This past fall in my new role as Spiritual Care Provider to palliative care clients in the community, I visited a man who was terminally ill with cancer. He was quite anxious about his pending death because of his view of the afterlife. In this blog, I want to outline how I, as a Christian spiritual director, have come to understand the judgement process and the afterlife. My client’s fears were around him not being good enough to get into Heaven. When I tried to reassure him that God was gracious and would embrace him upon his death, he challenged me by saying, “God does not let everyone into Heaven. There are evil people in this world like the people behind the Rwanda genocide or the people running the Jewish concentration camps in World War 2. He proclaimed that there is no way God would allow them to get into Heaven.” I was quite troubled by his fears of the afterlife for it had been nurtured by teachings in his church. The church has taught that our death is a day of judgement before God, and that this judgment determines our destiny in the afterlife. The way the Church has understood this judgement has not changed much since the days of the early church 2000 years ago, which is surprising considering how much the theology of the Church has evolved over the centuries in so many other areas of thought. God’s Two Sets of Children: The Prodigal and the Religious It is clear to me that our Christian tradition teaches that God loves all people unconditionally. This is often called God’s agape love. The Bible story that captures this unconditional loving nature of God the best is the popular Prodigal Son story (Luke 15: 11-32). In the Bible, we read Jesus telling this parable to an audience made up of two groups of people: outcasts and sinners and religious leaders. This parable provides a helpful framework in understanding God’s agape love and how it plays out on both Earth, our physical world, and Heaven, the spiritual world. One could see the parent and the parent’s home in this parable as God and Heaven. From this heavenly home comes two sets of God’s children who are born into our physical world, Earth. It is very apparent in the parable that both sets of children become lost on Earth. One set of children grow up and find the physical world appealing and full of possibility. They end up seeking happiness in the external world. They become prodigal children. The second set grow up suspicious of the earthly world and instead seek happiness by becoming religious children. They seek to please God through doing their religious practices with the hope that someday they will experience God’s gracious love. After many years seeking earthly treasures, the prodigal children get to a place of bankruptcy, possibly physically, relationally, morally, and spiritually. They realized that they are totally lost. Seeing that they are the cause of their poor choices, they become repentant and humbled. It is during this time of starving that they begin to remember God and the Heaven they came from. A hunger arises within them for the treasures of Heaven that they remember from their heavenly home. And so, they begin their journey home. Upon getting home, they hope that God will be gracious enough to give them a task to do that will allow them to earn a place within Heaven. You can imagine their surprise that upon arriving home God welcomes them with open loving arms and wants to celebrate their homecoming by throwing a big banquet of the best. These open arms symbolized the unconditional gracious love of God. In contrast, the religious children, in the parable, are horrified at God receiving such sinful children into Heaven. This cannot be possible. The religious children are upset because they have tried to please God all their lives by doing faithfully their religious practices, but not once did God throw a party on their behalf. It is interesting how this parable ends. God basically says to his/her religious children, “I have always been with you; you have simply not been able to experience me. All of my treasures are yours to have; you have not allowed yourself to enjoy them.” This parable, as I have interpreted it, provides a helpful framework from which to address many key questions that people have around Heaven when we died. God’s Love is Unconditional and Never Changing It is very clear from this Bible story that God’s agape love is unconditional. To love unconditionally means that God’s love never changes, never becomes less or becomes more. It is a divine love that is the same today as it was yesterday as it will be tomorrow. Jesus compares God’s unconditional love to the sun, that rises on both the evil and the good, and to the rain, that falls upon both the righteous and the unrighteous (Matt. 5:45). This is why Jesus teaches that it is possible to love those who hurt you rather than retaliate (Matt. 5: 38-42), to love our enemies as well as our friends ( Matt. 5: 44). It is clear that the unconditional quality of God’s agape love is very different than the love humans normally show each other. One simple teaching that the church often uses to capture this notion of agape love is that we are to “love the sinner but not the sin.” But the reality is that few people can practice well this teaching of love. The Narrow Gate to Heaven Christians often challenge this notion that God loves everyone and will accept everyone at death into Heaven. Like the religious children in the parable