I gave up on forever a long time ago, probably around the time that I realized that some of the rules I had been taught for who goes to hell are pretty damn arbitrary. That time may also have coincided with one of the times I convinced myself that I was just going to be alone and unhappy for my entire life, so, to the version of myself that I was then, nothing really mattered anyway. I can hear the gears ticking away in my brain as I type those sentences, deconstructing influences and reconstructing beliefs, editing the picture that I want to present, but I think it needs to stand as is. For most of my life, eternity was linked with purpose which was linked with who I was going to love for the rest of my existence. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted each of those things, eternity, purpose, and love, to look like and it's been a perpetual source of angst when one of those things doesn't show up like I wanted it to.
I'm sure forever was the first to go, because we can't really know what eternity is going to look like, can we? Just like the hour of the Second Coming, it's for God to know and for us to find out. And I've never really liked that aspect of God, that idea that God keeps things from us because we're too stupid to know them. That's not how it's expressed, of course, but that's what it feels like when, say, God says that you can't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It'll break you. But I tend to have a "Come at me, bro" view of knowledge. Tell me the information. I'll take what comes. How bad can it be?
I can accept that the afterlife looks like something that we can't understand. I'm okay with that. Like the dragonfly nymph that leaves the water or the matter falling into a black hole, there might not be a way of communicating the information back to us. Or like an ant trying to understand a skyscraper, it might be beyond our brain's current ability to grasp. What I can't accept is that we have any way of knowing who will be going where or if there's a place to go to after we die. I cannot accept earthly condemnation that echoes into eternity, or that a magical prayer has the opposite resonance.
Eternity is tough to wrestle with, so I think I set it aside as a question that I could say, "I don't know," to and carry on with the rest of my life. I hate to keep bringing it up, but there are a lot of people we could be helping here on this planet and it doesn't require a knowledge of the world to come to do that. Grow a little bit of empathy and help make life here and now better for somebody else. Maybe a lot of somebody elses. How hard can it be?
And I still stand by that, to some extent. If all we have is what we know, the eighty (if you're lucky) years of breathing this air and walking this ground, we can help each other in the time that we have. If we get those eighty years and forever, we can still help each other in the time that we have here together. But I don't think that eternity is about what I thought it was about anymore. There was a line in Time & Eternity in a section on eschatology that talked about eschatology as "what we may hope for."
What we may hope for.
It may well be that life is incredibly unfair and painful and then you die, robbed of the chance to be truly happy, that there's no purpose to the universe and nothing really to live for except that mysterious thing we call love, in all its forms. But we can hope for more than that. We can hope for a forever that rights the wrongs of this world. We can hope for a forever that redeems the brokenness we may have brought or that may have been brought upon us. We can hope for justice. And mercy. We can hope for reconciliation. We can hope for a peace that we may never see in our time on earth.
The danger of that hope is escapism, and I know that. I know the danger of shrugging and saying, Well, things will turn out all right in the end, I'm sure. But I don't think that hope is meant as an excuse for the lazy. I think it's meant as a comfort for the exhausted. Blessed are the peacemakers because they need to be blessed. Some way, somehow, the peacemakers need to have their faith rewarded because it is not easy to make peace but it is so necessary that we try. It is so necessary that we believe that we can live together on this planet in love and kindness.
Maybe we believe that peace can be made because we want to leave a better world for our children and our grandchildren, that though our past struggles can never be justified, there may one day be a day on this earth when war and greed are facets of the past, a day whose seeds we are sowing now. I think that's an important belief. I think that it's crucial that we start striving for the good of others instead of good for ourselves. I think if we're to have any kind of real peace on this earth, we have to think that it's at least possible, one day, for someone else, maybe.
But we're allowed to hope for more. We're allowed to hope for justice for all, not just the temporally fortunate.
And I don't think we need to walk away from that.
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