The woman, in her 50s, had survived a tough life and come out happy, or happy enough all things considered, without believing that happiness was natural or permanent. Some people need formal religion to get through life, she said, like someone with a very sick child.
“My religious belief is in what gets you through the day,” she said. The belief that gets one person through the day won’t get another person through the day. Some people needed to believe in religion, and believe in a heaven where their lives would finally work out, and that was great for them. But she didn’t believe it.
I’d been sitting at the bar at our local place, talking to a friend for my newspaper column (“Who’s right about God? A report on religion from a townie bar”). She’d overheard us talking, listened for a bit, and then joined in.
She had a different hope for eternity than the religious. “How about, this is hell on earth and if you make it through that, you have eternal peace and rest, and that’s heaven?” She meant oblivion. Heaven meant ceasing to suffer because you’d ceased to be.
Two forms of unbelief
“I know people say I’m a pessimist; but I don’t believe I am naturally,” the writer Thomas Hardy told the young G.K. Chesterton when they met in a publisher’s waiting room, a story that Chesterton tells in his autobiography. “I like a lot of things so much; but I could never get over the idea that it would be better for us to be without both the pleasures and the pains; and that the best experience would be some sort of sleep.”
Hardy, one of the greatest writers of his time, wrote dark stories of a world without God and ruled by an apparently malevolent fate. The most famous might be “Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman,” which ends with Tess executed for murder — justly, Hardy indicates, only in the strict legal sense, but not in relation to the life she had had to live.
“The President of the Immortals … had ended his sport with Tess,” Hardy writes in the book’s closing paragraph. She suffered and died because the casually cruel universe enjoyed making her suffer.
Hardy, writing when he did (“Tess” was published in 1891), still cared that no one oversees the world, that no God would make life work out in the end, redeeming human suffering. He made the bitter remark at the end of the novel because he felt God’s absence mattered. He wrote the story as a protest.
My friend at the bar assumes this world is all there is. God doesn’t feel real enough for her to care if he’s not there. She won’t protest the way the world is. She’ll only look forward to it being over.
That makes sense to her. Her eschatological hope, as a theologian would put it, lies in what she calls eternal peace and rest.
An understandable view
I can understand why my friend thinks as she does. Nothing in the world, from what I know of her life, gave her a sense of being cared for in the world by any greater power, so that she could believe she could be cared for in the next.
Chesterton, who had grown up with that feeling, argued with Hardy: “I argued that nonexistence is not an experience; and there can be no question of preferring it or being satisfied with it.” Hardy did not agree. I don’t see why my friend would either.
We do not automatically believe in heaven (or hell). The world we know does not necessarily give us, and certainly hadn’t given my friend, any compelling hints and clues that we move on from this life to another one, much less a better one, much less heaven as Christianity understands it.
Whatever feeling we have that there must be something more might be just a cultural artifact or wishful thinking, or the belief that we’re too good to be gone forever. Happy people assume that they will go on being happy.
How could someone like my friend come to believe that the next world could bring her happiness, that there is more to death than eternal peace and rest, and therefore more to life? That what happens later makes sense of what happens now?
In his book “Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life,” Pope Benedict XVI described heaven as “that definitive completion of human existence which comes about through … the encounter with Christ.” It begins in this world. One might come to believe in a future heaven by knowing now, in this world, the One who is heaven incarnate.
Belief doesn’t work the other way, at least for people like my friend. Heaven looks like “pie in the sky when you die” if you don’t have any pie here. I suspect that’s true for most of the rest of us, but we’ve been blessed to be fed.
