As a spiritual care provider for people in palliative care and hospice, I am constantly helping people face death. As people face their death, they often share fears and questions about the afterlife. What happens to me at death? Will I face some sort of judgement? What will happen to be in the afterlife? Will I suffer or will I be in paradise? As I sit with and reflect with them around these questions, I have been forced to do a lot of rethinking about the common Christian theology of Heaven and Hell that I and most Christians have been taught in the church. In this blog, I plan to share how I have come to understand the mystery of the afterlife. It is still a theological work in progress. The Afterlife Black Box I have come to see the Afterlife as a black box, a box full of darkness, mystery, and unknowingness. Our understanding of what happens in this black box is shaped by the metaphysical framework we believe in. If we believe in materialism, that humans are only physical creatures and that nothing exist beyond death, then that is what we believe happens within this black box. But if we believe that humans are both physical and spiritual creatures, like I do, then our metaphysical framework that we have adopted shapes what we believe happens after death within this Afterlife black box. Because this Afterlife black box is so unknown and mysterious, it is easy for religious institutions and leaders to project metaphysical frameworks onto the Afterlife that fit their earthly agenda but have little to do with the dynamics of the Afterlife. We see this within the history of the Christian Church at times when church leaders created doctrines of Heaven and Hell based on a fear of God’s judgement that motivated people to become “saved” or give larger donations to the church so they, or their loved ones, would end up in heaven. Due to the potential of mistruths and abuses, it is important that we use all tools available to help us understand the black box of the Afterlife. As a Christian, these tools include comparing our Christian metaphysical system with metaphysical systems of other religions for each religion is trying to understand the same Afterlife black box. Some religions like Tibetan Buddhism with its “Tibetan Book of the Dead” have an extensive afterlife metaphysics. There are also certain psychologies like transpersonal psychology and parapsychology that seek to do scientific studies of spiritual phenomena that may be tied to the afterlife like death-bed visions, near-death experiences, or insights from hypnotic research into experiences connected to the afterlife. There are also religions and sacred psychologies like The Diamond Approach that teach about and inquire into the spiritual dimension within our earthly lives. If it is true that the dynamics of Heaven are also seen on Earth, as is taught within the Christian tradition (eg. Lord's prayer: "on earth as it is is Heaven"), then these spiritual experiences also provide a glimpse into what happens within the Afterlife blackbox. As I did my research, I found that there is much diversity among Canadians about what happens within the Afterlife black box. In a major 2015 study, Reginald Bibby, well-known researcher of Canadian religion, found that, within the Canadian population, 30% embrace formal religion, 25% reject religion, and 45% are uncertain toward religion. Bibby then explored how these three groups of Canadians understood the Afterlife. 87% of the religiously devoted believed in the Afterlife, 94% believed in Heaven, 73% believed in Hell, and surprisingly 34% of these religiously devoted people believed in reincarnation. In contrast, among those who rejected religion, 35% believed in the Afterlife, 5% in Heaven, 4% in Hell, and 21% believed in reincarnation. Among the middle lukewarm group, 70% believed in the Afterlife, 68% in Heaven, 35% in Hell, and 38% in reincarnation. In the past, the Christian Church has taught that there are two destinations within the Afterlife: Heaven for those who God judges as good and Hell for those God judges as bad. The Christian Catholic tradition includes a third temporary destination, the place of purgatory where some people go for transformation work so they can become good enough to enter Heaven. Since many people have fears around God’s judgement and Hell, let me begin with questions in this area. Looking Inside the Afterlife Black Box: Rethinking Hell. Traditionally, Heaven was seen as a physical place of paradise involving beauty, love and oneness with God while Hell was a physical place of fire and punishment and God was totally absent. Now, many Christians reject such physical understandings of Heaven and Hell and understand them more as mental states, Heaven being unending happiness and Hell involving mental anguish and suffering (1). This makes sense to me for the physical nature of life is what what makes earthly life different from heavenly life. When we die, our soul detaches from our physical dead body, and acends into the Afterlife. With these notions of Heaven and Hell being the primary metaphysics of our Western culture, the issue of destiny is often on people’s minds when they approach death. How does one discern God's judgement line between going to Heaven and Hell? I remember a wife who was concerned that her husband would go to Hell because he was not a very religious man. To calm her fears, she got him to repeat the baptismal vows that were used in her Christian denomination. Did repeating these baptismal vows spiritually move her husband to the Heaven side of the judgement line? Within the Bible, we read Jesus telling a surprising parable about the final judgement to the religious leaders of his time. In this parable, the judge divided people into sheep and goats. This judgement was based on how people treated the “least of their brothers and sisters,” how