On Death and (Maybe) Heaven

* NOTE: This essay first appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of Rock and Sling.

I long ago lost count of how many people I have buried. Let’s assume fifty, which feels south of the actual total, but gives us a number to work with—something tangible to keep us from drifting. We need such anchor points in times of grief, when the world contracts into a box, seven feet long and maybe 250 lbs. Just the right size to hold a human body, but too heavy to simply grab and lift. You need handles for such a thing, some way to grasp it, if ever it is to move.

Fifty, then.

Fifty trips to the cemetery. Fifty side conversations with the funeral home staff, talking shop like plumbers at a job site. Fifty condolences offered to the closest family or friends. Fifty recitations of the Lord’s Prayer—these have all been Christian burials—with heads bowed in reverence. Fifty sets of mourners who looked down at the ground to contemplate the state of their black dress shoes, while I, the pastor, peered through the crack between the casket and the cloth skirt hiding the winch that will lower it into the earth. Fifty holes, deep enough to swallow any of us, but dug only for one, whose body we commit to earth and soul we commend to God. Whose ghost will set up house in the tender places of our emotional memories—love and guilt and relief and loss—and occasionally upend our lives until we become someone else’s memory.

So. Fifty.

But only one Hali.

For most of Christian history, preparing people for the afterlife was a primary task of clergy, and no wonder. Our spiritual ancestors lived in close proximity to death, constantly threatened by wars and disease and disaster, ever aware that a flea bite or infected cut could spell the end of their time on earth. Priests served as sentinels on eternity’s border, providing church-sanctioned assurance of the eternal destination for the faithful.

Modern pastors, however, spend comparatively little time with death. Certainly, we still visit hospice rooms and preach funerals, even socially distanced ones. But these are interruptions in pastoral work, not the rule. In the effort to be spiritual entrepreneurs, we spend most of our time trying to secure a bigger share of the ever-diminishing religious market. Our days are consumed by marketing, management, and maintenance—what Eugene Peterson refers to as “running this damned church.” Death is an obstacle in our week, not a component of our calling.

Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed us modern pastors even further from death by virtue of the isolation it necessitates. Even the stodgiest old reverend has taken to streaming sermons online, counting likes and views as congregants. There are plenty who would circle the culture-war wagons and retreat into defiance—always marketable among American conservatives. But others among us would speak more prophetically, even in awkward online formats. We call for justice and cry for peace. We urge people to repent—an archaic word, but necessary as dirt—and promise that, despite the sorry state of our world, all is not lost.

Even those with the most noble kerygmatic sentiments leave a gap, however. We have become entrepreneurs in mass communication rather than shepherds for individual sheep. Who is left to tend to the everyday dying? Who bears witness to the ordinariness of death?

Fifty years ago, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross posited in her seminal book On Death and Dying that ours is a death-denying culture, ill-equipped for facing end-of-life issues. Although research has continued to pile up in favor of her thesis, few pay any heed to her call to respect both the dying person and the dying process. Lists of greatest fears routinely include spiders, crowds, and clowns, but death rarely makes the top 10—not because it isn’t the scariest thing we can imagine, but because we can’t really imagine it at all.

And yet we have Hali, eighteen years of age and about to die.

“We’re doing everything we can,” the nurse said. “She’s in the Lord’s hands.”

He’d been talking about the Lord ever since he found out I was a pastor—a card I played in order to gain access to Hali’s room while her parents rushed in from Nebraska. She’d fallen ill on the way to a conference with a dozen of her peers and me, the new campus pastor at a tiny Methodist school on the prairie. Sometime in the night, her roommate Kat woke to realize that Hali was having trouble breathing. The paramedics took heroic measures to get her to the hospital alive, but they extended her life by hours rather than years. By that afternoon, her friends and I were waiting for the inevitable, kept company by this well-meaning nurse who thought, as most people do, that religious language in the face of death is somehow a comfort.

He’s wrong, or mostly wrong. Perhaps a certain segment of the population—the same one that prays before football games and thinks God’s Not Dead was a cinematic masterpiece—finds comfort in glib mentions of God’s name. But that’s not most people—even most religious people. No praise-the-Lord, he’s-got-the-whole-world-in-his hands cliché could change the fact that an otherwise healthy young girl’s life was about to be cut short for no apparent reason. If Jesus truly was here beside us in our hour of need, I didn’t want a hug. I wanted an explanation.

“You can’t ever tell,” the nurse said. “I’ve seen miracles here before.”

“Is that what you expect?” I asked.

