Heaven and Hell

“Without Contraries is no progression.”

--William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

I think I should level with you right at the start. I don’t believe in Hell. Like my Universalist ancestors in the 19th century, I find it impossible to believe in a God who would send people to such a place. Indeed, those ancestors, both the Universalists and the Unitarians, had a lot to do with the demise of Hell as a geographical or architectural Place. Even the great 16th century Protestant reformer Martin Luther did not believe that Hell was a place.

Luther believed that hell, and its more pleasant and desirable opposite, heaven, were spiritual states corresponding to faith, despair, and doubt. Unfortunately, his view pales alongside that of the great American Puritan Divine, Jonathan Edwards, whose sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” presents a more popular image of Hell, as a fiery pit over which (we) sinners are suspended by only the sheerest threads, kept hanging only at the pleasure of an angry and all powerful God:

So that thus it is, that natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of Hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked, his anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of his wrath in Hell, and that they have done nothing in the least to appease or abate that anger, neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold ‘em up one moment; the Devil is waiting for them, Hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up. . . .

But as early as the third century, the Christian theologian Origen (also a believer in universal salvation) denied the literal nature of hell. Origen, like those contemporary Jesuits, envisioned hell “as a state of eternal separation from God, where punishment is self-imposed by the actions of the sinner. Absence from God and from love of and for God is the ultimate torment, to which fire and brimstone are merely metaphorical embellishments,” writes Gomes. Hell, in this view, is the alienation we choose for ourselves.

What seems to emerge, at least in much contemporary liberal theological thought, is that Heaven and Hell, rather than being different places, are actually radically opposed states of intimacy with and alienation from God, or the divine. In other words, writes, Gomes, “hell is real and chiefly of our own making [my emphasis].” With such a view many of us can probably agree.

While I suspect that few of us will mourn the demise of Hell as a particular address, we may be less willing to let go of the idea of Heaven as an ultimate destination. According to one 1997 poll, 81% of Americans (up from 77% in 1989) believe in heaven, while only 63% believe in hell. But their views of what heaven might be like vary considerably. As an article in Time magazine puts it, “People still believe in [heaven]; it’s just that their concept of it has grown foggier. . . .”

For some, heaven is primarily the place where we will go to be with God (though few of those envision it any longer as a place of divine justice). For others it is only a place of reunion with friends and loved ones. This is particularly true of Americans. Fully 88% of those surveyed said they believed they would meet friends and family members in heaven when they die. They were less certain about whether or not our heavenly existence would be an embodied one, but fully 81% believed that heaven would be totally different than life on earth.

C. S. Lewis, the novelist and popular theologian, sums up the source of this confusion well:

“[Heaven is] the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. . . . We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it.”

But the question that looms for me is, can we have it both ways? If we no longer believe in a literal, geographical hell, can we still honestly have a heaven where all of our fondest hopes are fulfilled?

While I have my doubts about the traditional, or at least the popular, conceptions of heaven (just as I do of hell), I am not without hope about the afterlife. Though I am skeptical, I am open to the possibility that there is more. But of what that “more” may consist in I am by no means certain, because, just as Lewis said, “it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.” Or has it?

Mystics the world over and across religious traditions speak of the experience of divine union as that of “oneness” with all that is and with all that has been. Such a view can also be found in naturalistic terms in the writings of someone like John Burroughs, who wrote that “I shall not be imprisoned in that grave where you are to bury my body. I shall be diffused in great nature, in the soil, in the air, in the sunshine, in the hearts of those who love me, in all the living and flowing currents of the world, though I may never again in my entirety be embodied in a single human being.”

This is not the same as bodily reincarnation, I know, but what is comforting to me in Burroughs’ vision is the idea that when we die, we do not go anywhere. Rather, we are still here, just as we have always been (even before our birth), though perhaps not in a conscious state. As contemporary novelist, essayist, and poet Wendell Berry puts it, speaking of a loved one who has died, “He’s hidden among all that is, and cannot be lost.” It is eternity by any other name.

Further, I have to believe that our influence lives on, in greater or lesser degree, in those we leave behind: our children, our friends and partners, all those whose lives we have somehow or some way touched. This so-called “immortality of influence” may seem like weak broth to some, but clearly it is one of the few things we safely can say about the afterlife, that is, the time after life. We know that it is so, because we have all been the beneficiaries of it. And I have observed its sustaining power in some of those who stood on death’s threshold.

Believe me, I would love to meet my grandparents when I die, and to be reunited with all of my loved ones in the hereafter. But I also find it comforting that, upon entering the state of death, I will be going where loved ones have already gone before. In a very literal sense, I will be joining them. If they are already there, whatever “there” may turn out to be, then surely there is less--or nothing--to fear.

And to repeat, it is obvious, as Burroughs and Berry recognize, that in fact none of us goes anywhere at all: we are all still here, in death just as in life, though obviously we are not in the same form: “hidden among all that is” but not “lost.” But there is not, and it seems to me cannot be, any assurance about consciousness after death. Jesus reminded his Apostles that it was not given to most people to know heaven’s mysteries.

In the end, even Dante concluded that heaven is really just “a state of being in which we open up more to love.” By such a definition, we might conclude that heaven begins right now, in this very moment, in our thoughts and actions, in our hopes and memories. Eternity is now. On the contrary, it is alienation, separation, and the absence of love which we really need to fear. As one of my colleagues has written, with truth, what we need to fear is

. . .not death, but life: empty lives, loveless lives, lives that do not build upon the gifts that each of us has been given, lives that are like living deaths, lives which we never take the time to savor and appreciate, lives in which we never pause to breathe deeply. What we need to fear is not death, but squandering the lives we have been miraculously given.

If heaven is an opening up more to love (the opposite of alienation), and if our influence lives after us (as assuredly it can and does), then how much more important that we get on with the work of heaven and open our selves up to that love which, already, surrounds us and sustains us, and will sustain those who come after us.

Whatever there may be after life, it is clear that there is something. Personally, I believe we need fear neither heaven nor hell. For if hell is the absence of the divine, then in Peter Gomes’s words we need only begin to “cultivate the presence of God” in order to “deconstruct the hells we are so busy building.” And if heaven is a continual opening up to love, then we have already experienced it in this life and need not fear for it in the next.

It is worth noting, in conclusion, that not all religions concern themselves with heaven and hell. The ultimate goal of Buddhism, for example, is not an afterlife, but the selfless goal of non-being, closer perhaps to the naturalistic view of John Burroughs than to most Christian theology. Reincarnation in the Hindu tradition, we are reminded, is not a goal, but a consequence. The goal is to escape the seemingly endless round of reincarnation; we only fail to do so because of the negative actions we take in this life. Nirvana, paradoxically, is beyond paradise. As scholar of Islam Annemarie Schimmel has profoundly written, “Once the journey to God is finished, the infinite journey in God begins [my emphasis].”

Unitarian Universalists have always focused more on this life than on the next. Maybe, I’m suggesting, just maybe the two are not as far apart as they appear to be or as we tend to think they are. We do not need the fear of hell--or the promise of heaven, either--to live a good life. There are countless witnesses to that fact. The fruits of such a life in the here and now are evident for all to see. They can make a heaven of hell, just as our baser actions can make a hell of heaven. We have all experienced this, or will.

May we live our lives courageously in the face of all our questions, hopes, and fears. And may we always live our lives in the direction of ever-widening love. If we do, neither heaven nor hell will matter; for we will already be in paradise, and hell will be no more. May it be so, world without end. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock