Faith But No Expectations

I wrote a short story once about heaven.

I thought then that God might be the unassuming owner of an ice cream shop that we simply find ourselves at. We’d be peaceful, discovering only later that this wonderful, charming place was heaven — and that the gentle man serving us a sundae was indeed God.

Maybe that’s what it’ll be. But probably not.

As I’ve aged, I’ve had this pulling thought, a vision perhaps, that my first foray into heaven will be more like a community meeting. Lord Jesus and Lord Ganesha sitting together at a table, old friends, checking my name off a sign-in sheet. They’ll give me a name tag. I’ll wander into the gymnasium and see my father and Nakul, and then I’ll look for you. From there, the afterlife will unfold.

The vast majority of the time I spend in the universe will be as dead. I will live maybe 80 or 90 years — a few more if I’m lucky — and then billions of years dead. There may be no “time” in the afterlife, but if there is, I will be dead for much longer than I am alive.

And for all my fantasies about the afterlife, they could be too elaborate. There may be no embodied part of it, where others appear as bodies. There could be no seeing, no talking, no hugging. It could just be my soul — bodiless and faceless — moving amongst other souls, commingling with each other and with God, finding peace and unity. It could just be essences of all of us, finding our way in a spiritual plane where we have no sense other than an intuition of one soul knowing another.

These are just fantasies, a way to cope with the fear of death, and for me, the fear of an eternal loneliness. I don’t know what the afterlife will be like, or if there even is one. But I have faith in it.

I believe things that seem to contradict. I have faith in the promise of the resurrection, but the theology of reincarnation also makes sense to me. I feel both in my bones. In many ways, I don’t care much about the specifics. I have faith but no expectations.

My biggest hope, if God grants us an afterlife in unity with him, is you. My wife, my sons, my family, my friends. My greatest hope for heaven is that you are there. I want my soul to dance and embrace yours in this timeless spiritual plane. I don’t know how my own soul can find peace without you.

But how will I know it’s you? If I have no body and neither do you. If I have no sight, how will I know? I may not be able to speak, or hear you. My soul has no eyes, no mouth. My soul must be able to simply sense you. Energy recognizing energy, love recognizing love, immaterial recognizing immaterial. My soul must be able to know you.

For it would be a fate worse than death perhaps, to be a soul in heaven that cannot sense you. That cannot know you.

To prepare for death, I’ve come to believe, is not just to accept it. It is not just to prepare for the thing itself. It’s also to prepare for what comes after. A main enterprise of this life will be to prepare my soul — and for you to prepare yours — so that our souls can sense each other. That they can recognize each other without sight, without sound, without form. My soul needs to learn how to recognize you, so that in heaven, if there is no ice cream shop, no assembly in a gymnasium, I can come to meet you. So that I can be known to you. With you until the absolute end.

That too seems like a good way to live, even if there is no afterlife. Why not aspire to have my soul sense the unique soul of someone else — or a dog, or a flower? A soul is a lovely thing to know, in whichever living creature it comes from. Why not try to cultivate a sense of soul? To feel that our soul recognizes another, and that soul recognizes us, is the pretext for joy, peace, and love. Is that not what we should reach for?

To be wealthy, powerful, famous — even feared — is ghoulishly overrated. There is no peace in that, only the anxiety of losing it. Living to create a sense of soul not only helps us find peace after death, but in life. The delicate prize of a precious life is to be able to know the essence of others and be known — one soul to another.

The Waiting Place

It’s not the lung stuff that has knocked me out ill as an adult, it’s the stomach bugs. And this one was a gut punch like I haven’t had in half a decade.

I had lost water in both directions, still unable to eat or drink more than a little without twitching and convulsing sleeplessly with abdominal pain. Even with full blankets, socks, pajamas, and hours of adorning a second comforter I just couldn’t get warm.

“This one’s a nasty one,” I thought.

The kids were going about their “home day” downstairs, and Robyn was bridging both worlds to check on my condition. I was upstairs, just laying there. I was drifting in and out of semi-conscious daydreams and actual dreams. And damn, I was probably thinking too much about work, too.

But more than anything, I was alone. It was just me, with the bedroom door closed, laying witness to the bug battle being waged in my upper abdomen.

