I had a Facebook “conversation” not too long ago where I confessed to getting old. A friend of mine responded with “it beats being dead,” to which I replied, without thinking, that it did, for a fact.
Another friend immediately (and accurately) pointed out that we actually didn’t know that for a fact. The instant I read his post, I felt a bit like Peter when the rooster crowed for the third time. And I was instantly ashamed.
I was ashamed because I am a Christian. And as such, I’m supposed to know better.
Of course, everyone knows that Christians believe in an afterlife. We believe that what is waiting for us after death is so much better than what we have here that we can’t even imagine it.
Often, this idea gets over-simplified (or more accurately, derided) by some as “pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die” — an unspecified and intangible reward you get in return for a lifetime of denial, sacrifice and doing what you’re told. And I’m sorry to say that it is the sum total of what some people think Christianity means.
I think it’s more accurate to say that Christians believe that death is the moment that we cease looking at the world through a dirty mirror, as Paul the Apostle famously wrote to the Church at Corinth, and get a look at the way things really are. It’s not just life after death — it’s life as it really is.
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Cor. 13:12, NRSV).
Heaven, put simply, is when all of our questions have answers, and when we are reunited with the God we have been, whether we know it or not, yearning for all of our lives.
Before I go any further, I should say that I believe that as an important a concept as heaven for Christians, it is secondary to the much more important question of how we act towards our fellow men and women here and now; we are called to make earth as heaven-like as possible right now, with our work, our love, and our compassion. Simply sitting back, twiddling our thumbs, and waiting for heaven to come to us isn’t an option.
But I digress: I think the reason I gave my casual, off-the-cuff answer to my friend is twofold. First, I am, like most people, seeped in a lifetime of secular thinking, where death is seen as crushingly final. From where we stand now, when death comes, all of your choices end. From the earthbound perspective, the story is over.
Of course, Christians believe the exact opposite — that death is the moment when the story actually begins. My pastor has a wonderful habit of saying someone who has died has “joined the Church Triumphant.” Apparently, it’s an idea hasn’t fully gotten into my bones yet.
There is a second possibility — that the off-the-cuff, without-thinking answer is much closer to what a person really believes than the reasoned, deliberate one. In other words, with my answer, I revealed that I really don’t believe what I actually profess to believe.
While I concede the possibility, I don’t think this is what’s going on at all. I’ve had ample opportunities during my lifetime to cultivate my innate deist tendencies (I never felt the call of true agnosticism within me, much less atheism). Instead, quite the opposite has happened; as I have gotten older, I have grown in my belief, and my faith.
In the interest of clarity, that belief is best summed up by the concise words of the Apostle’s Creed;
I believe in God the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth;
And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord:
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;
the third day he rose from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic* church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.
Instead, I think there is a third, and much more likely, possibility; that I am simply guilty of having imperfect faith. To quote our friend Paul again, faith “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1). I have not seen heaven — not in this life, at least — but I really do I believe it exists, for the simple reason that people that I trust — Jesus, Paul, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others — have told me that it does.
I do not have the faith of any of these men; least of all Jesus, who Paul calls “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” Fortunately, faith is a not a quality that one is born with; it is a quantity that is developed, like strength or knowledge. If I am physically weak now, I can exercise, and become stronger. If I am ignorant on a given subject, I can study, and learn. And if my faith is imperfect (a foregone conclusion), prayer, study and fellowship can only increase it.
If so, maybe next time, simple Facebook conversations won’t trip me up, and I won’t have to use almost 1,000 words to correct what I should have said in 30 or less.
We can always hope.
*We Protestants read this as “universal,” but my Catholic friends can feel free to substitute the uppercase C.
