The Little Boy Who Didn't Go to Heaven

I don't read contemporary books about people who claim to have gone to heaven and come back, not generally.  It's a popular genre, one filled with angels and deceased relatives and tunnels of light, and I understand the desire it fills.  There are little boys, back from heaven.  There are earnest doctors, recounting their mystic experiences.  They meet Jesus, and angels, and your grandmother Tzeitel.  These books sell very well.

Very, very well.

I don't read them.  I just prefer not to know, because I don't think we know what that will be like, not in the depth of it.  Even if we've dipped into that chasm, that vastness, I don't think we can know.  So we have this first fleeting glimpse of eternity, as our selves filter it through the lens of the tiny flicker of life we've lived.  So what? What does that mean, in terms of what is to come?  Very little.

This last week, there was a well-publicized recanting, as a young boy who'd claimed to have that experience stepped away from what he'd originally claimed.  He and his father survived a car crash, and had written a bestselling book together, entitled "The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven."  It was the story of his experiences on the other side, and honestly, I haven't read it.  This last week, the young man, who in a bit of Matrix-laziness was named "Malarkey," recanted his story in a formal statement conveyed by his mother.  

On the one hand, it's easy to shake your head upon hearing that.  It's a crass cashing in, just another person with some wildly marketable story that they pitch to a publisher, who sees the dollar signs.  "Every time a cash register rings, an angel gets his wings," or so it goes in AmeriChrist, Inc.  I'm as cynical as the next guy about such things.  More so, frankly.  Given that this was a kid, it made me sad.

But then I went past the headline, and read the statement.  The tone and language of the recanting struck me, and struck me hard.  It was not just, "I didn't have that experience, and I'm so sorry for misleading all of you."  That is all that was needed.  This was different.  It was cast in the language of a very particular way of looking at the world, not so much a recanting as an ideological challenge.  Read it for yourself:

Please forgive the brevity, but because of my limitations I have to keep this short.I did not die. I did not go to Heaven. 

I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible. 

It is only through repentance of your sins and a belief in Jesus as the Son of God, who died for your sins (even though he committed none of his own) so that you can be forgiven may you learn of Heaven outside of what is written in the Bible…not by reading a work of man. I want the whole world to know that the Bible is sufficient. Those who market these materials must be called to repent and hold the Bible as enough.

It sounded strange in my ear.  If this is a public apology for deceit, it's...odd.  It is the kind of apology that says, "I lied, sure.  But you were wrong for having believed me."  It is written in the in-house language of Christian fundamentalism, and takes the peculiar tack of casting an untruth not in the bright light of whether it happened or not, but through the definition of "truth" that rises from that theological construct.

"When I made those claims, I had not read the Bible."  Why is that relevant to whether a person had an experience or not?   If I say, "I met Bilbo Baggins on the street yesterday, and we shared a pipe full of Longbottom Leaf," that claim is not false because it does not appear in The Hobbit.  It is false because it did not happen, and I am making it up.

If you lie about something, the biblical apology would be, "I bore false witness."  Plus a promise to not do it again, and an "I'm sorry."  Just that.  This is not a biblical apology.  It's a fundamentalist one.  It blames the publishers for taking him at his word, the very same publishers who immediately withdrew the book when he recanted.

His mother, herself a biblical literalist, fought the book from day one.  The idea that her son could have had that experience in any form was anathema to her beliefs.  Her son's recanting is in words and terms that are part of the litany of her tradition.  She...now separated from her husband...is the primary caregiver for her son, a desperately difficult and challenging task for any mother.  I read through her blog, through her deeply human struggles to raise her boy mingled with the kinds of stark, comfortingly binary ideological affirmations you get on fundamentalist blogs.  It was heart-wrenching.

The whole thing just feels so...sad.  And certainly, certainly, a reminder of how far we are from Heaven.

Animals and Eternal Rest

Having already done two posts on our pets and heaven, I'll wander away from scripture and the patterns of traditional theology and more into my own spiritual sense of the eternal destiny of the animals that fill our world. It might be a bit too esoteric to share with your typical seven-year old wondering whether Mr. Barky is in heaven...but then again, seven year olds often surprise you with what they can take in.

My own personal spiritual predilections are pretty intensely mystic in character. Those moments of numinous, ecstatic presence that shook me from a position of alternately cynical and hopeful agnosticism into my current faith in Christ and Creator have left me feeling rather differently about the creatures around me. Meaning, no more Vietnamese steak marinated in red wine and rolled in pepper on a bed of lightly dressed salad, no matter how much that thought still evokes a Pavlovian response.