or like my client, they argue that this cannot be possible. People who have committed terrible crimes should not get into Heaven. Furthermore, these people often quote that Jesus taught that the door to life or Heaven is narrow (Matt. 7: 13-14). These people argue that the reason this door is narrow is because of God’s holy character. They believe that God is very particular about who gets into Heaven: only the faithful followers of God do. This begs a question. What does it mean to be a faithful follower of God? As the parable of the prodigal illustrates, just because you are religious and believe the “right things” or do the “right religious practices” does not mean you will pass through the narrow gate and experience the fullness of life and God’s unconditional love? The religious people in the parable didn’t. In fact, they were outraged at God’s gracious love to the prodigal people when God celebrated them coming to heaven. So what does it mean to pass through the narrow gate? I want to suggest that this narrow gate has nothing to do with God’s judging people. As the parable teaches, God’s loves prodigal people and religious people equally. However the parable does teach that some people find themselves in Heaven while others don’t. I want to suggest that judgement tied to the narrow gate has nothing to do with God’s heart. God’s heart always loves unconditionally. The narrow gate is connected to our human heart, how our heart can be open or not open to receiving God’s gracious love, just like we see in the parable. Some embrace God’s gracious love while others don't. This is why I said to my client that he has nothing to fear about the afterlife when he dies. His heart clearly longs to experience God’s gracious love upon his death. Our Experience of Judgement is not due to God’s Heart. This emphasis that the human heart is key to experiencing God’s love is found throughout the Bible. The first commandment of the Jewish Ten Commandments states that humans are to worship the true God and no other gods (Ex. 20: 2-3). To worship is an act of the heart where our hearts wants to align with the heart of God. Jesus taught that all the Jewish commandments can be condensed down to two commandments: to love God with our whole mind, heart, will and soul and to love others as ourselves (Luke 10:27). The human heart was created and longs to be aligned with God’s heart of love. The second commandment of the Ten Commandments stresses the importance of not worshipping other gods (Ex. 20: 4-6) that can easily lead our hearts astray. These false gods are like the tempting gods in the world that prodigal children chase after for happiness or the idols that religious people become attached to like right beliefs or right actions or religious identities. It is interesting to note that these verses in Exodus also talk about how God punishes humans for God has a jealous heart and has no tolerance for a wayward human heart. How do we make sense of these teachings about a jealous judging God in the Bible (and there are many such teachings in the Bible) with the unconditional loving God of grace found in the Parable of the Prodigal Son and numerous other places in the Bible? These opposing teachings cannot be both true. Personally, I experience God as unconditionally loving. God’s love is always present as well as all of the other fruits of God’s spirit: compassion, grace, truth, joy, peace, kindness, strength, trust, etc. All of God’s spiritual fruits are always present or accessible in our lives for God’s spirit is unconditionally present in our lives all the time. This is why Jesus said, “God is like sun that shines upon both the faithful and unfaithful people in our world.” But, as we know from our natural world, just because the sun is shining does not mean we feel it all the time. Often clouds are in the sky which keep us from experiencing directly the light and warmth of the sun. The darker the clouds, the less light and heat we feel. Furthermore, we know from our seasons of summer and winter that distance between the sun and earth does affect how much we feel the warmth of the sun. All of these patterns about sun, clouds, and our experience of life are true about our ability to experience God. When God’s love becomes blocked or distorted by the clouds in our heart or feels far away from our heart, that love starts to lose its loving quality and begins to develop a non-loving quality. If God’s love is totally blocked, that love becomes transformed into its opposite, the experience of “no love” or “hate”. Let me provide a chart to illustrate how these clouds in our heart can affect the aspects of God’s unconditional character. Divine quality Divine Quality totally blocked/distorted/far away Light Darkness Warmth Cold Love Hate Compassion/grace Judgemental Strength Weakness Truth Confusion, Lies Clarity, knowingness Doubt Joy Despair Trust Anxiety Grounded Ungrounded Freedom Bonded, enslaved This pattern I am illustrating is built upon the Theory of Holes taught by the Diamond Approach, a psychospiritual work school that I have been part of for 15 years now. When seen in this way, we can begin to understand how God’s love can be experienced in two different ways depending upon the condition of the human heart. If our hearts are like the repentant prodigal children in our parable, then we will experience directly the amazing grace of God’s unconditional love. If our hearts are like the religious