This is the first time I’ve been home sick with the kids around, that I can remember, at least. The other times, must’ve been while they were at daycare, I guess.

It wasn’t different than a typical day, their comings and goings seeming like what I would expect. There were bumps and kicks. The clinking of dishes in the sink, accumulating because I wasn’t doing them. The half-hearted tears of sibling friction. Riley, of course, barked as the mail carrier made their daily rounds. A neighbor in his seventies or eighties stopped by with children’s books, in hopes that they’d find new life with our sons. I heard celebrations, I think, after a victor emerged after a game of Uno.

In our home, these sounds are businesses as usual. Except, today, I wasn’t downstairs in the thick of it. I was at a distance, hearing muddled and softened versions of it all. It was as if all the scenes were familiar, photographically familiar, but somehow fuzzy and uncharacteristically muddled.

And as I lay there, I wanted to rise. I wanted to get up, shuffle downstairs and just be there with them, even if I was relegated to the couch. I wanted to hold them, to kiss them on the crown of their heads. My fingers longed to be interlaced with Robyn’s.

All of a sudden I missed them all, desperately and with panic, like I was in the desert and being present for their afternoon snack was the oasis I needed to even just survive. I was only a floor above them, but all of a sudden, without any warning I felt like I was a whole world away.

And I wondered, in my half lucid mind, what if this is what it was like. What if this is what it was like when we moved from this world into the next world away?

Could it be that the next stage our soul goes to after we die is the equivalent of “being a floor away”? To a place where we can catch glimpses of the life happening without us? Where we hear the yelps of victory and the melody dishes clanking? Where we hear, but never see, muffled and fuzzy glimpses of home?

If the first stage of the afterlife is being the equivalent of a floor, but really a world, away, it would be a place of love and gratefulness, but also of the deepest sadness. If that were the afterlife, I thought, I would wait there. I’d wait, on the floor, back and ear to the door all day, hoping to hear just a little bit more, for a little bit longer.

I would hope to hear laughter and pray that someone could wipe the tears I could not wipe myself. I would eat when they ate. I would sleep when they’d slept. I would wait up for them, meditating and thinking, while they were out of the house, scratching a couple verses if there was a notebook at hand.

If waiting is all I could do, I thought, I would wait.

But if this place, this room of waiting, were the first stage of the afterlife, I thought further, how long would I wait?

Because surely, if whatever God there was created this waiting place, this good but anxious waiting place, he would create something more and better for us too. Surely, no God benevolent enough to create this purgatory of waiting would be so cruel to make it without a heaven that follows.

That’s where that heaven would be, right on the other side of the waiting room door. If this waiting place were purgatory, unity with God would be right on the other side of the door…

But no, if this were purgatory and I had made it here, surely Robyn would follow. I would wait here, I would wait here for her. Like Yudhisthira refused Indra, I would not cross the threshold without her.

One day, I would wake up, and she would be here in this waiting room with me. We’d take a few days or weeks, to see to it that our sons were on their way to being settled. And then we’d open the door, and we’d cross the threshold together.

As I thought about this possibility of a waiting place, frenetically, and with feverish mind, I started to weep - losing a few drops more of saline that I could scarcely afford to lose. I missed my family, even after just a few hours, and I wept.

I thought of them, a world away downstairs, and tried to feel the halo of their love in the air. And then I went to sleep.

When I woke, my toes, surprisingly, were warm again. From my core to my knees, I was warm again. The pain in my stomach had subsided. I tested out a few crackers and a few larger gulps of the electrolyte mix Robyn had brought me hours earlier. Sure enough, I was able to stomach both.

And then, I remembered that this was just a minor stomach bug, from which I would recover. This room, our bedroom, was not a purgatory of waiting. I was not in a waiting place.

I was here, right now. I was alive, right now. My wife, and my children, and our pup - my family - they were here right now.

I long to be with them, for the business as usual days the most, maybe. I want to be with them for the daily grind, with all its struggles, joys, illnesses, and small mercies. Being with them is a form of heaven for me, and it’s right here, right now. A heaven, I thought, is just on the other side of that door.

Photo by runnyrem on Unsplash