My oldest son came upstairs long after his bedtime last night, clearly fighting back little tears. I asked him what was wrong, and he, after the briefest of hesitations, relayed what was troubling him. He said, “I was laying on my bed thinking about heaven, and it’s…scary.” And the tears began to flow. Keep in mind that he’s getting close to his teenage years. But as I invited this increasingly tall, growing boy to sit on my increasingly fragile lap and shed his tears onto my neck, I had a feeling that this wouldn’t be as much about heaven as it would be about the concept of eternity.
Yep, that was it
I told him, “son, I know exactly how you’re feeling.” I try not to say that too often when people — even my own children — come to me with their problems or fears. Because so often, despite how much I might think I do know exactly how someone is feeling, I actually don’t. People are too unique for that. Now, I might have a glimpse of what they’re experiencing, or I may be able to draw from a similar experience in order to sympathize and empathize, but it’s often not helpful at all to say something like, “I know precisely what you’re going through,” because that’s typically only partially true at best.
But this time, it was true. Totally true.
The Backstory
Growing up, I had experienced moments like this so frequently that I even coined a somewhat silly moniker to classify them: I called them “EPAs,” which stood for “Eternity Panic Attacks.” As goofy as that sounds, it was all I could think of to call them; you see, when one hit me, when I would think about this idea of neverendingness, I would break out into a cold sweat, heart palpitations, and begin to spiral into an actual panic. The very thought of forever shattered my categories so hard that I was wholly arrested by crippling fear and anxiety.
I’ll not forget one of my worst ones — I was sitting in church as a college student, and for some reason, the thought of forever and ever and ever and ever popped into my head. Might have been something the pastor said, might’ve not been. But either way, there I was, in church, spiraling. Sweating. Breathing shallowly. Biting my thumbnail. Eyes wide. Panicking. I remember I pressed my thumbnail into my hand or leg (I don’t remember which) so hard just to bring myself back to reality, to the now , but it didn’t work. I didn’t even hardly feel it.
The worst part? Very few people actually understood this sort of thing, this “EPA” problem of mine. Frankly, I think that’s still true today. Most people with whom I converse about this seem to be able to simply say, “yeah, that’s weird. I can’t imagine that. But it’s gonna be great!” and then literally skip and frolic away, somehow leaving a actual trail of rainbows and flowers in their wake while they sing Blessed Assurance or something. But not me. Precisely because I can’t understand the concept of eternality, it has always troubled me. Not as much these days as it did then, and granted, it’s been a while since I had an “EPA,” but the notion of eternity and foreverness will still trip me up and ruin a good bit of my day if I let it.
You’re a mean one, Mr. Britt
I know. I know. This makes me a monster. I get it. I do. What we call “heaven” is supposed to be (and I believe will be) wonderful and amazing. When the realm of God finally and fully intersects with the realm of earth at his return, things are going to be, in a word, perfect. Scripture is full of everything from prophecies to pictures of how blissful and restful this will be. So I recognize that a statement like “thinking about it will ruin my day” sounds like it belongs in a category somewhere between ignorant and blasphemous. But please hear me out — this is coming from the mind of someone who believes and trusts in the mind and plan of God, but whose limitations have always prohibited the full relishing of such an idea as eternity. Like, actually never ending.
Forget what we’ll look like or what we’ll be able to “do” or comparatively trivial things like that — that was never the problem. I never doubted our Creator’s, well, creativity. I am fully aware I won’t be “bored,” and so on. The thing that bothered me was the never-endingness of it all. It all seems so incoherent, so disconnected from reality. Not that I very much like the alternatives to eternal bliss any better, thank you very much, but even The Neverending Story had an ending. People stop singing The Song That Never Ends after a little while. Everything ends…right?
Well Yes, But Actually, No
This is where I suppose it gets a little bit philosophical, or — if you prefer — theosophical. Is neverendingness actually that incoherent? We sure don’t live like it is. Think about it: most of us don’t typically live presently as if we intend to die. Not really. Sure, we make plans like life insurance and funeral directives, but until we get really up there in years (and sometimes not even then), that’s not something most of us really think about consistently, if hardly at all. In other words, thinking about eternity might be overwhelming to people like me (and my son, as it turns out) who have to wrap their minds around everything, but I can’t imagine it will be that different than how we live today: one day at a time, one week at a time. One moment at a time.
