Heaven

Seems like heaven is something you either “believe in” or you don’t. The stumbling block of course is that “just because you believe it that don’t make it so,” and “just because you don’t believe it, that don’t make it not so.” Being a thing unseen, it’s a matter of faith then, isn’t it -- “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1 NRSV). In making a case for heaven, an afterlife, a positive conscious existence after death, it may come as a shock to realize that this is something we know because we’ve been told it by those before us who knew it, and that what we actually have here is not knowledge. It’s faith and hope, isn’t it. 

And our hopes vary. Years ago, a parishioner who was dying asked me what she should expect to happen at her death, and I reminded her of our church’s theology of “a reasonable and holy hope, in the joyful expectation of eternal life with those we love.” (BCP 481). Then I pointed out that folks who have returned from near death experiences, which may be the closest thing we have to evidence, report that they passed through a tunnel into a warm, loving light, and were met by someone they had loved in this life, who had died already. Adele's husband had died in a drowning accident many years before, leaving her on her own with two little children, and she had gone on to make a bright and happy life for herself and raise her children. When I said, “Maybe Stan will be the one who meets you,” Adele looked horrified at me and said, “Oh, Father Weller, it’s been so long.” Her hopes and dreams did not include Stanley. That surprised me enough that I still remember it vividly; but my hope for her is that her hopes and dreams were fulfilled, and my faith is that God made it so. We may imagine heaven one way; but if we reimagine heaven as God imagines heaven, there's no reason why Stanley and Adele can't be together eternally in what is heaven for Stan, while God gives Adele whatever would be heaven for her.

In October 2010 after cardiac catheterization, cardiologists and surgeons told us the findings were grim, that I was inoperable, would not survive open heart surgery, and the prognosis was two to five months to live. If you are 75 and you father (82) and grandmother (69) both died of the same thing, there’s no reason for that to be surprising or frightening, and I was not, so came home to finish up. Everyone who knows me already knows this part of the story. In my discharge interview my cardiologist recommended I look around for a heart institute where they would be willing to accept me, “open me up and fix everything.” Being at that point a short-timer with no promises but with encouraging friends and loved ones, that’s what we did, with marvelous results -- which is not what this is about.

A couple days before my surgery at Cleveland Clinic, an MRI technician slid me into a tube for a test that would last forty-five minutes. Having been in tubes before, I’d learned not to open my eyes, because the MRI cylinder is as close and tight as a coffin. So for forty-five minutes, I kept my eyes closed, relaxed, seventeen years old, just finished my senior final exams, at the beach, the jetties, lying on the white sand. Clear sky, bright sun, soft Gulf breeze. My hand held a signal switch with a button, and in the background I could hear and respond to the medical technician. But I wasn’t there. I was in heaven. May 1953, on the sand, at the beach, listening to the surf.

January 23, 2011 was a bitter cold Sunday in Cleveland, Ohio, and part of my day was invested in contemplating where to go during my surgery the following morning. Back to the beach, ride the ferry crossing Narragansett Bay from Newport to Jamestown, walk in Robert Frost’s woods, I had a mental list and blogged about it early Monday morning. An hour or so later, lying on the gurney in the corridor outside my OR, watching as doctors and nurses and technicians arrived, and seeing enormous machines wheeled past me into the operating room, I remembered the cardiologist at BayMed saying I would not wake up. But I had my dreams ready, so it didn’t matter. 

Seems like heaven is something you either believe in or you don’t. There’s no certainty. There’s assurance, faith and hope. And there are dreams. My grandmother was going to meet me.

TW+