Souls in Full Sail by Griffin Emilie;

Author:Griffin, Emilie; [Griffin, Emilie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2011-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Imagining the Life to Come

All efforts to imagine death and the afterlife fail, leaving us feeling foolish and confused. It is simply beyond us; there is, as the Victorian writers used to say, a veil beyond which we cannot see.

I am gripped by a fear, suddenly, that all religious storytelling in the world is delusionary. The moment in the Oz story comes to mind when Dorothy and her friends find the little man behind the curtain, pretending to be a great wizard. Even the words, in all their whimsy and humor, came floating back: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” How, then, am I to be comforted? Consolation is a human invention, meant to lull us past our fears!

Is death an illusion? A passage into a new dimension? Is it possible, as some suppose, that a vast company of the blessed looks back toward us, rooting for us, praying for us, encouraging us in our struggles? In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, those who have already died sit on folding chairs to represent a graveyard. They comment on and understand our struggle, but they are beyond it; they have moved, as it were, to another level of consciousness, where the things we bleed for no longer matter. When Emily, the central figure of the play, dies and joins them, she is young. She has, perhaps, not let go fully of the attitudes of her former life; she has not fully embraced the life to come. “You know as well as I do,” Wilder’s stage manager explains,

that the dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually . . . they lose hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth—that’s the way I put it—weaned away. And they stay here while the earth part of them burns away, burns out; and all that time they slowly get indifferent to what’s going on in Grover’s Corners. They’re waitin’. They’re waitin’ for something that they feel is comin.’ Something important, and great.

Wilder’s theology is shaky. He says they are waiting for “the eternal part in them to start coming out.” Where is the blazing light of God, lighting up every crevice of those who have gone before us? His insight is animated, perhaps, by belief, but something less than biblical. Emily Dickinson comes closer when she peeks through sagacity’s riddle:

At last to be identified!

At last, the lamps upon thy side,

The rest of life to see!

Past midnight, past the morning star!

Past sunrise! Ah! What leagues are there

Between our feet and day!

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