Believing in Heaven IS Alluring... (Wish I Could)

Thoughts on death, hardship, reincarnation, and wanting an eject button

Forgive the meandering explanation of how I arrived at a fairly common perspective about why it’s nice to believe in heaven. Also, Jimmy Carter’s day of remembrance was Thursday, and at time of writing I was just listening to part of the service on NPR, where ministers talked about him being reunited with his wife in heaven, and the eternal rewards waiting for him, yada yada. It would be so nice to just believe in heaven. If you want to skip past my weird thoughts and get straight to the heaven part, scroll until you pass the photo!

It’s mid-winter, which means it’s peak sickness season: viruses everywhere, lurking, waiting to sneak into our body and try to conquer the whole system. (Thank GOODNESS for immune systems, right? But also, I think viruses might be proof that Satan is real and that evil exists… Especially if you have little kids, you GET it). We recently survived (knock on wood) a close encounter with norovirus that struck my spouse, whom I kept sequestered in our bedroom for nearly 72 hours (48 hour waiting period after symptoms pass!) and then bleached the hell out of everything once I released him. You might recall that I have emetophobia, which I’m sloooowly starting to work on again with EMDR, so my measures are perfectly reasonable and not extreme AT all. OBVIOUSLY.

I am, I guess, a bit of a germophobe, made all the more so since having kids and feeling especially disrupted by disruptions in routine and sleep caused by sickness and crying children. I wish I, and all of us, could just be kept safe from sickness. While reading an article on vaccines the other day, I reflected how just in the span of my young adult life, we came up with a vaccine for chickenpox (which most people my age and older have had), and now we’ve nearly eliminated cases of chickenpox. Isn’t that wild?? Meanwhile, we’ve got a giant movement of anti-vaxxers who are refusing basic childhood vaccines like measles, mumps, and rubella (and many others) and we’re seeing resurgences in preventable diseases like MEASLES. 😱 (not my main point, but WHY, PEOPLE?? WHY!?!?)

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in another era, back before the quality of healthcare we have now, and vaccines, and modern inventions? I mean I know we complain a lot about how things are now, and I think relative to how things very reasonably COULD be, things do suck. I could really do without making fascism great again, and without power more formally coalescing in an obvious authoritarian oligarchy. But compared to what it used to be like in past eras… wow, we have it so good.

Point two. (We’re going somewhere, I promise). Since completely abandoning evangelical theology, the belief system that I’ve semi-adopted is essentially that of reincarnation. I believe (currently) that there is a soul that is more than just your physical self. I believe your soul comes with a mission of sorts, an innate need to grow, and certain things it needs to learn or challenges to overcome while in its current embodiment. I might believe that this same soul essence embodies into different physical lives until it essentially finishes its journey (basically, Buddhist nirvana), but I might believe that at the end of your life, the soul melts back into the One like a drop of water into the ocean, and in that way “embodies” again when an ocean droplet leaves to take physical form (less focus on individual reincarnation, more on the ultimate Oneness of everything).

Right. So, given that living another life is an entire possibility for my soul, here is the weird form my health anxiety has taken shape:

I live a highly privileged, comfortable life as a 21st century American with financial stability. I’m lucky enough that my kids and myself are relatively healthy. And yet I STILL worry so much about illness! What if next time, I had horrible luck and I just couldn’t handle it??

I think part of this is that people in general learn to cope with whatever life situation they find themselves in, and I haven’t had to learn to cope with those hard things I’m afraid of. I am sure that I would learn how to deal if the dreaded things happened. I get that. And at the same time, it feels so scary!

Can’t I just escape living on this scary earth relatively unscathed by horrible health issues? Maybe in numerous past lives, I died from horrible diseases (I mean that is pretty likely, if reincarnation is real). And maybe in the future, in our post-apocalyptic world, we’re going to ravaged by all kinds of diseases and famine and hardship, all over again. (Because honestly, this is extraordinarily likely too). Can’t I just hit the eject button when I’m done here and stay in heaven forever??

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

Hi! For everyone who wanted to skip my meandering thoughts resulting from illness phobia / health anxiety along with my belief in reincarnation, welcome back 😂 Most people probably are primarily [emotionally] motivated to believe in heaven because a loved one has died, and they long for a day when they can be reunited with them. (Surprising thing about me is I’m 36 and have never had someone very close to me die, even though I have no remaining grandparents. The closest was a stepgrandma. So to be honest I haven’t had this be a personal motivator [yet], but I can see how it would truly impact one’s feelings and beliefs.)

As evangelicals, we believed we had an airtight understanding of both heaven and hell. You believe the right things and trust that Jesus forgives you of your sins*? (plus the * of all the other things you need to be doing in your life to show that your belief in Jesus has made a genuine difference, but otherwise, totally simple and straightforward). BAM. Heaven. You don’t believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior? BAM. Hell. Either way, you have a permanent final destination.

And as long as your loved ones have the right beliefs just like you do, you can take solace that you’ll all be reunited in heaven forever and ever, praising God and walking the streets of gold. (which… sounds pretty boring after about a hundred years, but whatev.) You have grief for a loved one dying? Unnecessary, because you’ll see them again before you know it. Oh, your loved one wasn’t a Christian?? Sorry ‘bout your luck, pal… but geez, you didn’t try harder to convert them? Or frankly, they probably deserve that final destination, so maybe you should just get over that sadness.

It’s tempting, especially if you’ve been conditioned to not have emotional depth or critical thinking, to not question. To trust that when you die, good things are waiting and you’ll never have to worry about anything anymore. It feels good, especially when you’ve been conditioned to not have genuine empathy for people different than yourself, to rest on the laurels of your own self-righteousness and not worry about the fate of anyone else.

It seems most people (in my cultural context, at least), even those outside the evangelical theology bubble, want to believe in an afterlife where you’re reunited with those you love, where there will be no more pain and suffering. Or, we like to imagine that those who have passed on before us are somehow watching over us while we try to navigate life without them. It’s comforting. It’s nice.

I just don’t think I believe in it. Not like that, anyway, where we still feel “people-y” when we die. I hope that we know perfect love and peace and union when we pass on, even if it’s just temporary til our soul decides to go on another growth mission again. And maybe I’ll change my mind on all of this when I’m older and facing my own mortality in a more vivid way. Who knows?

For now, I’ll try to focus on the people I love and care about, the pockets of joy I can find in this strange and scary world, and I’ll try to leave my corner of it just a tiny bit better than how I found it.

Peace and love to you, my friends.