On Not Being Too "Heavenly Minded"

Is Christianity about trying to locate the meaning of our lives in the Eternal realm? In some ways, yes, obviously...but still I'm wary of people who talk about that sort of thing.

I do believe the meaning of this life is in God. We're in agreement on that. The question is how to think and talk about it. About age seven...I was...just thinking. I was not in any of the emotional moods I remember feeling at that age. I was capable, at that age, of feeling sorrow, regret, fear, anger, despair, boredom, shame, embarrassment, vindictiveness, delight, pride in the warmhearted sense and in the Deadly Sin sense, satisfaction, merriment, and even a limited childish form of joy; but at the moment that comes to mind I wasn't feeling any particular emotion, but thinking logically. Children do that, I believe, more often than adults usually think. (Many people enjoy John Holt's observations of children thinking and learning; if nothing else they'll expand your awareness of how much time children spend thinking logically.)

But the circumstances I had to think about were not the happiest. My family was having a rough year. Dad had had an on-the-job injury. Mother was starting to be disabled by thyroid failure. Grandmother had come to our house to die. I spent most of the school year having some sort of "cold, cough, fever, or flu" except when I had mumps; I hated school and wanted to miss as many days as possible, until I was warned that if I missed one more day I was going to have to repeat the year. So then I went to school while being, in fact, ill, which didn't make school less unpleasant. People thought it was very important that children have a happy childhood. Most of the actual incidents that I remember that year, or that were preserved in family photo albums, were quite pleasant. We were boarding a pony, and I kept chickens, and had dolls Grandmother taught me to dress, and discovered a few long-term favorite books, and, having recorded a few songs for the family records, was beginning to learn to read music and sing in unison--harmony came later.. Still, it was a bad year, low on money and hard on everyone's health. It was the year when it became obvious to the eye that my parents were older than my school friends' parents were.

And somebody was blathering on about how wonderful Heaven must be and how well off were those who had left this miserable life, and gone there. How selfish people were to mourn for people we missed, the way we expected to be missing Grandmother any day now. Anyone, whatever he'd done, could repent today and, if he happened to die tonight, go directly to Heaven...Hay-uh-von, that type of people tended to say.

I said, "So in other words the thing to do is to repent of our sins and die now, so we can go to Heaven?"

"It doesn't work that way!" "Well, that's not faaaair! I want to go to Heaven!" If the afterlife was all that much better, why even bother with this one? Let's all go to that better place now! History shows that many people have wanted to "set their affections on things Above" prematurely, long after they'd finished grade two. People have starved and neglected and even self-tortured their bodies, in the hope that they could get to a better world. People have abandoned their families and retreated into caves in the Himalayas to meditate on being one with everything. People have well and truly been "so heavenly minded that they were no earthly good," in addition to merely trying to sound that way as people still often do today. But why is that not how it works? Because we have to accept this life, engage with it, and live it, in order to get to whatever better things lie Beyond. For my generation life has been less discouraging than it was for the people who understood "mortifying the flesh" to mean "treating the body as badly, in order to die as soon, as possible." If anything we go too far in the opposite direction. Fasting is something all animals instinctively do for practical reasons, "starving out a fever," and as such it has no special spiritual value, any more than eating or sleeping. Fasting, the prophet Isaiah made plain, can be made into an act of vanity (showing off one's endurance) or a practical way virtuous people who probably didn't have much, for most of the year, made sure that those who had even less could at least eat. Medieval Christians ignored this bit of common sense and tried to make a virtue of self-starvation. Some modern Christians live in such a fear of medieval self-starvation that they don't even allow themselves or their children to starve out fevers. They feel more secure, it seems, when everybody stuffs in three or four meals a day. Then they either become obese, or manage not to become obese and blame those who do, and instead of simply starving out fevers they take expensive and sometimes harmful antibiotics. The technology of storing and shipping food has made tremendous progress. People's understanding of fasting has not.

Our ability to accept the fact of mortality has not made progress, either. Blather about how much happier the dead are than the living was a way people tried to comfort themselves during plagues. So far as we know, the dead are at rest from the hard work of fighting off diseases. That may be an improvement. But few people really believe that death is preferable to life, and today many of us fear that belief more than we fear things that actually harm us. Jesus said plainly, "Lazarus is dead"; but some people now seem to live in such fear of the Hereafter that they can't even bear to say it. "Don't say that Lazarus, or whoever else, is dead. Say that he 'passed,' or 'left us,' or 'is sleeping'!" Then they wonder why their little children seem uncomfortable with the idea that teenagers pass their examinations and leave home...or with the idea of going to sleep. The dead may seem to be at rest and at peace, like the sleeping, but small children and animals can tell the difference. If what Grandma is doing in that coffin is "sleeping," they don't want to do any sleeping, themselves.