“I don’t think anyone expects a miracle. Sometimes they happen, though.”

“Well.”

He assured me Hali was stable for the moment, and so I left the hospital to check in on my students, who had gathered in the basement of a nearby home to clean up and rest. Most cried softly or retreated to silence. One young man, the son of a Baptist preacher, tried to frame Hali’s death in doctrinal terms.

“Everything happens for a reason,” he said. “We don’t understand how or why, but this is all part of God’s plan.”

The pastoral part of me understood his need to make sense of Hali’s impending death, regardless of how theologically incoherent the explanation. But mostly I wanted to punch him in the face.

Fifteen months earlier, my friend Jason had literally fallen over dead in his living room at the age of 42. A tumor in his heart—who knew? In the wake of that loss, those of us who loved him were subjected to all manner of platitudes about God’s will and heaven gaining an angel. The denominational leaders supposedly tasked with shepherding us through the valley were no better, instead using the interest in his funeral to bolster their ecclesial standing. In the fallout, I’d left my job and set out for the ends of the earth, which turned out to be South Dakota.

Ironically, I was able to do so because of another tragic death. Brian, a staff member at the campus ministry where I now work, had died of cancer ten days after Jason and a thousand miles away. Although I never met him, his passing opened the door that would lead me into a new setting, and, six months after that, to Hali’s bedside and eventually her grave. If either Jason or Brian had lived, my life would have taken a very different path, and Hali’s story never would have included me as a character.

Was this God’s plan? To kill off two young men, each of whom left behind a spouse and two children, so that I could be in that room with this woman as she died, or in the basement with her friends as they mourned? Were these really the only tactics God could employ to get his way, the necessary means for accomplishing God’s supposedly perfect will? Such a deity would wield the spiritual equivalent of a 1000-pound bomb, ignoring collateral damage for the sake of the target. To me, that god sounded less like Jesus and more like Dick Cheney.

The natural world cares nothing for justice, though. “Should” and “should not” may help my brain process my experiences, but they don’t get a vote in what becomes reality. Things are the way they are, and that is the sorry damned truth of it. Jason was dead. Brian was dead. In a few days, I would stand over Hali’s grave. None of it seemed fair. If God created this world, he left some serious design flaws for his tenants.

Once you start down that rabbit hole of despair, it’s impossible not to rage at every injustice—kids starved out by drug cartels, Black men murdered by police, pandemic victims who might have been saved by a simple face covering. You can’t unsee the selfishness of humans or the suffering we cause. With such knowledge as your constant companion, it’s hard to see any point in our existence. Truth seems less the property of religious texts than of Cormac McCarthy novels. How can a person maintain faith when staring honestly into the realities of death? And without the hope of heaven, how can anyone be truly honest about the human condition? It’s the ultimate Catch 22. We move through the world like Yosarian, grasping for sanity among the delusional. Pretending we won’t all end up like Snowden, already shot to hell from the moment we’re born.

Staring down at Hali’s dying body, I did not yet have the courage to articulate these un-pastor-like and therefore secret fears. I pushed death as far from my mind as I could, focused instead on logistics. Hali’s parents had driven all day and were only an hour out of town. The nurse asked us to say our goodbyes so that the room would be clear for them when they arrived. And so the others came to the hospital and took turns in groups of threes, passing by her bed as though already at her wake. I gave hugs and sat with people as they cried. Spoke as little as I could. Reminded everyone to eat and to sleep, even if they didn’t want to, so that their bodies would have the resources to cope.

What I did not mention—could not mention—was heaven. Was it right to offer a drink when I might have only sand to draw from? Kind, perhaps, but certainly not honest. Hali might be an eternal soul held in a fragile and dying body, or she might only be a collection of cells, her mind and spirit leaking away as her material body died. Too hopeful to reject the former possibility and too honest to deny the latter, I threw everything I’d learned from both the Bible and Kübler-Ross to the side and ran as hard as I could from the most foundational of questions. When all your energy goes toward fleeing death—yours, your loved ones’, your pets’, your planet’s—there’s precious little left for the higher order thinking heaven demands.

Heaven, after all, is an exercise in imagination.

Unlike hell or death, heaven does not flow naturally from an honest look at our world. Some would argue that it is mere escapism, an inability to deal with our fleeting reality. Fair enough. But most cultures across time have considered reality a poor reflection of what it is to be human. That’s why we paint and write, make movies and make love, raise children and sing in the shower. We sense there is something more, and even if that sensation is mere folly—a hope that our finite existence forces us into—we still feel it, some days. Such great hope requires us to engage in more than data collection and factual analysis. We also have to dream.

