I need to touch the wounds

Andrew Sullivan is an intelligent writer who is also a devout Christian. I have to admit I have a hard time putting those two characteristics together – my automatic prejudice is that if someone believes Jesus was actually God, they just haven’t thought about it enough.

This in itself is stupid, I realize. Thinking and believing are two separate spheres. You can’t think your way into God.

Anyway, lately on his site he’s been hosting a debate between atheists and theists that’s fascinating; about what everybody thinks happens after we die. The atheists tend to be a bit arrogant, postulating, for example, that people who believe in an afterlife do so because they’re cowards, afraid to face their own death. But they’re also quite compelling, writing about how their belief in their own dissolution makes them more able to appreciate the lives they have; more eager to live good lives because they will only live on in memory.

Sullivan himself writes:

I have two intuitions about what happens when I die. The first is that I cannot know in any way for sure; and I surely know that whatever heaven is, it is so beyond our human understanding that it is perhaps better not to try an answer. The second is that I will continue to exist in my essence but more firmly and completely enveloped in the love and expanse of God, as revealed primarily in the life of Jesus.

I agree with his first intuition, except for the part about heaven, unless he means that heaven has something to do with how everything got started, the one mystery that atheism has no capability to explain. As for the second, if Jesus popped into my room right now, I’d have to agree. But I just can’t get there from here. My room is empty.

When I’m 64

We played that song at our wedding, never quite believing we’d ever get that old.

We did, or at least I did. Chip is always quite proud to announce he’s six months younger, so he’s not there yet.

My father died when he was 64, on this day in 1977. I look around me: at my children, about the same age my brother and I were then; at the trees just turning toward another autumn; at all the life still left to live; and realize how hard it must have been for him to let go.

Where do we go, according to God?

We had a priest today at my hospice meeting who spoke about Catholics’ beliefs about death and dying. Someone asked where all the dead people go who aren’t Catholic. She, a Catholic herself, had been wondering about the people yesterday whose plane fell into the Hudson. If they were Catholic, they probably hadn’t had a chance to confess their sins right before they took off, and if they weren’t Catholic, presumably they wouldn’t be welcomed by all the faithful Catholics doing their penance in purgatory, or already in heaven, so did they end up in. . . . (She actually didn’t say all this last part.)

“Catholics are bound by the sacraments,” he said, “but God is not.” And so, according to him, the Church doesn’t know what happens to non-Catholics.

This was a pretty refreshing point of view (he was a young priest).

But if you don’t really have to do all those sacraments, why bother? And do Catholics know better than God?

The eye of the needle

“I feel as if heaven lay close upon the earth and I between the two, breathing through the eye of a needle.”

I wonder if Amr ibn al-As, the military commander who led the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 640 and said these words on his deathbed, made it through that needle.