they gave food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, and hospitality to the stranger. The sheep experienced the blessings of eternal life while the goats experienced eternal punishment. (Matt 25:31-46). This parable teaches that the judgement has little to do with our confessions of faith and more connected with the condition of our heart, soul, or character. This is why I listen carefully to see how people have tried to live their lives, how their lives express a concern for family, others, the world, and God. But still the question remains, how bad can a person be before they can no longer enter Heaven? Within the Christian tradition, there is teaching about the unforgivable sin. Interestingly, this unforgivable sin is not tied directly to how sinful or evil a person is. Rather, the unforgivable sin is connected to how hard or resistant our heart is to the influence of God’s spirit (Matt. 12:31-32). If our hearts are totally resistant, then we will not be open to feeling any sense of compassion, grace, new insight, or conviction from God’s spirit whether it comes from God directly or through people around us. If we apply this notion of the unforgivable sin to the process of death, then our destiny in the Afterlife is not determined by God, but by the hardness of our spiritual heart. If this is true, we experience Hell because we resisted going to Heaven. Based on this theory, God is not the judge, but we are our own judge at death and thus determine our destiny. Seeing the judgement process at death in this way provides a helpful lens for me as a spiritual care provider. When I am caring for dying person, I am listening to see if their heart has any sense of longing to experience God’s gracious loving presence. If that longing is evident, then clearly this person will be responsive to God’s spirit at their death. If that longing is missing, then I am curious why and look for ways to understand why this dying person’s heart is so resistant to the sacred with the hope that some healing work can happen that will reawaken this longing. However, the reality is that some people will die very resistant and thus not be open to any experience of God’s compassion and grace at their death. Does that mean these people will experience Hell upon death? The church historically has stated clearly yes but the answer is not so clear for me. Let me explain. At one time, the church saw suicide as an example of a resistant heart, one that was not open to receiving God’s grace. As a result, the church often insisted that the body of this deceased person had to be buried outside the gates of the church cemetery. Today, through advances in psychiatry, psychology, and counselling theory, we now know that suicide has its roots in trauma due to different forms of violence and abuse that has shaped the biology, psychology, and spirituality of one’s brain and soul. This means that people commit suicide due to the emotional and spiritual pain caused by traumatic events that they had little or no control over. In other words, they were victims. Seen in this light, would a gracious loving God, which is the foundation of a Christian understanding of God, allow such a person to suffer in Hell when they have already suffered for years during their earthly life due to trauma beyond their control? I think not. But as psychology is discovering, this connection between trauma and suicide flows also into many other issues in life like addictions, serious mental health conditions, crime, and violent behavior. All the people who are judged as evil often have much trauma and pain in their background. There is a reason why they have become the persons they have become, and many of these reasons are outside their control. Would a gracious loving God condemn all of these people to Hell, and if not, where is the dividing line between those who go to Hell and those who don’t? Suddenly, the unforgivable sin rule no longer makes much sense as a deciding factor between Heaven and Hell. If we see God’s primary character as unconditional eternal love, is there any place for Hell within the black box of the Afterlife? If we understand Hell as a place where “evil” souls suffer for eternity with no hope of transformation and healing, my answer is “no”. Our God is not dualistic in the sense that God loves those who are good and rejects those who are evil. No, our God loves unconditionally everyone regardless of the state of their soul, just like the loving Parent in the Prodigal Son story in the Bible (Luke 15:11-32). If we understand the Afterlife in this way, there is clearly no Hell in this black box. And so my message to those who are dying is that there is nothing to fear from God when we die. This truth echoes the truth noted in last month’s blog when I shared a study of deathbed visions of dying inmates which highlighted that such “bad” people have as many positive deathbed visions as the general population. Looking Inside the Afterlife Black Box: Rethinking Heaven If there is no Hell, then does this mean all people are going to Heaven? Many religious people disagree with the notion of “universal salvation”, that is, all people are “saved” regardless of how good or bad you have lived your life. This rejection of universal salvation is often used as part of the argument that Hell must exist. This concept of “universal salvation” makes a big assumption about the Afterlife black box, that there is only one room in Heaven and that we all experience Heaven the same way when we die. Is that really true? Does this even make sense? Think about it. Will we abruptly become a different person in the Afterlife then we were in our earthly life? Will we immediately think and believe differently after our death then we did during our life? Will we experience life differently when we pass over into Heaven? Will we suddenly