Is Heaven Necessary?

(A quick caveat here…these thoughts are less organized and developed than I had hoped. Nevertheless I felt it would be good to get them out into their own realm of existence to grow or ferment for some time. Perhaps then I can come back to them to see how if and how they have grown or withered. There may be some repetition in the ideas so I apologize for any confusion that may cause to the reader.)

My father died this weekend from cancer that had spread from one of his kidneys to his liver and pancreas. In the end it was his body’s inability to remove toxins from his systems that took his life. When I last say him, his skin was jaundiced and had almost a greasy texture – the skin excreting poisons as his body’s last attempt to remedy itself. It was pure life struggling to continue on living at that point – assignments being given to organs and systems not appropriate for the given task.

I am not looking forward to his funeral. Even at the time of his death family members and friends were talking about how he had “gone home” or “gone on to a better place.” And I am almost certain that the sermon to be given at his funeral will include some sort of attempt to save the unsaved with a salvation message.

As we picked out a casket and went over other funeral arrangements the thought was reinforced in me at how all of these motions and preparations are for the living and not the dead.

I am thinking about all the ideas surrounding salvation and heaven and the afterlife. How comforting an idea it is that, whatever might occur to us while we are living, we can rest on some concept of heaven or a subjective afterlife.

As Christians we profess that there is some sort of afterlife or resurrection of the dead and the focal point of this belief is the resurrection of Christ. The comforting hope of an afterlife is all that we have and I should like to stress that it is exactly that – a hope. Nowadays though with so much of my personal theology up for grabs as it were there is not resting for me on the promise of an afterlife or resurrection. And so I see the promises and statements of faith regarding these as being there as hope for the living- hope to help us deal with the frightening thought of non-existence.

My theological struggles center around trying to find or develop a faith that I can claim as my own and that fits with my person including my worries, fears, hopes and earnest desire to live a proper life. And this struggle has ended up with a massing tearing away at those beliefs embedded within me from childhood.

I have remained intellectually quiet on the prospects of an afterlife for one because there have been so many other pressing issues to consider first. Nevertheless, the ramifications of some of my leanings in other areas have silently affected my beliefs regarding what happens after death.

The belief in an afterlife as some sort of reward or for any other purposes is (and others might be in agreement with this) a coping strategy for the existential fear of the prospect of not existing. More precisely, it is for the fear of not subjectively existing. We wish to know that our subjective consciousness will not end in death, that we will, in some form, retain our psychical sense of self beyond our death.

I cannot in good conscience make any faith statement about this issue as fact, but rather only as hope. Unfortunately, in ways often unspoken, this hope for an afterlife underpins the various Christian denominations in existence today. For them the security of the afterlife is obtained through practices and creeds and prayers.

This is a great stumbling block for our faith while at the same time it is the locus of our faith. Would it have been better if the Church arouse out of the ashes not of the Easter experience but something else instead? Yet I know and feel deep down that the notion of life rising out of destruction – of the hope placed in such possibility is central to our faith. Perhaps it is simply because it makes a shift from being a thing hoped for to a belief which gives a certainty to it that it does not deserve?

If heaven remains only a hope, then perhaps the focus could, as it should, be returned to this life and this world. When the object, the central premise of a faith is that of an afterlife then the faith, in my view, becomes useless. A faith, as an orientation of ones life, as the way ones life becomes constituted, should be focused on this world and this world alone.

As I more and more work towards building a personal faith that is focused and based in this world and as my view of God becomes that of an impersonal deity, I wonder how that central purpose of heaven – the promise of better things to come- fits in. Indeed the issue that it addresses – existential fear of non-existence – does not disappear. Therefore some answer regarding what happens when one dies must be reached.

What I want to say next may hot make that much sense. There is room for spirit, I believe, in any newer theology that emerges from explorations into a non-personal, non-agential concept of God and the world. However, the discovery of that spirit – rather than coming from some outer realms, the separate world of the old theistic God – will come from diving deep into existence, into the stuff of the universe. Spirit will emerge out of matter. And this will be extremely hard and it will in some way require the cataclysmic destruction of our current outlook on our relationship as a species to nature and the world. In order for spirit to arise we will need to demolish the mental separation that exists in our perception of ourselves as separate from the cosmos. Perhaps it is not unexpected that heaven is described as a city – as a human construction.

I feel, although I cannot hope to prove, that spirit will be found within, deep down entrenched in ourselves , our bodies, our matter, our earthiness. And I do not necessarily think that we can retain a view of a heaven that is the abode of spirit only. The other route is to find that a heaven is not necessary. It would require an antidote to the existential fear of non-existence for that is an issue that will never go away. Thus the persistence even today in the vision of heaven and afterlife as commonly understood.

Can we find a hope- a comfort- that does not require a heaven?