Faith & Thought    by Rev. Robert E. Lauder Eternal life

(Sixth of a series)
Around this time of year I begin to plan the next year’s spring film festival at the Immaculate Conception Centre in Douglaston. Each year I show six films in the fall and six films in the spring, mostly classics, as part of what I call the Friday Film Festival. A movie that I am seriously considering showing is “Here Comes Mr. Jordan” starring Robert Montgomery, Claude Rains and James Gleason. Made in 1941, the film was remade in 1978 with the title “Heaven Can Wait” with Warren Beatty, James Mason and Jack Warden. The earlier film has an elusive quality, call it charm, that the later does not have. “Charm” is the only word that I can think of that expresses why the one film is so much better than the other. The reason that I am thinking of showing “Here Comes Mr. Jordan” is because the festival will be devoted to religion, and the film “Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” a light comedy, does present a depiction of the afterlife. It is amazing how much images of the afterlife, of heaven, hell and purgatory, that are offered in movies, stay with people, for better or worse.

This has been on my mind as I am rereading Pope Benedict’s encyclical Spe Salvi. The Holy Father comments that for some people images of eternal life are not attractive, in fact are completely unappealing. What many people want, says the Holy Father, is not eternal life but present life. To them, living forever, living endlessly, appears more like a curse than a gift. Having noted how difficult it is to imagine eternal life, Pope Benedict comments that even the term “eternal life” is inadequate and can cause confusion. He says that “eternal” can suggest something interminable and “life” can include those aspects of our experience that we love but also those aspects that we find very difficult. The Holy Father writes the following:

“To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality — this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time — the before and after — no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy.”

Of course, no one can imagine what heaven is really like, but I do like what the Holy Father has written. It would seem that whatever form existence in heaven takes, it must be “the supreme moment of satisfaction.” The idea and image of plunging into the ocean of infinite love speaks to me. I cannot completely understand what this might mean, but what I know of love suggests to me that this is one of the better ways to imagine heaven.
Images of people in white robes walking among the clouds do not seem a very good depiction of heavenly existence. Playing harps does not seem like a very interesting way to spend eternity. Even the notion that heaven is somewhere high in the sky does not speak to me. I am a little surprised how long some depictions of heaven stay in people’s consciousness and influence the way they think of eternal life. I once met a very intelligent and well educated writer who thought that I believed that if I got into a plane and flew up high enough I would see God on a cloud.

If our earthly existence can tell us anything about heaven, then heaven must be some kind of intensification of our experience of love. We believe that God is Love, and so heaven, being fulfilled with God, would seem to be best imagined, however inadequately, as some kind of fulfillment of love. However mysterious heavenly existence is, it would seem that since loving and being loved are the most fulfilling human experiences on earth that heaven would be something like those experiences.

If we can move past most images of heaven that we have received from films, especially films that we saw when we were children, and link our notions of heaven to some kind of fulfillment related to the presence of God who is Love, we will not understand heaven completely, but we may find that we imagine heaven as a more exciting place than some place in which we wear white robes and play harps.

Probably rather than trying to imagine heaven we should just trust that God is going to surprise us beyond our imaginings.

Father Lauder’s column will appear twice monthly in TLIC, in the second and fourth weeks of each month.