he realizes that if he wants to experience love, he's going to have to take
some risks. He leaps out of his tram,
zigs and zags his way through several others and leaps up onto the side of
Julia's. Eventually the door opens and
he's allowed in, moving on to the next level by the skin of his teeth!
Our sacred scripture tells us that “perfect love casts out fear”(I John
4:18). The idea seems to be that love
and fear are mutually incompatible. Fear is about self, about survival, about warding off threats and
avoiding injury. This is a mode of
existence that has been hard-wired into us over millions and billions of
years. That's why it is so easy to slip
into self-defense mode. As soon as
life's air-raid sirens begin to rev up we're heading for the bomb shelters,
closing off the rest of the world in a panicked flight for survival. That can come about from the threat of
physical attack, but it can also come about from the threat of psychological
attack. We sense rejection or a
struggle and we become the psychological equivalent of Fort Knox, guarding our
spiritual gold with big, thick walls.
Love moves from a deeper place. It might not have the million years of hard wiring supporting it, but
some people believe it's the end-goal that it's all moving toward. Maybe we had to start with physical survival
to get to this point, but now new modes of being are being birthed. Maybe this is what Jesus saw and tried to
communicate: this new mode of being called love. Jesus realized that there were worse things than being hurt or
killed, that we are more than mere physiological organisms tasked with
survival; we are spiritual beings able to commune with the transcendent powers
of the universe, able to see and revere the divine spark within all
people.
When you take in the full breadth of what Jesus seems to have said, you
end up with a rejection of the world as it gets spun and dangled before
us. I think that's why so many of his
parables imply that the spiritual life involves a deep giving up. Think of the woman who loses a coin or the
shepherd who lost a sheep: they let everything go in order to find what was
lost. I think Jesus was saying that
that needs to be our attitude about our lives, that we have to be willing to
risk it all. Like the mountain lion and
the dandelion, like the ocean wave and the sun's rays, we are embedded in the
mysterious fabric of life.
How silly to waste our energies seeking security,
when we are but a ripple on the cosmic pond. How much better to marvel at our gliding movement across the surface of
the deep and enjoy the ride.
Huston Smith, the scholar of world religions, reveals something of his
own struggles around hell and the traditional teaching on the subject in his
latest book, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of
Disbelief. Near the end of the
book he recounts a trip he took to India in 1964 as part of a semester's leave
of study.
“At the moment to be
described,” he writes, “I was conversing with one of a number of gurus whose
reputations had taken me to the foothills of the Himalayas, when suddenly there
appeared in the doorway of the bungalow I was in a figure so striking that or a
moment I thought I might be seeing an apparition. Tall, dressed in a white gown, and with a full beard, it was a
man I cam to know as Father Lazarus, a missionary of the Eastern Orthodox
Church who had spent the last twenty years in India. Ten minutes after I was introduced to him I had forgotten my
gurus completely…and for a solid week we tramped the Himalayan foothills
talking nonstop.
“…I had told him that I
found myself strongly attracted to Hinduism because of its doctrine of
universal salvation. Everyone makes it
in the end. Its alternative, eternal
damnation, struck me as monstrous doctrine that I could not accept.
“Brother Lazarus responded
by telling me his views on that matter. They took off from the passage in Second Corinthians where Saint Paul tells
of knowing someone who …had been caught up into the third heaven…. Paul …goes on to say that in that heaven the
man ‘heard things that were not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to
repeat.' Father Lazarus quoted the passages verbatim. Paul was speaking of himself, Father Lazarus was convinced, and
the secret he was told in the third heaven was the ultimately everyone is
saved. That is the fact of the matter,
Father Lazarus believed, but it must not be told because the uncomprehending
would take it as license for irresponsibility.
“That exegesis solved my
problem and has stayed in place ever since…” (pp. 269-270).
I
like this anecdote in part because Huston Smith has always struck me as someone
who appreciated the real beauty of religion. Whether he's describing Hinduism or Islam, Judaism or
Christianity, he sees past the petty attempts at manipulation to that which is
essential. He brings you to the edge of
the numinous, to the transcendent dimension of these various traditions. Here in his candid thoughts about life after
death, he helps us see that in our “little brain” sort of way we've shrunk the
mystery of death down to the oversimplified categories of heaven and hell. Of course the truth is, the mystery far
exceeds them. When we begin to open up
to the mystery, we open to our own lives in a way that enables us to face the
fear and anxieties that, left untendend, can choke us like so many spiritual
weeds.
