A very happy Birthday to all those born this day – especially bloggers on vacation. Many Happy returns Christopher!
Birth is far less controversial than death it seems. There are no arguments about whether there is life after birth, although maybe there should be! However, I wonder if the question about life after death might be helpfully shifted if we ask the question: “What about life before birth?”
The tricky thing about eternity is that eternity is not a time. It is not a long time, or a short time, it is beyond time. We don’t really have a chance of fully understanding this because our brains work within the category of time – time is built-in to how we think. We are used to the world happening as a stream of events that follow each other. Birth, life, death, from our vantage point happen sequentially in time. But the insight offered by Christianity and other spiritual traditions is that birth, life, and death also have an eternal aspect to them. They are all held in a cosmic Now, the eternity that is beyond time.
Birth is now.
Life is now.
Death is now.
Perhaps this reminds us of the “Mystery of Faith” that we proclaim as part of the Eucharistic mystery:
Christ has died
Christ is risen
Christ will come again.
From the point of view of eternity, the Mystery of course is always unfolding right now. Christ is dying, Christ is rising, Christ is coming again. We are being born, we are living, we are dying. Of course, from the perspective of time this is obviously does not correspond to our experience.
So where do we experience eternity? That is a wonderful question. I suspect we all will have different answers. But they will all be experiences. The sense that time is held in eternity is not something that really can be explained or argued for or against. It can only be experienced. Which brings me back to birth.
Birth, for me, is the experience that new life has emerged from apparently nothing. Oh, high school biology will tell us all about gametes, and meiosis and mitosis, those processes by which an egg and a sperm come together and eventually make a baby, but nowhere in that mechanical process is “life” imparted. It is not just the transferring of “life” from the parents because birth is the experience that something new has emerged. The life of mom and dad are still there and there is now a new thing with life of its own.
What about life before birth?
Perhaps that question can help get us unstuck from all the concretized metaphors about what happens after death. It seems to me that the symbol of “Heaven” is one of our linguistic placeholder that points towards a reality that is beyond time and space. All language, therefore, about eternity or Heaven, is necessarily metaphorical from the side of time.
But because we experience ourselves in time are we bound there? How can we experience eternity from within time? That, it seems to me, is the single purpose at the heart of all religious tradition. For, throughout history, humans have discovered that there are symbols and rituals that reliably allow the ocean of eternity to break through our experience in time. Or it might sometimes feel like we are being cast out of time and into eternity.
For Christians, out of this Christ consciousness that has one foot in eternity and one in time comes the proclamation that the Kingdom of God (eternity) is at hand. Out of this Life that bridges time and eternity comes the gift that bread and wine, food for our earthly lives, can with intention also feed our eternal consciousness. Out of this Love comes the revelation that whatever we do to each other we also do to ourselves.
Where do you experience eternity?
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August 24, 2011 at 2:25 pm
Tress
I like this post!Once one is beyond the belief of heaven as a chatty place for meeting old friends and loved ones. there are a lot of conceptual problems to deal with regarding the continuation of life. or as one soon realises not the continuation but the ever presence.
The metaphor of the individual consciousness, returnig like a drop in the ocean to the cosmic wholeness has always lacked something for me , surely by addition we should be more not less. i s it not possible that this fusion is heaven itself, forever expanding ? or is that not possible either. and alsois it all beyond the experience of this life which may just be a projection or dream?
When i was a naive 19 year old (can you imagine it today) in nurses training, Our Tutor explained that Quickening was just the first time the baby kicked the mother in the utereus , that she felt it. I was devastated .I had a beautiful picture in my mind that god actually brought the baby to separate life at that moment.it was no use that she said it was stilla miracle! My my emotionally held misconcetion hurt in its demise
I t taught me a lesson, that it took years to understand.What we believe is conditional on our power to understand, and that is what we are all trying to improve.the trick is that it is not just an intellectual exercise, but one of love from which comes acceptance and an openess towhat may be.
August 24, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Rob
Perhasp another perspective is that TIME is our measurement not God;s as HIS is eternal.
How can I think of time before I was born as I was not aware of my existance with God and that memory has been erased from me so I can be that bundle of joy and miracle of life on earth. We have been given a gft of a promise so I can look forward past time to my place with Jesus or should I say back to God’s place.
