Will I Remember?
This article is a platform and seed for a further and deeper study into the matters of the resurrectional body and its characteristics. This will appear in a future edition of Efmevi. Stay tuned.
Pain is a very personal experience. From Scripture and the Christian life, the only person who can claim, through their own life, that pain can transcend personal boundaries and become theirs as well , pain as intimate as your own, is Christ himself. It is a bold claim that reeks of possible arrogance. But, the Incarnation says so, that Christ can both empathize and sympathize, at the same time, with all human suffering through his life and then on the Cross.
On the steps during break at work, I couldn’t agree with the words I just wrote. Pain encroached upon my heart; it was absolute, final, definite. I couldn’t and didn’t want to compare it with that of anyone else. I wagged my head at Christ knowing or understanding the depth, height, and breadth of my predicament. In that very moment, in the here-and-now, I was the only one who mattered. My pain mattered. I stared at the steps and I considered… well, I became anxious as my mind catapulted me to thinking about death and the afterlife.
All this pain, all these torturous moments, my heart and my mind laden with sadness and futility… will I carry this to the next life?
The very question shook me as if I was breathing my last. Real fear gripped me. Since childhood, I have been mortified by death and the afterlife. My mind, visual by nature, couldn’t paint an image to comfort me. It still can’t. The bare references it has are not enough. I try to imagine levitation and lightness of being, but I’m still afraid. I try to imagine the faces of angels, saints; I try to conceptualize the fully revealed glory of the Trinity and my mind fails. I try to simulate the sensation of transfiguration, our bodies undergoing a transformation to that form observed on Mount Tabor, and try to look toward that with hope and expectation; I feel even more afraid. Clearly, both John and Paul, inspired writers who delved into these matters, were right to each that there is no way to encapsulate certain matters of the Divinity within our minds. That’s why St. Paul stressed: “And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, … “ (Phil. 4:7) It’s really that middle clause that’s relevant here; it surpasses our comprehension. So both by Scripture and my own attempts, you can’t really think your way into comfort about the afterlife. It is clearly foolish.
It’s a testament of our human inadequacy. Our minds have no reference point, are limited by nature, and when coupled with anxiety or uncertainty like mine, it fails with a Windows-like blue screen.
It’s not just the failure of my mind to comprehend the afterlife that rendered me numb that day. It was the conjugal fear of, even to that undefined period of existence, all suffering coming along with me. Would I still remember all the pain, could I still feel, even in that post-resurrectional body, all the regrets, sins, failures etched into me?
I could only imagine then a presidential press conference. For questions bred more questions, knowing no order or delay. Two stood out like the voices of quiet, experienced journalists, steeped in the art of asking questions all presidents suppress with circular answers and waffling.
Where will I end up? Is it heaven or hell?
That would answer a first part of the original question of whether I’d carry suffering into the afterlife. If it’s heaven, it means I’ve conquered death and that my body has found victory. In the glory of the coming age, I will be in unbroken and eternal communion with God and all his people. Going back to me on the steps, me in heaven? … I really doubt it. There’s no way! My feelings right now seem to be a pre-hell, a trailer for a summer horror film that won’t end: one that I will watch and live. It’s not just my feelings, but it’s also an entire experience I can’t escape right now. I surely can’t be living in that hope of repentance and transformation. So, it seems that the original question of carrying pain into the afterlife implies and reveals a fear of hell.
That is, what I’m experiencing now is what I will experience then.
The great St. Anthony of the Egyptian desert said that he doesn’t fear God because he loves him. Abba, you suffered; you underwent great temptation. Perhaps hagiography never intended to preserve for us your own private turmoil lest we lose hope. Could you have pondered upon my question? Will I end up in hell, Abba? Is my life going to be hell now and hell then as well? I am afraid of eternal suffering, that which I will inflict on myself, not God doing it to me. God cannot willfully inflict pain on me, even if I’ve deserved eternal punishment because of my continued and conscious separation from him. God is love. Right? God is love! Abba Ammonas says: “Love never hates anyone, never reproves anyone, never condemns anyone…”
In my suffering, now or then (what an odious thought!), is God distant, far away? Isaac the Syrian writes: “It is totally false to think that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is a child of the knowledge of truth and is unquestionably given commonly to all.” (Homily 84)
Momentary comfort comes to me. I’m not sure. It seems like it. In that pained moment, God seemed totally absent. St. Isaac continues: “… but love’s power acts in two ways: it torments sinners, while at the same time it delights those have lived in accord with it.”
Terminal blow. I don’t know what to think. Thinking back, I couldn’t tell you if it was sin or repentance I was walking in. But his words are cutting.
What body will I have? I don’t know. It all really depends on the answer for the first question: where will I end up? I try to ignore that and convince myself I will be in heaven in the afterlife, that my concerns are philosophical distractions only. But this whole inquiry started from a real moment of human weakness. It’s far from a thought on a whim while sipping on an espresso.
Questions about the Resurrection and the Ascension are hard to approach as we are still humans covered in the cloth of flesh. All we really have is our mind’s wanderings, maybe visceral dreams, or stories from others. We don’t have a daily, direct experience or encounter with that side of existence. We get glimpses through monasteries and hearing or seeing monks who have reaped the harvest of toiling in the journey. Even with our patristic witness, we find that words only come to so much. When a loved one passes, clergy, faithful, and the grieving family immediately speak of that person being in heaven. The pastoral concern by the clergy and the need to be assured of the person’s coming state are both well-understood. But to my jaded mind, within myself, I know that those people may grapple with my questions too. They may even have had moments, like mine on the steps, where existential anxiety, to borrow R.D Laing’s term, surfaces. This is the kind of anxiety that doubts and shakes the very foundations of life and death.
I know and believe that all that pass onto the next age are in the mercy of God. After that, the Fathers speak of those who bask in God’s love and those who will find it torture, as the quote from St. Isaac illustrated earlier. It will be torture for them because they never knew the love of God in their temporal lives. For me personally, it slaps me across the face and shrieks in my ears: perhaps you don’t know God at all.
We cannot imagine for our loved ones that we could be tortured in hell. This will pose great pastoral and personal questions for us, and raises concerns for us whom are in the ministry. Over time, cultural practice and cultural beliefs surrounding death trumps our faith and small Arabic expressions [ba’ad el sharr] make people fear death, hold onto life, and wish for it to be prolonged on earth. These attitudes and expressions clash head-on with our faith that is rooted in the afterlife; that’s where our treasure should be, the eternal resting place of our heads, the place we should be aiming for.
Our hope and goal is in the afterlife, to be in heaven with God. That is also my hope, even as I still fear death, that coming life, and the possibility, even as I write these words having quoted Fathers and Scripture, I don’t know God at all.
Is there supposed to be a place in the treasure box in heaven for all my earthly legacy, sensual and physical?
When people ask me about my convictions about heaven… will I give them a faithful answer, one rooted in my faith and struggles, or be the coward and feign a cultural answer?