Ultimately, I believe that the existential barriers of self that we perceive as unbreachable boundaries between us mean exactly diddly squat. With Thomas Merton and other Christian mystics, I see our awareness in this life as deeply limited. Though we do not now directly perceive the harms or joys we cause in the same way as the beings with whom we interact, that lack of perception is a limitation of our temporal and material existence. We are, whether we like it or not, all participants in one another. Once we enter into the unmediated presence of God, we come into the wholeness of what the Apostle Paul would have called our "spiritual body." That, as I have come to understand it, is not just the "us" that we know, but the full fruit of our words and actions as they play out across every relationship in which we have participated.

Every joy caused and every harm inflicted is unmediated and fully us, written forever into the fabric of existence. That standard, as I know it through my faith, includes not just our interactions with the homo sapiens sapiens around us. It also includes the creatures with which we share this beautiful and fragile little planet. If I strike or harm another being, that harm is mine, forever scarring me. If I give comfort to another being, that comfort is a part of my place in eternity.

For simpler creatures that lack awareness of self, this interweaving of being is just part of what they are. The lion will know the death throes of the wildebeest, and the wildebeest will know the contented sleep of the full bellied lion. Feel free to start singing that Lion King song, if you must. Creatures that exist moment to moment are simply living as they must live. They have little understanding of themselves as selves, and even less understanding of the other as a self.

As beings grow in sentience and awareness of self and other, they become more...spiritually complicated. But the interconnectedness remains the same. It is to that interconnectedness that the greatest and only law of the Gospel speaks. We are to be aware that we are part of a glorious something that transcends us and our culture and our species, and to love that Glory with all our heart and mind and strength. As a part of that knowledge, we are called to love the Other as we love ourselves.

The creatures around me are part of the great story that God is telling, just as I am part of it. Our destiny is the same. We move into the presence of God as one.

When I come through the door at the end of a long day, and our little puppy comes galumphing up with her tail wagging in unconditional, exuberant joy at my arrival, that knowledge is a pleasure.

Reezus Reist Ris Ry Rord Rand Ravior

Why wouldn't our lickity pals be able to chase that frisbee through the pearly gates? A heaven without our furry friends would seem like rather less than a delightful place.

But that doesn't mean that there might not be folks out there whose theology is not..umm...dog friendly. As I fished around in my noggin for a hypothetical reason some compulsive Calvinist might deny eternal reward to a pup, I was only able to come up with one. So, here goes:

For many Christians, it is axiomatic that a prerequisite for entry into heaven is professing faith in Jesus as one's Lord and Savior. In fact, that's a pretty standard refrain for those who would consider themselves pure-bred orthodox. If faith in Jesus is a necessary prerequisite for salvation, then dogs and cats and sea monkeys are pretty much out of luck. Just getting Ms. Barkerton not to poop on the rug is hard enough. But getting her to speak and...believe in the salvific power of Jesus Christ? I'm not sure that even the most dedicated megachurch doggie training ministry could pull that one off.

From that radical position, salvation is two things. First, it is intensely anthropocentric. Meaning, about humans, kids. True, deep and right relationship with the Creator is only something that applies to humankind, which is made in the image of God. Other creatures, being less Goddy, are just SOL. Second, the fulfillment of that right relationship with our Creator can only be worked through faith in Jesus Christ. As animals...even the smarter ones...are not capable of having that faith, they're presumably just consigned to nonexistence. Their earnest howling and meyowling isn't part of the heavenly choir.

If your pastor is a heartless pharisaic sunnavabeetch, this is what he'll tell your children when your dog dies. Should that be even a remote possibility, I recommend finding another church.

But this theological position...which is the only one I could come up with...has within it a major flaw. Beyond it's obnoxiousness, I mean. If we are being truly orthodox about the purpose of Christ's saving work among us, we understand that work as undoing the brokenness that was wrought in the Fall. From that second creation story in Genesis, humankind drifted out of the perfect awareness of our place in Creation and with our Creator. We ate of the knowledge of evil...for we already knew the good...and drove ourselves from the Garden. By we, I mean "human beings." From a strictly Biblical perspective, there is no evidence that any other creature other than the serpent shares in our fallen state.

