Saints and Sinners: Many concepts, only one heaven
Given the alternatives, most of us would like to go to heaven when we die. But we must first enter a couple of caveats. While we want to go heaven, we want to make it clear we don’t mean right now. We like it here fine for the time being. No hurry, Lord.
And some of us are not sure the conditions in heaven will be to our liking. An eternity of hymn-singing and nonstop hugging isn’t everybody’s idea of eternal bliss.
We understand Thomas Huxley who, speaking of the afterlife, said he would prefer “the upper reaches of hell where the temperature and the company are not too trying.” We recognize the heaven types Huxley is talking about from people we have all met at Aunt Martha’s church.
Some people, however, have no trouble with the idea of heaven. Not only do they accept it literally, they also can’t wait to get there.
The father of the late Daniel Poling, longtime editor of the Christian Herald magazine, was one of these rare human beings. “The greatest day of my life,” he once said, “will be the day after they say I’m dead.”
Evelyn Underhill, the English mystic, was another. She believed implicitly in all the doctrines of the church, although she did confess whimsically on one occasion, when she was ill and old, “I sometimes think the resurrection of the body, unless much improved in construction, a mistake.”
And in a cemetery in England is a lovely epitaph over the grave of a man who obviously regarded death and resurrection as normal as sleeping and waking: “When thou callest me, Lord Christ, I will arise, but first let me rest awhile, for I am very weary.”
It is apparent that, for this doughty pilgrim, heaven is not going to be a place of eternal rest. He’ll rest now but he expects to be up and about in the next world.
Rev. Arthur Ford, the medium who is said to have put Bishop James Pike in touch with his departed son, told of talking with scientists in the next world who are continuing to do research in their new environment.
“Remember,” wrote Emmett Fox, one of the most popular of the metaphysical writers, “that death makes positively no change in you. You are just the same person you were before it happened. You will go to the sort of place, and be among the sort of people, for whom you have prepared yourself by your habitual thinking and your mode of conduct while living on this earth.”
Jesus himself spoke of renewing human relationships in the Kingdom of God. He also seemed to suggest that the kingdom would not be devoid of all earthly pleasures. While he was eating the Last Supper with his friends, he said, “I will not drink henceforth of the fruit of the vine until I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”
For the poet Robert Browning, heaven was going to be an opportunity to carry on with more satisfaction the human work that had fallen short of its goal. In “Old Pictures in Florence,” the failed artists do not envy the painters who have won fame on Earth: “We are faulty — why not?” they said. “We have time in store. Things learned on Earth we shall practice in heaven.”
To Browning, Earth’s special glory lay in the struggle and the chase, “the almost but not quite getting it and the brave adventure of trying again to get it.”
While these conceptions differ in their particulars, they all succeed in picturing the next world as a lively place, full of vigorous and varied activity and intensely interesting. They deal vividly and imaginatively with a universal experience that awaits all of us. Hugs in abundance, yes — but only after a good day’s work.
George Plagenz is an ordained minister and veteran newsman based in Columbus, Ohio.