Ok, it's adults-only swim time! |
"And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head."
Robinson also once wrote:
"There is a good deal to live for, but a man has to go through hell really to find it out."
If Hell is a great furnace or barbecue pit where us naughty
mortals will roast forever for our sins here on earth, then presumably the more
grievous our sins the more onerous our punishment.
You could think of as staying in a really seedy motel, and
occupying a corner room near the ice machine and away from all the noise, or
one next to the elevator, with stains on the bed sheets, a hissing radiator
and a leaky toilet.
And Heaven, which is where we go if we repent our sins, would
be a private penthouse overlooking a beach and a beautiful blue sea, so high up
that it’s surrounded by clouds.
Who gets to live in the penthouse? You do! Just so long as you say you’re sorry before you die.
So Heaven is populated with the contrite, the craven, the
wheedlers, the abject, not the righteous necessarily but merely the apologetic.
It’s a congregation of connivers, hypocrites—or, worse yet, the genuinely
reformed, living out their dreary, eternal lives in decadent splendor.
But to formulate a real definition of Heaven and Hell we must
know what goes on there. And since no one has ever returned from these regions
to give us a report, how are we to know what goes on there? How?
Imagination! That’s how.
We can imagine a Heaven chock-full of our most cherished
things, and a-swarm with our long-lost loved ones and former friends and pets. We
can imagine it as bustling around the clock with our favorite activities,
accompanied by the music we love. We can hope it’s a place with all the fun
stuff we like to do on earth, multiplied to infinity—like our own personal
cruise ship, perhaps, sailing to eternity.
And we can imagine Hell as its opposite—as the unending
replication or prolongation of all the maddening, painful, unpleasant
experiences of this life—and all that sweating, too.
But the vision of life beyond earth is
clouded by the fact that we’re spectacularly unfit for it. “I’m bored” is our
eternal refrain, and lacking the wherewithal to entertain ourselves for even a
few hours doesn’t bode well for an endless sojourn in Heaven or Hell.
Nevertheless, we may
fervently pray for it—for the Heaven outcome, that is. (Who knows? Hell may
also have its aspirants, if one believes, for instance, that all the
interesting people will be there.) We may be hard-pressed to know what to do
with ourselves in this life—or just on a Saturday night—and yet long for
another that will go on forever.
The idea is that
things will be different there, no doubt. But what is the evidence for that?
What if the next life is as botched and unplanned as this one?
In short, why should
we believe that God has arranged things any more competently there than He has
here?
No comments:
Post a Comment