Great post
August 24, 2011 at 5:51 pm
jaqueline
I have wondered about this idea that we come from heaven ever since I became interested in spirituality and especially ever since my mum used it as a way to skirt around our horrible upbringing by telling me that I chose my parents and my life before I was born. So I was rather intrigued when you brought it up at the death talks.
So I have been reading scripture in the morning and I was fascinated when John 3:13 “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man.” ..so for me that seems to address the speculation.
I can’t help but feel that this idea that believes that we are old and eternal spirits popping in to earth by zipping on a body seems to be to dishonour the body and the earth.
Is that we are formed from the dust of our beautiful planet by the breath of God and that that somehow keeps going because of a relationship between two people; and that in a baby we see this fresh expression of being human; is that not enough to be considered holy and amazing?
August 25, 2011 at 9:46 am
inaspaciousplace
Though all that lives is doomed to die, something yet remains. Though even our universe is not eternal, there is that which is.
Creation is eternal birth. A beginning without end.
The same same power which burns in the stars and nebulae burns equally in us. Our being is a miracle, equal with the creation of the universe, and like the univese, each day is created anew.
We have reviewed the whole of time, in order that we might see what is without beginning or end – without growth, without decay – eternity revealing itself in the phenomena of time – as active in undoing as in doing.
We have traveled up the river of time – ascended, from nature to the soul.
Paradise is not a place here or there. The soul is paradise; it opens before us; here, today. The humblest things show it. We live in the eternal, even now.
(Terrence Malick “The Tree of LIfe: A Screenplay” June 2007)
August 25, 2011 at 12:52 pm
jaqueline
oh and I was just thinking that Christipher’s break is bringing out the poetry in him and then there’s Mallick 😉
( Hey Terrence …you got somethin’ going on there…)
“Our being is a miracle, equal with the creation of the universe,…..eternity revealing itself in the phenomena of time – as active in undoing as in doing.”
gorgeous.
August 25, 2011 at 11:36 am
Lindsay
“The humblest things show it.” It seems sometimes when we look for the profound as something out there … on the horizon, in the future, the big picture, the completed jigsaw puzzle … that we forget to see or easily dismiss as mundane the extraordinary in an everyday convergence of times/place/event. Like if we only stopped for a moment … and paid attention to what is happening, we would be blown away and constantly amazed. It seems sometimes we look too hard so tend to miss the glory in those everyday moments when we say “Wow! What are the odds of this happening … right now, at this specific time, when this has happened” We often dismiss people the same way it seems … sometimes the hobo or someone who we might normally tend to cross the street to avoid or a young child, has a profound message but we’re too busy looking for the answer in some great book or some place else … we don’t actually listen …
August 26, 2011 at 10:01 pm
David
What if we think of it this way. What our parents provide at conception is not a new life, but specific cells which replicate. Life is a characteristic of those cells. What is created in the child is not a “new life” but a new consciousness. At the instant before conception, that which will become “us” is alive. The instant after conception it is still alive, and becomes “us”. The same was true for each of our parents, and grandparents and on back. Each of us is an individual, but there is only one life, and we share it.
August 27, 2011 at 9:32 am
jaqueline
I am puzzled why there is this popular belief that we are alive before conception…why do we want to believe that? The new life that is conceived from two human beings is a totally new thing, a totally new combination. Totally new and yet connected to all that is. Life from life.
I am wondering if it is a a version of individualism ….that we want ourselves to be special and unique and somehow set apart from the dust of the earth. …essentially independent and immune from the constraints that we think hinder our freedom…
August 30, 2011 at 9:20 am
Lindsay
I don’t know Jaqueline, lots of people believe in reincarnation which if I understand correctly is life before conception …?
