Daily Reading for June 27
I suppose my greatest curiosity about the afterlife is whether I will continue to be me. I want to continue being me, of course. I want not only to see all of those creatures that I have rescued through the years; I also want to see the loved ones whom I have lost. I want to lay my head on Grandma Lucy’s lap again. I want to shell field peas with Fannie Belle and listen to Schubert with Earl. The problem with this scenario is that it turns heaven into my perfect version of earth, with a perfect me in the middle of it. As appealing as this is, it strikes me as an underutilization of God’s gifts.
Since ecstatic union with God is my best idea of heaven, I think I have to be ready to let myself go—literally, I mean. I think I have to entertain the possibility that joining God in heaven may mean surrendering everything I hold dear on earth, including my me-ness, in order to be made entirely new. In Christian terms, I think I really do have to die, and be willing to leave the rest to God.
When my father lay dying several years ago, I hardly left his room for the last two weeks of his life. This gave me a lot of time to think about what was happening to him, and where he might be going. . . .One Sunday afternoon I lay my head on my father’s pillow so I could whisper in his ear. “I think I finally get what’s taking you so long,” I said. “You’re having to let it all go, aren’t you? All the places you haven’t traveled yet, all the places you’ve been. Your first girlfriend, your favorite chair, your prize students, your grandsons.” I was crying now. “Everything that makes you you, you’re having to let go now. Oh, Poppa, I don’t know how you can do it. It has to be so hard.”
He died at three that afternoon. After the undertaker had taken my father’s body, I lay down in his hospital bed. I fully expected him to be there in spirit somehow, but when I got up, the room was dark and empty as a tomb. Around the same time the next day, I was thinking of him when I felt him take off like a rocket. For about three seconds, a wave of pure bliss washed through my body. Then I knew my father was gone. He had left all his Earl-ness behind.
Maybe he got it all back again when he arrived where he was going, or maybe he discovered that “me” was too small a box for who he became in God. I may never know, but ever since then I have become less attached to my beliefs about heaven. In their place, I am cultivating what I hope is radical trust in God. In the face of all that I do not know about heaven, I am still willing to go where God wants me to go and to be what God wants me to be, even if I have to leave me behind.
From “Leaving Myself Behind” by Barbara Brown Taylor, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. Copyright © 2007. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org