Thomas
Merton, the Trappist monk, was a spiritual pioneer in the sense of someone who
has gone before, facing the unknown with marvelous spiritual courage. He describes an early, formative experience,
which took place when he was passing through Rome as an 18 year old. Not a highly religious person at this point
in his life, he says the images of Christ were beginning to work their way into
his psyche. Then he had this
experience:
I
was in my room. It was night. The light was on. Suddenly it seemed to me that [my] Father, who had been dead more
than a year, was there with me. The
sense of his presence was so vivid and as real and as startling as if he had
touched my arm or spoken to me. The
whole thing passed in a flash, but in that flash, instantly, I was overwhelmed
with a sudden and profound insight into the misery and corruption of my own
soul, and I was pierced deeply with a light that made me realize something of
the condition I was in, and I was filled with horror at what I saw, and my
whole being rose up in revolt against what was within me, and my soul desired
escape and liberation and freedom from all this with an intensity and an
urgency unlike anything I had ever known before. And now I think for the first time I really began to pray—praying
not with my lips and with my intellect and my imagination, but praying out of
the very roots of my life, of my being, and praying to the God I had never
known, to reach down towards me out of His darkness and to help me get free of
the thousand terrible things that held my will in their slavery” (Thomas
Merton: Essential Writings, p. 31).
When the manifold depths of reality are opened before us in this way,
we glimpse, even if just for a moment, “the unbearable lightness of being,” we
sense an invitation to venture more deeply into the mysteries of our existence. My point today is a simple one: I think we
need to move beyond scare tactics about heaven and hell and realize that the
spiritual adventure begins now, in this moment, and this moment. Every moment is a window onto the eternal
now.
Back to Huston Smith. After
sharing the anecdote about his encounter with the Orthodox priest in the
Himalayas, Smith concludes his most recent book, perhaps one of his last, with
his own best guess concerning what will happen after he dies. We read these words yesterday at a small
graveside service for Amanda Crosby, whose ashes were placed back in the
Earth. You may recall that in the
spring, in the public memorial service, some were sprinkled on a hawk that was
then released. As we read these words
yesterday, a hawk appeared high in the
sky, lit up by the sun.
“After I shed my body, I will continue to be conscious of
the life I have lived and the people who remain on Earth. Sooner or later, however, there will come a
time when no one alive will have heard of me, let alone known me, whereupon
there ceases to be any point in my hanging around. Echoing [a] reported farewell, ‘Thanks, thanks for everything;
praise, praise, for it all….'
“As long as I continue to be involved with my
individuality, I will retain awareness that it is I, … who is enjoying that
vision; and al long as I want to continue in that awareness I will be able to
do so. For me, though—mystic that I
am…—after oscillating back and forth between enjoying the sunset and enjoying
that [it is I who is enjoying it], I
expect to find the uncompromised sunset more absorbing. [At that point] the string will have been
cut. The bird will be free.”[1]
Seasoned, mature reflection on life after death of that caliber can
open us to the mystery that death represents. It can also motivate us to live life fully. Once we take away the fear of death, we find we are liberated
into a deeper capacity for living. Hence Jesus' statement that he came that we “might have life and have it
to the full.”
Speaking of mature perspectives brings to mind my neighbor, Rose. She's getting on in years and is at that
point in life where she's fond of telling the same stories over and over
again. I noticed my grandfather did the
same thing. After he died I realized
the stories I heard over and over were the ones I would go on to remember.
One of Rose's dates back to when her husband was dying of cancer. Her ten year old son, Charlie, kept saying,
“When Daddy gets better, we're gonna go fishing.” This was long enough ago that the doctor was the same doctor who
had delivered Rose's son, so he and the family went back a long way. The doctor said to Rose, “How can I tell
little Charlie that his daddy isn't going to get better?”
When Rose tells the story, she lets that sink in for a second. Then she says, “But years later, when
Charlie was grown up, I said to him, ‘Charlie, your daddy wasn't able to take
you fishing. But now you've got your
own little boy, and you can take him.' And you know what?” she asks triumphantly? “He does.”
How fitting that the accumulated wisdom of Rose's life can be summed up
in that story. It affirms the mystery
of death, while at the same time cherishing the gift of life. Like that hawk illuminated against the
bright blue sky, it calls us to spread our wings and soar, tapping into our
full potential and growing into the people God is calling us to be.
Amen.
[1] Smith,
Huston. Why Religion Matters
(New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 270-271.
© 2002 .
All rights reserved