“I am wondering if it is a a version of individualism ….that we want ourselves to be special and unique and somehow set apart from the dust of the earth. …essentially independent and immune from the constraints that we think hinder our freedom…”
I’m not sure if you’re wondering if individualism is a necessarily a bad thing … or perhaps a wrong thing … I don’t think seeing ourselves and each other as being special and unique is necessarily is bad or wrong ,,, I think we do each other and ourselves a disservice when we don’t acknowledge or realize each other and ourselves as being special and unique … and each other as having a unique and special purpose … vocation … calling from God. Also, having a soft spot for eccentrics … it’s hard to argue any different … I guess, because this is so essential to what I was taught when I was young and so strongly reinforced by the nuns at school whose own lives were focused on vocation … kinda like we are made special and unique and our journey is special and unique for God’s purpose …. even as it seems sometimes our lives are just a mere snapshot in time … a moment in eternity …it’s kinda like a part of a bigger whole … not simply an egocentric thing … like the difference between having meaning and purpose versus being accidental flotsam or ‘butt dust’
🙂
…………. where even mistakes serve a purpose … (um, the nuns didn’t say that part about mistakes … they were German and um, maybe more into doing the right thing … I think … but becoming more from Africa and from a Microsoft generation so it’s a different perception … mistakes happen and it’s all part of it) … yup I’m veering completely off topic now and rambling …. I was listening to this amusing TED talk yesterday … I like where this lady is going with her research findings … okay, so she’s also a data junky so I’ll admit to liking her for that alone, but it seems to be leading her somewhere and it’ll be interesting to see where she goes from here …
August 30, 2011 at 9:48 am
Lindsay
“I am wondering if it is a a version of individualism ….that we want ourselves to be special and unique and somehow set apart from the dust of the earth. …essentially independent and immune from the constraints that we think hinder our freedom…”
Hey Jaqueline, this long pre-amble is really a roundabout way of trying to figure out what you’re saying … but I’m still confused … can you please clarify?
August 30, 2011 at 2:24 pm
jaqueline
Well I agree with you there is not anything wrong with recognising our individual uniqueness….but that should not happen at the expense of acknowledging the value of all, which seems to have been a tendency of the individualist movement. I am glad you wrote what you did and that calls for a finer distinction.
Perhaps what i mean is this tendency to beleive that anything of body / material/ earth is not spiritual, that humanity is above mere material and earthly existence that our destiny is beyond this realm…I suppose no-one could call me a gnostic. I think there is a tendency for humanity to see it self as separate and greater than the rest of creation instead of being a product of and responsible to that creation.
As for reincarnation….I do not myself believe in re-incarnation . I think it is an attempt at answering questions of justice and suffering and our connectedness. But the more the cost and work of the Cross is understood it is hard for me to make sense of or feel the need for the idea of re-incarnation. I think it is best understood as an explanation of the circle of life I suppose..that we need to respect life because we still participate in it even though we die.
There are many who have these ‘past lives’ experiences…but I am of the tendency that these are not literally past lives but generational memories that are stored at a cellular level . Here is a PBS special on the research that is introducing that idea of experience and memory being passed down through generations.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/genes/
August 31, 2011 at 11:43 am
Lindsay
Thanks for clarifying, Jaqueline. I think I now understand a bit better what you are saying. I was thinking it would be kind if boring if we were all the same, but I see now that’s not what you meant .
This research on epigenetics and the anticipated findings in the near future and the FAQ section are fascinating… I’m struck again by how the findings so far seem to validate old wisdoms … like the ancient seven generation wisdom of the First Nations, the affects of maternal stress in utero, and nutrition of men in puberty on the longevity of their grandchildren, especially with respect to transgenerational development, and the collective impacts these and environmental impacts such as the widespread use of plastics and lifestyle have on the development on society as a whole.
My brother who is an actuary so studied longevity for a long time was telling me of all the factors predicting shorter life span, the super mathematician actuaries determined the one single factor predicting early death is lifestyle stress … With this kind of transgenerational research it seems the actuaries might need to broaden their horisons to take into account stress in prior generations as well, but then again genome research and tinkering with genes might change all that …
Kinda like after being told for years to keep our houses squeaky clean and antiseptic … only to find our children are more prone to asthma, allergies and immuno-deficiencies because our kids don’t have any resistance to common bacteria and viruses, and so now being told a little bit of mess, bugs and dirt is um, a good thing. Welcome news, indeed!!! 🙂
It seems to keep coming back to the same dichotomy … gain rational understanding to control nature on the one hand versus relax and accept and even relish nature … don’t stress out, come to peace with it … live in it and be part of it … .
August 28, 2011 at 11:46 pm
Kim
So, one sunday a minister was looking heavenward at the end of his sermon and exclaimed: “without you, we are but dust…………..” at which point a little girl in a not so quiet voice asked her mom: “what’s butt dust?”