We do not and cannot know what lies beyond this life. We have mental pictures of the afterlife; some of us have visions of an afterlife that generally resembles the mental pictures we had. Is any of those visions literally true, or more true than the others? We have no way to know. We are, as a species, very much afraid of having no way to know. People argue about their understanding of various teachings about the afterlife. I suspect all of our understandngs of the afterlife will seem, when we get there, like a three-year-old's "understanding" that a lot of very small people are living in the television set.

The older we get, the more of our favorite people have gone on to the afterlife. Meaning what? We really have no idea. Or say, we have a lot of ideas, and as they are all speculation ungrounded in facts we probably do better not to take them too seriously. A terribly important political issue, over which people fought and died in the seventeenth century, was whether Grandpa's vital essence is sleeping as peacefully as his body appeared to be before burial, or is already singing with the angels in Heaven. What fools we mortals be! We don't even know whether angels literally sing. We can speculate about the nature of Time and Eternity making it possible that Grandpa is both sleeping in Time and already awake in Eternity. We can't know any of these things in the way we know that it's a cold and sunny outside as I type these words. The less we blather about them in public, the easier it is to avoid quarrelling about things we don't understand.

I personally have come to peace with a question that used to concern some of my elders. Can the circle be unbroken, in that better home a-waiting? Can we hope to be reunited with our grandparents and our grandchildren in the same Eternity? I say, how not? Eternity has room for both of those things, and more. In Eternity it would be logically possible for our grandparents to know our grandchildren, and their grandparents, and their grandchildren, all through time. We may meet Neanderthal people, Olduvai Gorge people--how not? The language of Heaven may have special words for twenty-greats-grandparents as distinguished from fifty-greats-grandparents. But that's speculation.

I don't see good effects on living people from trying to give very much attention to a world they can't even imagine, as opposed to the world in which they are living. The ones who don't fall into a morbid Victorian romance with "easeful Death" are the ones who use the Blessed Hope of Eternity as an excuse for present selfishness, laziness, and even cowardice. "It's not my fault if those people lost their home and in the great scheme of things it doesn't matter where they go, and I want to rent out my rental property for a profit." "People will be just as dead next year, whether they spend their last days enjoying their grandchildren whenever they feel strong enough to remember that they have grandchildren, or get themselves blasted into Eternity right now by a lethal injection, so why not just simplify the process and euthanize all the old disabled people now!" "A million years from now, what difference will it make that I've become rich by stealing someone else's money?" People can be, and many people are, so "heavenly minded" that they really become horrible. They are deluding themselves, of course. By definition Heaven is a place where that kind of people are not going to be.

Entire nations have fallen into this bizarre belief that detaching our minds from our own present-time reality can help us attach them to something "higher" or "better." That is the Buddhist philosophy. And what does history show that it accomplished for those nations? Let's just say that the Buddhist countries were not the ones who brought medicine and literay to the Christian countries. The Buddhist countries are now very actively trying to return the favor, and in doing so they are reclaiming the Christian approach, engaging with this life, and making themselves useful. From here that seems to be a very good thing.

Christians are meant to follow Christ's example, and Christ did not detach from this world. He engaged with it in a more complete way than we mortals could do. He did not teach us to practice detachment from the things we don't like in this world, but to do things that change them.

People who have those visions of better lives in better places need always to emphasize that they always seem to be told, "Not yet. Go back. Go home. You have work to do before you can stay here."

We are here to become the people we shall be in Eternity. Doing that does involve rest. We are told that Jesus both retreated into solitude to rest His mind, and slept to rest His body. We should neglect neither of those things. But the Bible overflows with active verbs addressed to those who have had their night's sleep. "Awake." "Arise." ""Say." "Do." "Go."

Most of the Bible was even written in a language that seems designed to have made it difficult, either to pass judgment on the way other people seem to "be," or to sit around thinking that "being rather than doing" is the way to inner peace. Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic have few if any real equivalents for English phrases like "be happy" or "be healthy." They have a word for "exist," and then they have a lot of specific verbs for the things people do that fall under the general headings, in English, of "be happy" or "be healthy: or "be" any other way. Their words for "be happy" (and all the other phrases that describe conditions or moods) are all active verbs that are understood not always to describe physical activity, in the most literal sense, but to describe the things people at least feel like doing when they are happy (or whatever). The words translated as "be happy" have literal meanings like "sing," "shout," "dance." When translated literally, as in the Psalms, we learn that "the little hills clap their hands; they shout for joy; they also sng." When addressed to human beings "be happy" usually means "Celebrate! Join the party! Come out and dance and parade through the streets!" and there was probably a literal parade, and a barbecue, going on. "This is the day that the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it" referred to the religious services of the ancient world, which did not involve sitting silently on benches and praying. Ancient Israelites, like ancient Pagans, did their private praying and meditating in solitude. Ancient Israelites, unlike ancient Pagans, also taught people to read and recite the sacred writings of their faith, rather than making them a "mystery"; they invented religious schools. But when they went to the Temple, they went to feast.