Dogs aren't fallen creatures. Neither are gerbils or hamsters. I'm not so sure about some cats, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. And if animals are not fallen, then they are not in need of reconciliation and restoration to be what God meant them to be. We're messed up, sure. We find all sorts of ways to not be the gracious, just, and loving beings we are intended to be. But they already are what they were intended to be. As such, there is no doctrine of sin that could meaningfully apply to them. And if that's the case, well, there's no reason that the pets of even the most rigidly orthodox can't join them in the hereafter.

Of course, this is all working within the framework of orthodox Christian thinking. Though I buy it in part, I'm...well...not quite that person.

So next post, I'll get around to presenting my own spiritual sense of this pressing, pressing issue. ;)

The Definitive Teaching About Dogs and Heaven

There's been a little bit of lull in my blogging lately. And my Facebookin'. And, in fact, across much of the other non-essential activities of my existence. The reason for that is the introduction into our household of a little scampering bundle of lickity affection. After forty-one orbits around the sun, and a full year of lobbying from my nine year old, I have a dog for the very first time.

Ellie is an eight week old blend of Golden Retriever and Standard Poodle. She eats, she sleeps, she runs in crazy little circles. I haven't been this focused on feeding schedules and their resultant output since my younger son was a tot. It's not as intense, as she's far lower maintenance than an equivalent toddler. She's tiring, but in an utterly-worth-it sort of way. I am, as the missus puts it, totally smitten.

In one of those synchronous events, one of the blogs I feed pitched out a musing about dogs the other day. It's the blog of a leader of one of the most ferociously hard-core conservative cells within my denomination. Carmen tends to look for things that trouble her in the church, signs of liberality and progressivism and the creeping influence of secular/Wiccan/socialist/French heresies. Here, though, she was "going after" a church that allows dogs in it's services. It seemed tailor-made for harrumphing. Not taking worship seriously! Not showing respect to the orderly praise of the Creator of the Universe! Only, try as she might, she couldn't quite bring herself to get into high dudgeon about it. Because she..well..she loves dogs. It's hard to get all ornery about them, even if being ornery is your favorite hobby.

The conversation that followed among her commenters surfaced the classic question asked by every earnest 12 year old: Does little Barky go to heaven? One of her readers said no, for reasons that probably have to do with having presuppositional apologetics beating in their chest where their heart should be. But the majority (true-believing conservatives all) said, um, maybe. Probably. It'd be nice if they did. That's not a good enough answer, though. In my capacity as the Pastor Who Spends Way Too Much Time Thinking About Things (tm), I will now offer up the definitive Christian answer to that question: Yes.

Why yes? Well, let me elucidate. First, from scripture.

The Bible doesn't spend a whole heck of a lot of time talking about the eternal lives of canines, felines, gerbils, and hamsters. For some reason, this probably didn't seem like the highest priority for an ancient Semitic people. But as we look at how creatures are directly approached in the Hebrew Scriptures, it's clear that there are some moral and spiritual obligations towards the animals in our care. From the Torah, we hear in the 10 Commandments that the Sabbath is to be kept sacred by all. A day of rest is to be given not just to those who are part of Israel, but also to the stranger in the land and the bondservant...and to the animals. This assertion of care for the well-being of domestic animals is repeated in the Exodus teachings about the value of the Sabbath. Critters get included in.

Now, some might say this is simply utilitarian. You got to keep 'em rested, so they can work harder and/or taste better. There is no spiritual component to this, some might say. But in the Writings, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes speaks directly to the question of the spirit behind the inscrutable eyes of your cat. The answer, from this wisest of the wise souls in the Bible, is that there is no difference between humankind and animals. We are all creatures of earth. We are all animated by the same breath.

So on the infrequent occasions that the Bible teaches directly about the non-human beings around us, it seems to point to the strong possibility of animals sharing in whatever our eternal destiny may be.

But there are deeper Christian theological principles at play here too...which I'll deal with in my next post.

Sin Tastes Better With Bacon

After many years of wheedling and cajoling from the boys, my family appears headed down the road towards getting a dog. I never had pets as a kid, mostly as a function of a semi-transient continent-hopping childhood. Now that we've settled down into a stable surburban quarter-acre, it looks like our family will be adding a furry critter to our number come 2010.