become a Christ-like or holy person upon our last breath? It seems to me that who we are in our earthly life follows us, to some extent, into the Afterlife. If that is true, then each of us will experience the Afterlife differently. I have been intrigued by the teaching of Jesus in the Bible where he taught that there are many dwelling places or rooms in God’s house in the Afterlife (John 14: 1-2), not one room but many rooms. It also seems from this text that Jesus has access to all of these rooms for he said he will come and take us to the place he has prepared for each of us (John 14: 3). Thomas, one of his disciples trying to understand Jesus better, asks, “Jesus, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus responds, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14: 6). Often, this verse is interpreted in a very narrow way, that we have to mentally believe in the historical person of Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. I understand this teaching of Jesus far more broadly but at the same time more deeply. Jesus is inviting us to live our lives in the same way as he did, believing the same truths as he did, that is, putting on the mind of Christ and becoming like Christ (Phil 2: 1-8) in how we live our lives. If this is true, how many of us, even as Christian leaders, truly live our daily lives in this Christ-like way? I suspect not many of us do this perfectly or even consistently, including myself, and so that begs the question: where will we learn to become a person or soul who is Christ-like in our thinking, experiencing, and being? If we didn’t fully develop our Christ-like nature during our earthly life, will God magically change our mind, heart, and soul upon our death so we become instantaneously Christ-like, or does this growth continue on after our earthly life and during our Afterlife? Maybe Christ takes us to the room that God has chosen for each of us in God’s house based on our soul’s development at the time of our death so that we can continue our journey of growth? If we have lived a life involving much sin and moral evil, we will find ourselves in a room with others who require a lot of spiritual rehabilitation. If we have lived a more holy life, we will discover ourselves in rooms with others who have a similar spiritual maturity. If we begin to see Heaven in this way within the Afterlife black box, then we begin to perceive Heaven having two levels or stages to it. One level of Heaven could be seen as soul graduation, the final room where souls are fully “saved”, healed, whole, enlightened, and at-one-ment with God. Rather than all people arriving in this room, only those people whose earthly lives have revealed well the holy character of the Sacred will find themselves in this heavenly room. The rest of the people will find themselves in the many other rooms in God’s house where we have the opportunity to continue to develop and grow until one day we too will find themselves in this graduation room. I realize that this two-level view of Heaven in the Afterlife black box is foreign to many Christians. And yet, when we look at the metaphysics of other religions, in particular Eastern religions, and transpersonal psychology, we see similar understandings of the Afterlife although with different language, frameworks, and images. However, if we look to the Catholic Christian tradition, we do see the Afterlife black box having a section called purgatory where souls can develop in the Afterlife and eventually graduate into Heaven. Looking Inside the Afterlife Black Box: Rethinking Purgatory Based on the Britannica Encyclopedia, purgatory is “the condition, process, or place of purification or temporary punishment in which, according to medieval Christian and Roman Catholic belief, the souls of those who die in a state of grace are made ready for heaven.” Now, “modern Catholic theologians have softened the punitive aspects of purgatory and stress instead the willingness of the dead to undergo purification as preparation for the happiness of heaven” (Wikipedia, “History of Purgatory”). It is here where I find C.S. Lewis’ view that purgatory is not a “temporary Hell’” but a “training camp for Heaven” so useful. “Our soul demands purgatory”, writes Lewis to Malcolm in “Letters to Malcolm, a book of letters to a fictitious friend published just after Lewis died”(2). Lewis says that “the process of purification will normally involve suffering.” “Most real good that has been done me in this life has involved it.” However, he continues, “I don’t think suffering is the purpose of the purgation. I can well believe that people neither much worse nor much better than I will suffer less or more... The treatment given will be the one required, whether it hurts little or much” (3). It is a common belief that suffering happens in purgatory as a punishment by God that causes our souls to change their thinking and ways and grow as spiritual beings. However, in our earthly world, suffering by itself does not bring about healing; suffering only causes us to seek out help for our pain whether it be guilt, depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, powerlessness, worthlessness, etc. What I am suggesting is that the suffering and the healing that occurs in purgatory is similar to the suffering and healing I see occuring in my counselling office or spiritual care visit. Yes, we will experience suffering in the Afterlife, but this suffering is suffering we are already experiencing due to the pain we are carrying in our soul. Suffering alone does not create the conditions for healing. Rather, spiritual transformation slowly happens when we find a trusted person who can help us hold our pain and suffering in a compassionate, loving, and gracious way. In Purgatory in the Afterlife, the agents of God who hold and care for our injured souls function