The most famous Western depiction of the afterlife—the Inferno section of Dante’s Divine Comedy—conceives of endless tortures heaped on the damned and spelled out in gruesome detail. Our human minds seem to have built-in shortcuts toward suffering. The Inferno confirms what we already suspect about the world, which explains why it sticks in our collective mind a thousand years after publication.

Visions of heaven, on the other hand, are trickier. Outside of literary circles, almost no one knows that the Divine Comedy also included sections on purgatory and heaven, the latter of which may be the most masterful work of poetry ever written in the Italian language. Most of us blow past the poets in favor of the literal renderings of the book of Revelation popularized by American revivalists. We picture white-robed angels walking with Anglo-Saxon Jesus past jewel-studded walls on streets paved with gold. The unfortunate result is to plop heaven into the same category as Top-40 music—something we know we are supposed to like, even though we secretly find it banal.

What we miss in these heavenly caricatures is how much they serve as projections for our own desires, informed by our modern economic machine. We want to think that faithful toil will result in the good life, which of course includes wealth and comfort. When we arrive in glory land, God will give us the rich things that we know we deserve, even though our earthly circumstances involved a constant struggle to afford our piddly existence. In heaven, we’ll all live like kings. Take that, Donald Trump.

But there’s an even more important aspect of John of Patmos’ description of heaven, one that almost no one notices when they read his Revelation. The shiny things we covet enough to kill our neighbors for—jewels, gold, wealth—are worthless in John’s eternity. In fact, they are so common that they’re used as construction material, on par with the Sioux Quartzite that gives the roads where I live their pink hue. John’s treatment of heaven is not a promissory note for some imagined birthright. It is a value statement, and not a subtle one. So go ahead and collect your rubies and your diamonds, your emeralds and pearls. In heaven, you can crush them up to gravel your driveway. Who would have thought?

If anything in my religious tradition gives me hope for a world to come, it’s this flair for the unexpected that the Biblical authors so often display. Think you can imagine heaven, even on your best days? Probably not. If it doesn’t surprise you, you’ve got it wrong.

Still, belief in heaven is not a natural thing for me, nor for most of the adults I know. It’s a discipline, and one I struggle to maintain. Many days, heaven seems at best improbable and at worst a dangerous delusion.

The older I get, the more I understand that the whole thing is actually out of my hands. Either there is a God who has created a heaven, or there is not, and no amount of work or will on my part will change the circumstance. I’m left to do the best I can with what I know, to decide what is the most honest and hopeful way to live in a ruined world. For now, that means understanding that belief is not an absolute, but a continuum. If Methodists are allowed a patron saint, mine would be Thomas, the doubter, who waited out his disbelief with his friends until the Lord appeared to set him straight.

Hali died early in the evening with her family by her side and her friends gathered in the hospital chapel. We cried and prayed and the next day began the journey home, only to be thwarted by a snowstorm. On the third day, we tried again, threading our way through the one plowed lane of I-29 north out of St. Joseph, MO.

When we stopped for lunch at a fast food restaurant, I hit a wall. Suddenly the hamburger I had ordered weighed 600 lbs. I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up, much less to try to eat. Unfortunately for me, Hannah, a five-foot-tall stick of dynamite who would graduate in May, had been listening to my earlier advice. She pulled up a chair next to mine.

“Pastor Eric,” she said, her voice dripping with smugness. “Is that your uneaten lunch sitting there on the table?”

“Okay, Hannah, I know. But—”

“And aren’t you the one telling us to take care of our bodies so that we have the resources to deal with our emotions?”

“Right. Of course. It’s just that—”

She held up a single finger and shook her head, delivered her command with perfect theater. “Eat that sandwich, you hypocrite.”

And so I ate the sandwich.

When I think back to that moment, and moments like them, I know I was not far from the kingdom of God, whatever that may ultimately mean.

I want to move past the fear of death. I want certainty that all will be made right in some as yet unrealized heaven, assurance that the fifty—a fair number, but it might as well be eight billion—people I’ve buried really will live on in an unseen world, prepared for them by a loving God.

At present, however, I don’t have what I want. Instead of certitude, I have little acts of kindness that add up to love. I have unanswered questions, but also friends who refuse to let me wallow in them. I have stories I’ve heard and stories I’ve told and stories I’ve lived, and while they don’t negate the pain and terror of death, they are nonetheless surprisingly durable material for constructing a hopeful life.