Pets are, for many folks, part of the family. Cats, dogs, and the occasional hamster are deeply loved and woven into the fabric of day-to-day family life. That often goes as far as bringing them for pastoral blessings, celebrating their birthdays, and similar schtuff. When they pass, they are mourned...not as deeply as we'd mourn a human, but mourned nonetheless. Folks of faith with pets frequently express the hope that those dear creatures will have a place in God's Kingdom. I am convinced that they will, but mulling over this leads me off on two related theological tangents:

Can a human being commit a sin against an animal? Someone who beats or abuses a puppy or kitten certainly isn't showing themselves as a person moved by the grace of God. Someone who trains animals for bloodsports would seem equally reprehensible, although I'm not sure how many football fans in Philly agree with me on that one. At a certain level, our willingness to vent our anger or hatred against the creatures around us is a measure of our sinfulness. We're meant to care for all creation, not beat it into submission or abuse it. Suffering is suffering is suffering. I am convinced that the harm we cause to our fellow creatures...even the nonhuman ones...is part of the measure by which we will be judged.

So if we can sin against animals, where does that leave thems of us who chow down on less-sentient critters? We're outraged at those folks who abuse dogs, but are happy as a clam to munch on a Bacon Double Bacon Burger that's comprised entirely of the flesh of animals that have lived short, brutish existences. The factory farm pigs that give us our delicious crunchy marbled fat-sticks exist in conditions that...were they, say, Golden Retrievers...would fill us with sputtering, pitchfork wielding, Congressman-calling outrage.

But...but...they're different, say you. Pork isn't puppies. Bacon doesn't bark.

Different? Not really, not by any meaningful standard. Both dogs and pigs are omnivorous social mammals. They have similar intelligences. There isn't any valid ethical difference between the process of preparing pork tenderloin and thit cho nuong, or between what goes into gaejangguk and a Mo's Bacon Chocolate Bar.

Yet we are an integral part of a system of industrial food production that inflicts impressively vast levels of suffering on creatures that are, for all intents and purposes, just as aware as those creatures we Jesus folk cherish and hope will somehow be cared for by their Creator.

It's a good thing God isn't just, or else we might be in for a world of hurt.

Save the Whales

Every Sunday on my way to my bitty church, I pass my local up-and-coming independent mini-mega church. They've been running a sermon series for the last month or so on heaven, and the question posed on their signage today was a simple one: ANIMALS IN HEAVEN?

The purpose of such a question is rather simple...will there be a doggie door on our heavenly mansion for Mr. Barky? Anyone who has a pet to which they've had deep emotional ties really doesn't want there to be any question: Captain Fluffykins will be there forever and ever.

Of course, I tend to find that way of understanding heaven a bit simplistic, but when you get right down to it, I think...sure. Yes. Of course animals are there. If you're OCD about scriptural references, it straight up says so in Ecclesiastes. Not the cheeriest of prooftexts, but hey, it answers the question.

Animals, of course, tend to be simpler creatures, and one could argue that they're considerably less aware than we are of their surroundings. As beings that have less self-awareness, they aren't prone to the type of destructive self-seeking that defines human sin...and therefore they'd just automatically get in. That, I would think, would be the theological position that a thoughtful pastor consoling a churchgoer at the loss of a companion animal might provide if pressed.

There's a deeper fuddle to this, though. Not all animals lack self-awareness. Higher primates like chimps and orangutans and gorillas clearly demonstrate memory, awareness of themselves as selves, and are even capable of grasping and expressing certain forms of human language. They can show compassion towards one another, and are also capable of intense brutality. But can they sin? If they have self-awareness, the answer would seem to be yes. If so...then are they somehow inherently unsaved according to the evangelical rubric? Koko the Gorilla never signed that she had accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, after all.

A solid counterargument would be that even the brightest of the "lesser creatures" are like children, and thus not fully culpable for their actions. But...what about creatures that aren't meaningfully "lesser" than many folks who've responded to an altar call. Elephants have fairly sophisticated infrasonic language, and have brains and vocabularies that meet or exceed those of most reality TV stars. Cetaceans are clearly our equals, although the forms and structures of their intellects are very different from ours. That doesn't matter, though.

If they have sentience, and they have will, and they are aware...then from the basic underlying assumptions of orthodox theology, they should be capable of sin. But they don't know nor can they know Jesus, as they're not able to read the tracts we earnestly press up against the glass wall at SeaWorld.

Does this mean they're inherently damned? Or just that the contemporary evangelical understanding of sin and Christ's purpose isn't quite adequate to the task of explaining it's way through this conundrum?