Heaven and Hell for us should not be based on Dante's Divine Comedy

     If Heaven and Hell are eternal, what makes you think they would skip the present moment?  Where are you right now? I just came from Heaven a few minutes ago.  I was in my 7 week old daughter's new nursery.  My wife of 3 years was sitting in the rocker.  We put Delia in her little portable crib.  My wife had the Lullaby album she made a few years ago playing in the background.  Listening to my wife's beautiful voice singing lullabies, Delia drifted off to sleep.  I left and went up to the gas station and had a smoke.  While I was there, I thought this thought: Heaven and Hell are all around us at every moment.  I just left Heaven by choice.

     When I was a younger Christian I was inundated by the view that Heaven was just somewhere you go when you die. After 20 years of reading scripture and attending church, I am less convinced.  Sure, I believe there is some sort of afterlife.  I really don't believe we are here for a brief instant of a life and then eternally lost to time.  God is too big, in my view, for such an austere plan for human beings.  Do I believe there is a hell?  Yes, but I read scripture enough to know that it is not Dante's fire-consumed Inferno. It was called Dante's Divine Comedy

because it was a SATIRE on religious belief of the time. It was not meant to shape our views of the afterlife for 7 centuries! It has got to be the greatest literary irony of all time. Too many people are stuck on Dante's inferno, thinking that their good works during life are somehow "fire insurance," saving them from a bodily existence in a lake of fire.  People seriously believe this and have for hundreds of years.  I hate to take the wind out of our collective sales, but this is one man's satirical picture of Heaven and Hell and, of course, Purgatory as well.  It is simply a travesty that the church eventually unintentionally installed this picture in the collective consciousness of Christians up to this very day.  It is simply absurd. 

     The sheer probability that Dante, when writing a satire to show the fates of the famous people of his day, somehow captured the entire essence of the afterlife, is 1 to infinity. So what does that leave us with? Speculation and some nebulous references in Jesus's words. I am not big on what the non-canonical gospels or anything outside the 4 canonical gospels say on this subject because I think Jesus knew exactly the answer, everybody else is just interpreting through their own cultural lens. Isn't the Bible the inspired words of God himself?  Yes, but they are second hand.  Except for Jesus's exact words.  And do we have Jesus's exact words?  Doubtful.  And even if we do, the majority of the population of Christians throughout history have read them interpreted by scribes (or modern translators) into a second (and sometimes though a third) language. What about Revelation?  Revelation is a special type of Jewish literature called apocalyptic literature and it takes wild poetic license on themes using symbolism to describe concepts with a large brush. So I can only share what my beliefs are based on Jesus's words.

     If you look closely in the New Testament and pay attention to what Jesus says about Heaven on the one hand and what we interpret to be roughly equivalent to hell, I think we can only safely say one thing.  Heaven and Hell are existences which are eternal and prepared for us.  Jesus refereed to Paradise and he seemed to infer that it was all around us this very moment, unbound by time and space (if you include the references to the Kingdom of Heaven) and will last forever.  I can "slip into" heaven any time by experiencing God or the beauty around me. The prophets called it "being taken up to heaven." The Early Church interpreted Jesus's words through the lens of their current theology and amalgamated Jesus's few words on Heaven and Hell with their man-made concept of Sheol.  Sheol was a physical (although this is somewhat questionable as to how universal that was believed) place where the dead went "down to" when they died. In the New Testament, authors attached the idea that the believers on the last day (because of the Revelation writings) would be bodily raised from this Sheol and judged.  Those who were found worthy would be ushered into the presence of God.  Those who were not, would be separated from God. What does this look like?  Your guess is as good as mine.

     If we are careful to not assign things to the text and the people of that time through the lens of our own tradition, we can see that the afterlife is very much undefined.

     Where does this leave us?  With our imaginations at best.  But the human brain just happens to be the most powerful device ever created.  Why do I say this?  I say this because the human brain creates reality.  It defines the world around us with language and influences the world through our body's words and actions.  But more than that, our words influence all other living things we are in contact with.  Even living things we are not in direct contact with.  Take for instance The Paris Agreement.  All the major countries of the world got together and agreed that we are going to reduce emissions so that Global Climate change does not raise the temperature on our planet more than 2 degrees Celsius.  If we can do this, if even if one person changes his or her actions with respect to this goal, it will influence the entire world, and I would argue, more than that. It actually influences the future. Do you see how powerful the human mind is?

     So what then do I believe the afterlife is?  (Because by writing this, I am creating reality for me and possibly for you).  I believe the afterlife is what you make of it.  Literally.  If someone is limited by Dante's vision of Paradise  Purgatory, and the Inferno, then I think that will be the reality that they live in now (today) and for eternity. You think this is a vain exercise.  I don't think so at all.  What if Paradise were available to us now?  Wouldn't you go there?  And wouldn't you try to go there for the rest of eternity? This isn't saying that man is all powerful.  Man can't create realities that God does not permit. God is the ultimate authority, but man's mind is a reflection of God's.  We have free will.  We can choose to live any way that we want, regardless of our circumstances.  And we can shape our reality radically through our own actions and thoughts.  This is what it means, I believe, when it was written that man is a reflection of God, made in God's own image. 

     So where does that leave me?  That leaves me very conscious of the present moment.  Because in it, lies the rest of my eternity.  As I read scripture and build a picture of God for myself that is hopefully inspired by God himself, I learn to be in relationship with Him and with others and very importantly, with myself.  Based on these relationships, I exist.  I can exist in any mindset I put myself in.  So I naturally want, when my inclinations are correct, to seek the peace that communing with God provides.  In some Christian circles it is called the peace of the Holy Spirit. The more my inclinations are brought in line with God's, the more peace I experience. I naturally want to bring my inclinations to this place because this peace is probably the most important thing to me.  And God helps us do that.  In fact, he designed the entire universe to do just that: put us in touch with Him! The peace from this is a powerful "carrot."  The "stick" is going without it.  I believe that all humans are built with this basic device at the core of our being.  People, of course, seek peace any way that they can find it.  Without God, it takes all sorts of shapes - some seemingly good and some horribly bad.  But I think the only way to evaluate these things are, "does this thing take me closer to an all-loving all-powerful, self-sacrificing Creator who loves me more than I can possibly know with my own flawed experiences of love?"  If the answer is yes, then for God's sake, I should do it to the best of my ability with help from God.  When I seek this peace, where I find it, is Heaven in the present moment.  And these glimpses of heaven (and hell) are glimpses into Eternity.

     That's my theology. I am happy to believe that the experiences I have in the present are actual tastes of where I will spend the rest of my existence in eternity.  I hope that in some small way, this article influences you to savor the present.  Because I think that is where heaven lies: outside of time, sure, but also within it: right here, right now.