32/50: What happens when we die?
A really obscure Amy Grant song but one of my very favorites.
“I have found the perfect mystery
Love has a hold on me
Long before my life had come to be
Love had a hold on me
Love has a hold on me
Where do I come from
What does life mean
Is it not to know the one who made me
As I’m looking down the road ahead
Love has a hold on me
Someday when I breathe my dying breath
Love has a hold on me
Love has a hold on me
Where will I go
When this life is through
Back into the light that made me and you”
What happens when we die?
I don’t know.
But here is the best answer I’ve heard —
In the first month of my seminary internship, I visited Gordon in the hospital before his heart bypass surgery the next day. I was trying to ask all the right pastor questions. One of which was, “Are you afraid?” And he said, “No. I was loved before I was born and I will return to love after I die.”
If love is the nature of reality, then whatever is after death is love.
Personally, I don’t need more than that.
I know others who want to know they will see their loved ones in the afterlife. And I know some who seem to have seen into the world beyond ours and seen those who have died. That’s okay, but it’s all pretty misty to me past my trust in Divine Love to hold us.
Another important question about life after death is who is included in Love and who gets excluded. I’m pretty sure it’s everyone, but the truth-telling embrace of Jesus is how I think it happens. Justice begins when the truth is told. And, I like to imagine, along with early church father, Origen, that there is a refining aspect to the truth-telling experience of Love once we die. There is justice when even the most evil person encounters pure and complete Love. Whatever is in that encounter with Love must heal all that gave birth to the evil. The truth-telling must be so painfully revealing that the victims of evil would be vindicated. Even in life after this life, God is restoring through truth and embrace.
More than any other theological shift I’ve made, this shift to a more universal view of salvation was the biggest one. I no longer worried about people’s immortal souls or whether they would end up in “eternal conscious torment” as some statements of faith put it. It freed me from a lot of anxiety and gave an integrity to my interactions with people outside of Christian faith.
You are loved before you are born. You are loved every day of your life. You will be loved in whatever is beyond this. For me, that love is absolutely rooted in what I see of God through Jesus Christ, but I trust that it extends beyond any human hoops or actions or “professions of faith.” It is stronger and bigger than we are and it will catch us every time, from now and forever.