Tuesday, January 20, 2015

There was a book that came out a few years ago about a four year old who had an afterlife experience called "Heaven Is For Real."  It was one of those books that was taken as proof of heaven by many people.  Unfortunately, it has recently come to light that it's fictitious.  The boy who told the story is much older now and admits that it was all made up.  Apparently he was coached and the dishonesty has been a challenging thing to hide through the years.  Ironically, the book--a lie portrayed as truth--is more proof of hell.  And that's something we have enough of already.
A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of leading a class on the C. S. Lewis book called "The Great Divorce" in which he illustrates hell and heaven and the nature of the life of a person offered to choose where eternity will be spent.  Its an amazingly convicting story--not focused on the afterlife as much as on the living of our days now.  
Heaven is a powerful motivator in some belief systems—eternal paradise, nirvana, rewarded with virgins, streets of gold.  Hell on the other hand is an equally powerful motivator—it has, currently it seems, fallen out of favor with most people, but still as something from which most of us would repel, it can certainly push us in the opposite direction.  Oddly, it seems that fear of hell is often a greater motivator than the promise of heaven--people are more interested in avoiding hell than they are in entering heaven.  Hence, some of the scare tactics used to present people with the option of being saved.  I remember such tactics being used when I was growing up in a region of the US thick with churches, oil rigs and bait shops.
I don’t know what to think of eternity.  I trust that it is beyond my comprehension--either eternal paradise or damnation.  I like the way C. S. Lewis illustrated heaven and hell in his story, but I still have to say that the concept of heaven and hell in the after-life has not been a large part of the make-up of my faith.  Its there, its just not steering the ship.  What is steering the ship for me is a sort of heaven and hell on this side of the divide.  What brings me joy and what fills me with dread in the living of my days is the way heaven and hell are significant threads in the fabric of my faith in the nitty-grittiness of each day.  I experience heaven when I do something for another without any expectation of payback; or I help someone who is down; or I sacrifice something I may want so someone else can have something they need.  I experience hell, on the other hand when I’m selfish or mean-spirited or stingy or greedy or critical in order to hurt instead of help.  These are the way heaven and hell figure into my faith and belief system.  Frankly, I think that’s what Lewis was portraying in his story too.  His point was that the heaven and hell we live in this life will most likely be the heaven or hell we live beyond this life—not that we can’t accept heaven instead of hell.  Its just that our habits and character are so deeply ingrained in heaven or in hell, given the choice we aren't likely to choose whatever we haven't been familiar with all along.  Who we are and choose to be in the daily-ness of our lives shapes the who we will be beyond our lives--it reflects whether we are drinking from pure or brackish waters.  And that's a powerful motivator to not delay being who we really want to be in regard to our relationships with others.  There's no reason to withhold compassion or concern or generosity or kindness--the way others treat us ultimately doesn't matter in regard to how we live.  Please understand that when I describe this kind of living in the face of rudeness or insincerity or mean-spiritedness isn't a reason to stay in an abusive relationship or to not try to make the kind of changes that will cause those relationships to improve.  The point is that we can be a portal for heaven to pour into this world simply by living as if heaven is real.  Remarkably, if heaven is for real, then for me that's the way to prove it.  

© Stephen Carl

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