children in the parable, filled with many clouds, then we will experience God’s love as being very conditional. Two very different experiences of God's love, but the reason for the difference is not because of God’s divided character. It is because of our human divided heart. However, we often project this difference onto God’s character. We believed that God’s character is divided when it is really our own. This interpretation brings a further new meaning to the narrow door to life and Heaven. The door to Heaven is actually wide open. All people whose hearts long for God will be received with welcomed arms. It is the divided condition of the human heart that has made the door to Heaven narrow. This is why Jesus taught that the “poor in spirit”, a humble repentant heart, will receive the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 5: 3). This is also why Jesus taught that those who are treated “last” by the world, like the prodigal, will discover that they will be first to be received in Heaven (Matt. 20: 16). Their heart longs for the gracious love of God. We Experience Heaven on Earth First Many people believe Heaven is very different than life on Earth, that Heaven is only found in the Afterlife. But our Christian tradition is very clear that the experiences of Heaven happen here on Earth too. The Lord’s Prayer recited in many churches stresses this truth. It begins with the words, “Our Father, who is in Heaven, hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” There are many other teachings of Jesus which highlight the “here, but not fully here” Kingdom of God. It is interesting how Jesus stresses that the Kingdom of God cannot be directly observed in the physical world and objectified (Luke 17:20-21). Rather, he says, the Kingdom of God is found among or within us meaning that we notice the Kingdom of God through our internal experience as humans. In other words, we notice signs of Heaven here on Earth through our internal human experience. This is why in my palliative care ministry I encourage people to reflect on the times in their lives when they have experienced sacred moments. People do have such moments, often many whether it be in nature, or in their relationships, or mysterious coincidences in their life, or through the meaning they find in their work like being creative, helping people, or making this world a better place. It may be a repentant experience similar to what the prodigal encountered when they realized they were spiritually lost. However, in realizing their spiritual disconnection or remembering past sacred times, many people experience a longing to return to their spiritual home. That longing is a sign of God’s spirit transforming their hearts such that their hearts begin to point in the direction of Heaven. They begin, like the prodigal, to travel their sacred journey back home to God. The Journey to Heaven Begins on Earth It is important to realize that this spiritual journey home begins for many people on Earth, long before their death. Many people seek out a religious community or spiritual director for this very purpose, so they can begin to experience Heaven on Earth. This spiritual work involves reducing the distance between a person’s heart and God so that they can feel more intensely God’s light, warmth, love and all the qualities of God’s spirit within their lives on Earth. It also means doing the psychospiritual work necessary to melt the clouds within our hearts so that our hearts align more closely with the gracious loving heart of God. As we work at our spiritual transformation, we experience more often and more deeply the dynamics of Heaven in our earthly lives. As people do their spiritual work, people notice a difference between the dynamics of Heaven and the dynamics of Earth. As the prodigal discovered, the dynamics of Earth are very physical and concrete. There is a strong pull downward to the physical world that operates at a lower vibrational frequency, one that can we experience through our five physical senses and observe through the scientific method. We can become quite attached and addicted to the dynamics of this physical world. However, this downward pull vibrationally also happens everytime we "rigidize" or solidify our beliefs, emotional states, the ways we do things or how we hold experiences in our physical bodies. When we give in this downward pull, we find ourselves attached or addicted to our internal states just as we can be to aspects of the external world. This temptation to control our earthly experiences is quite appealing and as a result, our hearts are pulled downward and often become trapped in these lower frequencies. The dynamics of Heaven on Earth, often called the fruits of God’s spirit, are very different. Rather than being external and physical, the qualities of love, grace, truth, joy, peace, etc. arise from within us, within our mind, heart, will, and body, within our human soul. This is why they are seen as having their source from God or Heaven rather than from our physical world. These heavenly dynamics are also more subtle meaning that these dynamics cannot be noticed by our physical senses or by scientific instruments. Yet, our heart, mind, gut, and body clearly sense them which suggests that these spiritual dynamics operate at a higher vibrational frequency than the dynamics of Earth. But there is a catch with these spiritual dynamics. As soon as we try to control these qualities