Thursday, March 23, 2017

Just where is eternal life?

Today I drove up to Our Lady of The Angels Catholic Cemetery.  A nice drive for a sunny early-spring afternoon.  I'm helping with a committal of ashes there Saturday, and I wanted to know where I would be going.

And as I thought about that, I realized there was a time in my life when those last nine words would have been a question about my eternal destiny.  The time when adolescent puberty-fueled fear of eternal hell for my sinfulness drove me to ask Jesus to be my saviour from God's unquenchable wrath.  The time also, a few years after that, when I and other members of our youth group did door-to-door evangelism for a few months in the neighbourhood around our church, armed with a ten-question survey, the ninth question of which was "If you were to die tonight, do you know where you would go?"

I don't remember what the tenth question was.  I do remember, though, that that ninth one didn't scare people nearly as much as we thought it should into wanting to know more about God's plan of salvation.

Something else I don't remember clearly is exactly when or even why I stopped fearing for the eternal destiny of my own soul.  No doubt it was a process.  But right now I wonder why.

Is it because I am secure enough in the grace of God that I know I need not fear what comes beyond this life?

Is it because I am overall less sure and certain about exactly what follows life on Earth?  Less certain of the location, the landscape and even the population of heaven and hell?

Is it because my experience and understanding of God and of the meaning of salvation have grown over the years?

Is it because I am focused more on both the questions and the promise of the here-and-now living of "eternal life"?  Not in spite of, but because I am that much older and nearer the end of life here?  And still trying to work it out?

I know when my dad died just over twenty years ago it was (and, I must admit, it still is) vitally important for me to be able to imagine him in heaven, fixing stuck windows and off-square corners in the eternal mansions, building shelves in people's cupboards to increase their storage space, painting and maintaining and repairing and just generally being in heaven and forever the persistent handyman-helper of his neighbours that he was here on Earth.

But as I sat in the parking lot at Our Lady of the Angels, looking through the car window at the almost-Prairie-like untended grass field stretching out behind the mausoleum, and at the open blue sky above it, I realized that what I was singing over and over to myself was just a few lines from "Spirits," a song by The Strumbellas on their new disc called "Hope":

And I don't want a never-ending life

I just want to be alive while I'm here

And I don't want a never-ending life

I just want to be alive while I'm here