And that’s more or less what I imagine eternity to be: unshackled by our limited paradigms of time. Unbound by a sense of needing to progress in order to matter. One infinite moment. That’s not to say we won’t still be inventing, cooking, gardening, working, governing, and so on. But I think we might be a little bit closer to the reality portrayed in the garden narrative: no ongoing sense of what happens outside the bounds of the Garden, so to speak. Only within. Only the present.
But I suppose I digress. Is eternality truly that alien to us? Yes and no. We have a beginning and an ending, but we serve a God who we believe (and who must necessarily be) eternal, both backwards and forwards. I recognize that in our human limitations we can’t know (or can even conceptualize) what forever will be like any more than a baby knows what life outside the womb will be like, but I do think there’s room for addressing this philosophically in way that’s not incoherent with reality. It’s foreign, sure, but unfamiliar doesn’t mean unreal.
Wishful thinking?
Speaking of unreal, there’s a growing group of thinkers out there who are, in a word, materialists. They believe that this universe somehow magically created itself from a nothing-explosion and set its new self in order by binding itself to laws of physics that it made up with its non-mind before it existed. And then after lightning struck a primordial pond, RNA arose and got smarter and more complex with no directing intelligence, and the rest, as they say, is history. I don’t have a problem with evolutionary creationism, mind you, but it becomes staggeringly incoherent when you don’t have a first cause or intentional mind.
Anyhow, the materialist believes that this life, this product of mind-bendingly long periods of time and mind-melting amounts of mind-breaking streaks of luck, is all there is. And I suppose that follows: after all, if nothing comes before this material world, then nothing should or could come afterwards, I suppose.
So heaven, says the materialist, is therefore a mere fantasy born in the minds of some ancient goat-herders somewhere who didn’t quite like the idea of death. They’ll rightly point out that just about every religion has its own view of what happens after we die, and it’s usually good news for the adherents of that religion, and bad news for the ones who didn’t listen. And so, once again, the courageous, the brilliant, the intellectually fearless atheists are here to save the day by saying, “yes, eternity is troubling, but don’t worry, because it’s not real.”
But I think there’s defeaters to this, some more powerful than others. One could cite the universality of the belief in the afterlife among all cultures before certain modern ones became deliberately post-theist, or one could appeal to arguments of contingency and so on, and we won’t spend time doing that here, but I mean to say that coddling oneself by saying things like “you’re lucky you’re alive at all, against all odds” or “things are only meaningful if they have an ending” might be comforting at first, but doesn’t provide much by way of actual argumentation against eternity. Remember — unfamiliar doesn’t mean unreal, foreign doesn’t mean fake, and non-exemplified doesn’t mean non-existent.
But I suppose all of this is beside the point.
And now, the rest of the story
So anyhow, with my son in my lap, I told him, “Son, I have been where you are. And I am going to make you feel better. I promise.” I had such confidence! Thankfully, it paid off. I was able to make him feel better, and he slept soundly after a few moments of discussion and contemplation. In relating some comforts to him, I asked him the following questions that I’ve had to ask myself over the decades:
- Are the alternatives to heaven (annihilation or various concepts of hell) more desirable than eternal bliss, however scary eternity may sound to you presently?
- If you were 70 and someone offered you 70 more years or death, what would you choose? Now, after 70 more years pass and someone offers you 70 more years, what would you choose? Without pain and without boredom, can you conceive of a scenario in which you would decline blissful, productive living?
- Is it not likely that in a restored state of innocence (and possibly naïveté), humans will be much less likely to even conceive of, let alone worry about, something like existential dread in an eternal state?
- Are you consumed with thinking about next year presently, or are you mostly just thinking about today and tomorrow and next month? Do you think it will be much different in the eternal state?
- Do you believe that God, in his creativity, love, and wisdom has prepared you a place beyond what you can even imagine?
And so on. I told him that he would look back on days like today and say, “I understand why I was worked up. But now I see that I had no reason to be.” Maybe you’re reading this and you’ve had EPAs or something like it. You should know that you’re not alone. Maybe these thoughts have helped or will help you.
Man, that took forever (get it?)
By way of conclusion, I should add that this was a bit of a reminder: my son (and possibly most of my four children) will face some of the same intellectual and emotional obstacles to some of the assumptions that undergird Christianity and religion in general that I have faced. My task is not to force-feed them Bible verses about the topic with which they’re struggling, dismiss their concerns as “attacks of the devil,” or simply beg or frighten or guilt-trip them into believing these assumptions. No, my task is to demonstrate that there is an intellectually viable pathway to belief in the supernatural not only as a possible reality, but as an overwhelmingly probable one.
A blissful eternity included.