In fact, when Hannah sat in silent prayer in the Temple, Eli thought she was drunk. Which was possible, because the sacrificial offerings people made to God included plenty of wine, some "new" and unfermented, some intensely alcoholic. And shouting, singing, dancing, eating, and drinking were typical of sober and devout worshippers. But offering a petition with lips moving in silence? Obviously, Eli thought, this lady was about to pass out! He did not say "May your prayers be answered, dear sister." He said, "If you're going to be sick, get out of the temple!"

The Bible never tells people to "be happy" or actively "rejoice" for the sake of their own emotions. In fact we are told that "it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting." The people who were celebrating didn't need help; those who were mourning did. We are called to engage with all of life. The ancient phrases for grief and anger are as lively as the ones for happiness. People being warned of losses are advised, "Howl!" Only enslaved people had to conceal their emotions--out of fear. When God's people were free, if anything they dramatized their unpleasant emotions. They tore their clothes, smeared ashes on their faces, wailed and wept and cried aloud. Emotions are motions; they come and they go. The Bible does not tell people to be bland or inscrutable. It does not tell us that we need to act out all of our emotions, which most of us feel that we don't, but it certainly does not tell us to try to filter our emotions and feel only the nice ones. When anyone in the Bible was told what sort of emotions to have or express, those phrases always introduced a bit of news to which the emotion mentioned was relevant. Nobody was told to howl for the sake of howling, but that they were likely to feel like howling when their business failed. Likewise nobody was told to rejoice for the sake of rejoicing, but always invited to join in a real celebration of some real good news.

More serious than the friendly warnings to prepare to feel a certain way, of course, were the positive commandments that tell us what to do.

Observe a day of rest. A day. One day in seven, with annual holidays (limited to three) and celebrations of what deserved celebrating during the year. Recently someone shared a video in which a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher--a Black one, it would be, they were traditionally allowed to say things the White churches couldn't stand to hear--said that God rested on the seventh day because God's work was very good, and if our work during the week has not been very good, then what have we to rest from? I don't think a White preacher who said that would be offered another preaching position in the Seventh-Day Adventist church, corrupt as it has become, but it's a good point. The day of rest presupposes six das of good work.

Honor your parents. (My mother was apt to hint that this meant the same thing as "obey" your parents, but what the word seems to have meant, primarily, was "feed and provide for" your parents).

Love people as if they were your sisters and brothers or, God knowing the kind of sisters and brothers some of us have, at least avoid murder, theft, adultery, and perjury.

Be diligent about your work. Get up early in the morning.

If you want to eat meat, cook it in a way that reduces the hazards of eating it. If you have eaten and feel a need to excrete digested food--yes, this is in the Bible--bury what you have excreted. Moses did not say it was ever acceptable to dump bodywaste into water, and Moses also specified that this burying was to be done by means of "a paddle on thy weapon," presupposing that, when people got out of bed, along with their shoes and head coverings they put on their weapons...but let's not get into politics.

Pay debts, Rather than take advantage of those who have less, give them the advantage. Moses specified that, if you took the tools of someone's trade as a payment, you had to find a way to get the tools back into his hands that very night so he could go back to work and earn money the next day.

Respect people's property rights. Don't covet what other people have.

Abstain from gossip. If you have heard a juicy tidbit, be of good courage, it will not burst you (that's in the Apocrypha but I think it's good advice).

Practice hospitality toward strangers. They may be dangerous; they may also be angels. Be prepared for either possibility, and give them the opportunity to be angels.

Help others when you can. One-tenth of what we have is the general rule for what should be freely given--to the priests and prophets, who were responsible for feedng and teaching the poor, in Bible times. The Bible specifically teaches us that a secular government is not something people really need; it is something they want, and then regret having wanted once they have it. Secular government is not well qualified to feed or teach. It is mostly for the purpose of international relations, and should be subject to the will of the people even there. Bad secular governments are all but guaranteed wherever people indulge in having big governments at all, and must be accepted as God's judgment on people who have failed to govern and regulate themselves.

Be clean, even in situations that make it difficult. Quarantine yourself if there is any kind of "issue" from your body that could spread diseases to others. Wash hands often. Bathe regularly.

Bear witness to what God has done for you. Help the sick. Teach the ignorant.

And--the Bible writers always assuming a certain common sense on the part of the reader, such that readers understand that this is not some sort of terrible obligation that needs to be enforced on people with laryngitis--sing. Not all songs are happy. Some of the Psalms are sad; some are angry, bitter, and even cruel. Nevertheless. In one way or another, with whatever material God has given you, sing.

Due attention to all these things we are called to do in this world is the balance that allows us to think about Eternity in anything but a foolish, presumptuous, even blasphemous way. We are specifically told that our mortal eyes, ears, and imaginations cannot understand anything about Eternity. We are assured that, in its unimaginable way, it will be good.