Let not your heart be troubled: believe in
God, believe also in me.
In my Father's house are many mansions:
if it were not so,
I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and
receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. Jesus in the 14th chapter Gospel of John
Odd that Jesus, after spending time on earth lifting up the
poor, would promise us mansions in the sky. What did Jesus mean when he said
that in his Father’s house there were many mansions, that he was going there to
prepare a place for us?
Do you wonder about what comes next? Books written by
people who claim to have had afterlife experiences sell millions. People do
seem curious about what awaits. Google “books about life after death,” and the
screen fills to overflowing with books written by people claiming to have died,
visited heaven and returned to write about the trip.
Raymond Moody is the bestselling author of eleven books which
have sold over 20 million copies. “Life After Life,” first written in 1975, sold
over 13 million copies worldwide. A 2015 “Special Edition” is right now in the
top 10 sellers of spiritual books on Amazon.
One woman wrote an amazon.com review. “This book helped me
heal after my mother’s death. I was a wreck with grief for 2 1/2 months. I had
that 1% doubt in my mind that maybe, just maybe, there wasn't a Heaven after
all. I started drinking every day. I was a mess! I
read this in two days, and was "healed."
Remember Edgar Cayce. Born in 1877; he died for the final
time in 1945 after convincing millions that he’d been there and back many times.
Cayce was a Christian who had regular NDEs or near-death-experiences and
brought back medical cures and information on future events, predicting the
1932 stock market crash, the rise of Adolph Hitler, the creation of the UN and
dozens of other events that actually happened. Of course, he also predicted the
discovery of Atlantis, that China would become the cradle of Christianity, and
the second coming of Christ would happen in 1998.
Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) is well known for her work on death and dying, although she eventually claimed that death
does not exist. Death, she thought, is one of several
possible transitions through permeable boundaries, whatever that
means.
The idea that there are several possible transitions
through permeable boundaries can be boiled down to this. We are all guessing.
None of us knows. The skeptic in me believes those who claim to have experienced
life after death had an experience far more emotional and spiritual rather than
real.
Some years ago, I joined a group of local clergy in a
discussion of the question, “What happens to us after we die.” We agreed to
maintain one another’s responses in confidence but I can tell you that the
people in their pews would be surprised by the collective responses. These are
people who have spend a great deal of time pondering the ultimacy of the
question and few of them towed the company line.
Who knows? No one knows, which is why I prefer the work of
David Eagleman. DAVID EAGLEMAN is a neuroscientist, a
Guggenheim Fellow, and a New York Times bestselling author. He
wrote and presented the PBS series The Brain. At night, his
bio says, he writes fiction.
Eagleman’s book entitled “Sum: Forty Tales from the
Afterlife,” could be considered satire, or could also be considered a brief
collection of rational and thoughtful postulates.
One of Eagleman’s 40 guesses has it that after you die, you
get to choose what it is you’d like to be in the next life. You could, for
example, choose to live a simpler life as a horse, grazing in the warm sun,
loping across the pasture with no responsibility.
You announce your decision and begin to change. Muscles
bulge, a matt of hair grows, fingers and feet become hooves, your brain
changes, synapses unplug here and re-plug into equestrian patterns.
But suddenly, just before the metamorphosis is complete,
while you still have the ability to reason as a human, you realize that you are
quickly losing the ability to comprehend what it was like to have been human.
Your ability to think like a human quickly departs; the more you become what
you’ve asked to become, you lose the ability to wonder what it would be like to
be either a human or a horse.
This, Eagleman says, is punishment for your sins; left at
the destination you chose without the ability to remember where you started.
Another possibility in a world ruled by technology is that
we never really die. We just lose the password to our computer and the rest of
the world believes we have, therefore, passed away.
In another scenario, Eagleman explores the motivational
qualities of death. Upon arriving, you are offered an opportunity to change anything
about your life; you can be taller or thinner; or you can change the world.
With the sadness of your own funeral fresh in your mind, you proudly announce
you want to end all death.
Your afterlife adviser warns you this has been tried before
and has never ended well. But, with your human ego yet intact, you persist. You
return to earth and go to work. Eventually your anti-death crusade succeeds.
The last to die is an incurably ill elderly woman. You’ve done it. All death
comes to an end. People can now live their lives knowing they no longer have to
think about dying.
But, that creates unintended consequences. The thought of
death, it turns out had been motivational. People actually worried about
whether how they lived would have an impact on their after-death experiences.
That motivation is gone. Accomplishments decline as does empathy and caring and
giving. Churches are empty. Charities go broke.
It turns out that both the uncertainty of the date of death
as well as what happens afterward were motivational. People had been motivated by
both to live better lives. People actually spend a lot of time thinking about
those things and it changed the way they lived.
Which brings us to one last scenario. You arrive at the
Pearly Gates to discover that God’s favorite book is Mary Shelly’s
“Frankenstein.” God is distressed that so few humans gave any real thought to
what God intended by Creation and God is relived to find one who did; Mary
Shelly.
For the first time, you begin to see the purpose behind the
trajectory of Creation. God created the earth, the sky, the waters. Then God
QUOTE sewed together the astounding platypus, the compact beetle, the weighty
woolly mammoth, and the glistening pod of dolphins.”
And then he created humans, feeling this was his most
prized possession; creatures, like God, with the capacity to care, empathize,
love. God marveled as they wrote holy books, invented musical instruments,
built marvelous cities, learned how to feed themselves and cared enough to feed
others who could not feed themselves.
Then they started to fight, to capture and kill. God tried
to talk sense into them but discovered that even as their creator he had little
control. The beauty of the earth was marred by blood and God could do nothing
but weep. That, you realize, is the punishment for human sin; humans will be
separated from God for eternity because God has locked himself in a room with a
copy of Mary Shelly’s novel, pondering the way in which Creators are powerless
over that which they created and must eventually flee from the things they have
wrought.
Eagleman, Cayce, Kubler-Ross…guessers all in my humble
opinion. Add me to that list of guessers. We don’t know what awaits us. God
finds the guessing to be useful, motivational maybe. God could have made it
simpler. God could have taken the guess work out of death. Dentists could teach
God how to do that.
Every six months my dentist sends a notice, tells me when
I’ll be sitting in his chair to have my teeth cleaned. I call it my “it’s time
to get serious about flossing notice.” God could do that. God could send an
“it’s time to get real about life” notice. Dear Rodger, “your day is whatever
date God chooses. Just thought you’d like to start getting ready.” //GOD//
But, that’s not how God arranged the world, living and
dying. It is ambiguous guesswork for a reason. It’s about being born again
every day. Searching for the answer to the question, “Why am I still here”
every morning as your eyes open and you roll out of bed.
What I do believe, what is enough for me is what Jesus said
to Paul, “My grace is sufficient for thee.”
Whatever awaits, one thing is sure. We can plan to arrive on the other side
singing the words of the hymn, “I come with joy, forgiven, loved, and saved.”
AMEN
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