or seek to become attached to them, they lose their godly quality. It is like these heavenly energies fall in frequency to earthly vibrational levels, and all the divine aspects of love, grace, and compassion disappear. It is only when we stay in a posture of surrender and trust that these aspects of God's spirit remain within our earthly human experience. As we realize this truth, we come to know that these heavenly experiences are truly a gift from God, moments that we can only experience when our hearts are aligned with the heart of God. This is why Jesus stresses the importance of learning to surrender our attachments to the physical treasures of earth (Matt. 6: 19) and seek instead the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 6: 33). The Experience of Heavenly Judgement on Earth It is important to realize that the treasures on Earth have the potential to pull our hearts downward. As we experience something pleasurable like ice cream, we want to experience more of that goodness, because after a while, we don’t get the same kick of pleasure. We need more of that pleasure to get the same positive experience. As result, if we are not careful, our mind, heart, will, and body will become more and more desensitize and find ourselves soon enslaved and lost to the dynamics of our Earthly world. As we all know and as the prodigal found it, there are painful consequences to any earthly addiction: broken relationships, poverty, guilt/shame, self hatred, etc. These are the consequences or judgements of God’s Law, one could say, that arise due to our choices when we follow our flesh or sinful desires (Gal. 5: 17-21). In other words, the experience of judgement or Hell-like experiences happen on Earth long before we get to Heaven. In contrast, for us to experience the higher frequencies of Heaven, we have to practice surrender, letting go, the emptying of ourselves (Phil. 2: 7) of all our passions for this earthly world. You would think that when we let go of control and surrender to God’s spirit and the flow of life we would fall downward. But as Richard Rohr explains in his book, “Falling Upward”, the opposite happens. We find in surrendering to the experience of Being that our souls wake up and become more sensitized to the subtle dynamics of God’s spirit. We begin to experience more fully the fruits of God’s Spirit on Earth. Instead of falling downward into the denser energies of Earth, this relaxing of our soul allows it to rise to experiencing the more subtle, higher frequencies of Heaven on Earth. That is, we experience the judgement of our choices on Earth, but in this case, we experienced being blessed by the fruits of God's spirit and often by others in the world. How is Heaven different at Death? This begs the question. If we can experience aspects of Heaven during our life on Earth, what happens at the moment of death when we leave this earthly plane of existence? One big difference in the Afterlife is that the physicalness of Earth passes way. Everything associated with our physical body and physical life disappears. What remains is our human soul with all of its patterns of thinking, feeling, longing, and being that were developed on Earth. Another key difference in the Afterlife is that upon death we enter a totally different dimension of time and space. Time and space essentially disappear. As two different writers in the Bible suggest, a thousand years is just a day in God’s time (Ps. 90:4; 2 Peter 3:8). This suggests that the notion of past, present, and future vanishes, at least as we understand it on Earth. In the heavenly dimension, God and the spiritual world are described as eternal, everlasting, timeless. We get a taste of this heavenly timelessness sometimes when we have sacred moments in our earthly lives. However, since the realm of Heaven in the Afterlife is no longer restricted by physical reality, we experience immediately the consequences of the thinking and emotional patterns in our soul. While consequences can take days, years, or even a lifetime on earth to happen, and sometimes not even then, we now experience them immediately. It is interesting reading stories from Near Death Experiences and other research on human consciousness that reveal how Heaven is a world shaped instantly by our thoughts, feelings, and longings.
What this means is that the heavenly journey of spiritual growth on Earth continues in the Afterlife. All the consequences related to our soul’s thinking, feeling, longing, and being are now realized quickly leading to the possibility of faster growth. While on physical Earth there is a subtle pull toward the higher frequencies of living nurtured by the dynamics of Heaven, in the Afterlife, this pull upward to experiencing God’s agape love and all the spiritual fruits is far stronger. And yet, it seems, based on the Scriptures of the different religions and consciousness research, that there are levels of goodness and conscious awareness in the Afterlife, just as there are levels on Earth. The hearts of people in the Afterlife still respond to God's unconditonal love in different ways, some embrace it fully whiles others distrust it or even reject it. How people's hearts respond to this divine gracious love at their death determines, it seems, where their spiritual journey begins in the Afterlife. Questions to Ponder:
Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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