Is Heaven Boring?

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
--Romans 8:38-39 NRSV

“Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“Dad, do you ever think heaven is going to be boring?”

I was taken aback by my son’s question.  Boring?  So I asked him, why he thought heaven would be boring.  He replied that heaven seemed boring, because all the pictures of it were of people sitting around on clouds in white robes, strumming harps and not doing much else.  That seems like boring stuff to do forever and ever.  I had to admit he had a point.

We aren’t served well by the history of art depicting heaven that has come down to us through the ages.  Most of the scenes seem based upon Greco-Roman art which preceded Christianity.  Folks in toga-like robes, strumming harps of all instruments! and hanging around on either clouds or grassy hillocks.  It sounds nice for a minute, but for eternity it looks, well, boring.

Then there's the common idea that heaven will be full of self-righteous holy rollers who judge anyone who isn't like them.  Mark Twain famously said, "Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company."  If heaven resembles what many churches are like, exclusive clubs that use religion to beat up on people, then count me out too.

The Bible is suspiciously vague on what heaven is like, and what it does say doesn’t tell us very much.  I like to think heaven must be a place where you can eat all the Krispy Kreme donuts you want without getting fat or sick!  Surely it’s more fun that we’ve been led to believe. 

In my last blog post, what I feel John Prine’s music is saying to me during this time of pandemic.  The last song on his last album before his death is called “When I Get to Heaven.” 

When I get to heaven, I'm gonna shake God's hand
Thank him for more blessings than one man can stand
Then I'm gonna get a guitar and start a rock-n-roll band
Check into a swell hotel, ain't the afterlife grand?

And then I'm gonna get a cocktail, vodka and ginger ale
Yeah, I'm gonna smoke a cigarette that's nine miles long
I'm gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl
'Cause this old man is goin' to town

That sounds like a lot more fun than sitting around on a cloud strumming a harp!  That's a heaven I'd want to go to!  Prine goes on to sing more about his idea of heaven.

Then as God is my witness, I'm gettin' back into show business
I'm gonna open up a nightclub called "The Tree of Forgiveness"
And forgive everybody ever done me any harm
Well, I might even invite a few choice critics, those syph'litic parasitics
Buy 'em a pint of Smithwick's and smother 'em with my charm

I'd sure like to go to a place called "The Tree of Forgiveness;" do I have to wait until I'm dead to go there?

I’ve decided I don’t need to have specifics of what the afterlife is like.  All I need to know is what God is like, and the one thing I’ve staked my life upon is that God is loving.  So whatever heaven is like, it is a place where I’m going to be with the one who loves me most of all.  I’ll bank on that when I feel afraid about things in this life.

During these days of the Coronavirus, you’d have to be crazy not to think about your own mortality at least once in a while.  It’s natural to be afraid of the unknown, especially the unknown before the ultimate unknown—the suffering that could happen before one dies.  Yet, everyone from psychologists to religious mystics tells us that fear of death and the great unknown leads us to do a bad job of living in the present with what we are able to know.  It requires courage to face our fears and live accordingly. 

A book I highly recommend to everyone who is elderly or who has elderly loved ones is Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande.  In it, he writes the quote above, “Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped.”  It takes courage to believe what we cannot know for sure, and the ultimate thing we cannot know for sure is what awaits us, if anything, after we die.

It’s a bit of a gamble to trust the words found in Romans 8, that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus”—not even death.  I can’t prove that’s true, but I can prove that denying the reality of our mortality can make us miserable people while we are alive.