in the same way as this caring trusted friend or psychotherapist. When we experience this gracious caring space from another, our soul becomes even more vulnerable allowing for new understanding, healing, purification, and spiritual wholeness to occur. In other words, through that special moment with that trusted friend or counsellor, we experience a healing moment of heaven here on earth, a moment similar to the many healing moments that happen in purgatory. One of the surprises in my work as a Spiritual Care Provider is that many people toward the end of their life are looking for a trusted sacred person to unburden the pain within their soul. As I listen to the stories of palliative people, I am finding that people want to share with me the unresolved traumatic experiences of their life, pain they have carried for many years, but now their soul wants to release this pain so they can settle into a place of greater peace before they die. In other words, they want to begin their purgatory process with me, a process that will continue beyond their death in the black box of the Afterlife. Further Questions and Wonderings Due to my current spiritual care ministry, I now sit with many unanswered questions about the Afterlife black box and purgatory. One involves how the experience of the Afterlife is different than our experience of physical life on Earth. So much of our life experience is tied to our beliefs, emotions, and sensations all based in our physical body. With our physical body including our brain gone, what makes up our experience of our soul in the Afterlife? Another question related to this first one involves how much of a person’s trauma follows them into the Afterlife. We know through scientific research that trauma affects our biology, both the biology of our brain in our skull, but also the major nerve centres found in our heart and gut. (Dr. Gabor Mate's book, "When the Body Says No" is one such example of this research). But we also know that trauma structures the nonphysical mind or soul that interfaces with our physical brain and body through beliefs, emotional patterns, and pain coping strategies. Both the physical body and the soul carry our trauma. When our physical body dies at death, it seems logical that the traumatic patterns embodied in our physical body will disappear with it. This is good news for it means that the intense suffering connected to our past traumas in this life lessens considerably at death. And yet, since our soul is also affected by this trauma, it would seem logical that some aspect of this injury follows us into the Afterlife. I am suspicious that the notion of karma present in Eastern religions is related somehow to these trauma patterns in our soul that still need to be healed and transformed. Another question I have is similar to the last one. As we do spiritual transformational work and healing, we come to realize that our structured personality, shaped by our history and holding environment as a child on earth, is different from the character of our soul. We often assume that they are one and the same, but they are not. Yes, our soul has vulnerabilities and weaknesses that are related to how our personality formed but our soul is far more open, flexible, unstructured, and vulnerable than our personality that formed during our earthly life. One could say that our personality is the outer shell and our soul is the inner centre within this shell. Upon death, does our structured personality follow our soul somehow into the Afterlife, and if so, how, and how does this personality transformed in purgatory? Again, I wonder if the Eastern religious concept of karma is tied to this transformation process. And finally, there is the question of reincarnation, a doctrine that appears in many Eastern religions and and within studies within transpersonal psychology and parapsychology, and yet this doctrine is often avoided in Western religions. (One such example from transpersonal psychology is the research work of Dr. Michael Newton, a counselling psychologist who has focused his research on understanding the afterlife through hynoptic regression. I find his research quite interesting, both in how it affirms what I have written in this blog, but also the many questions it raises about the workings of the Afterlife black box.) In some ways, reincarnation is a natural extension of the process of purgatory. Since the Afterlife is a mysterious black box full of many unknown mysteries, I think we have to accept that the metaphysics of reincarnation could be a real possibility. Questions to Ponder: 1. I have described the Afterlife as a black box full of much mystery. What beliefs do you have about what happens within this black box? What wondering questions do you have? 2. What do you believe about the dynamics of Hell? What parts of my discussion of Hell do you resonate with? What parts do you question or wonder about? 3. What do you believe about the dynamics of Heaven? What parts of my discussion of Heaven do you resonate with? What parts do you question or wonder about? 4. I have compared the dynamics of Purgatory to the dynamics of healing that happen within a therapeutic relationship with a trusted friend or counsellor. Do you resonate with this idea or do you question it? 5. How do you imagine your sense of being in the Afterlife in relationship to your sense of being as a human on Earth? How will you be the same? How will you be different? Footnotes (1) https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zdhmtv4/revision/9#:~:text=Many%20Christians%20believe%20that%20all,sin%20will%20go%20to%20Hell (2) https://aleteia.org/2018/08/02/c-s-lewis-tells-you-why-you-should-like-purgatory/ (3) https://aleteia.org/2018/08/02/c-s-lewis-tells-you-why-you- should-like-purgatory/ Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
0 Comments
|