What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us? Part 7

What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?

Part 7

Some responses to the things we’ve lost:-

2.) We will not go to heaven when we die.

This would be a huge loss!

It is a very great comfort and joy to me to think that one day “every veil” will be removed and I will see God as he truly is. All that is presently unfulfilled will be fulfilled; everything that is not well will be made whole.

However, I have surprised myself by starting like this – I have not immediately focussed on living forever. Instead, I seem to be interested in fullness of life, rather than eternal life, or life after death. What I am conscious of now is a lack of completeness, of unfulfilled potential, of mistakes spoiling what might have been. So, I see heaven as putting all these things right.

I have long been aware that merely resuscitating my body and giving it immortality is not the full job that’s required. I need to be transformed into the “perfect” version of me.

This might actually give some ways forward for reinterpreting what I mean by life after death, and still finding great value, even though I expect to be dead. The greatest spiritual experiences are often of transcendence, when, for a short while, you feel at one with the universe: we who are finite and temporal feel in union with the infinite and eternal; we who are so flawed in our moral characters feel uplifted to share in spiritual perfection. In those moments, we feel that we can “die happy”, and we have, in fact, reached the highest experience possible. I think (and hope) that just about everybody has a few of these experiences in their lives, and it is the claim of religions that they can become common through spiritual practice. Because we are mortal, physical creatures, these experiences usually last just a few moments, however, I think that this is the experience of heaven, and if heaven does exist, then to live there is simply to continue in this state of bliss forever. As our spiritual experiences in this life have a timeless quality about them, there is some sense in which we have experienced heaven on earth. It is a truly lovely thought to think that it might be possible to “wake up” the other side of death to discover that God has gifted you a new spiritual body as a vehicle to live in and, even more importantly, has gifted you a new version of yourself whereby you have achieved the perfect spiritual version of yourself while remaining completely in tune with the unique individual you are. We might think of this as being the equivalent of all the spiritual benefits acquired through 10,000 years of intensive meditation suddenly being acquired while simultaneously losing the burden of a physical body that has rudely reminded you throughout life of its needs.

To lose the hope of life after death would be the loss of a very great prize indeed, and we can see that my attempt to argue that, in a way, we’ve still attained it in brief glimpses is very feeble.