Does Anything Happen After Death?

“Yes,” goes the joke, “but none of them involves you.”

Is there anything more difficult for humans than accepting the reality of death? That difficulty, say many people who don’t believe in life after death, is why so many of us cling to belief in an afterlife.

According to a 2017 survey by the polling firm, Rasmussen Reports, 62 percent of Americans believe in life after death and another 20 percent say they’re “not sure.”

So, many writers of newspaper obituaries, even many who aren’t apparently religious, compose (or borrow from funeral homes) obits like the following.

“God looked around his garden and found an empty space. He then looked down upon the earth and saw your tired face. He put his arms around you and lifted you to rest. …It broke our hearts to lose you, but you didn’t go alone, for part of us went with you the day God called you home…. Your parents and son were there to welcome you and those you left behind will always keep you in their hearts.”

United With Loved Ones?

A common belief expressed in obituaries is that we will be united with loved ones, an idea that, as far as I know, is not part of Jewish or Christian doctrine about death. A heavenly “garden” and “looking down” are also common terms relating to heaven and its position “up there.”   

Preachers, at least in my experience, seem to avoid the topic of death except at funerals. Many don’t want to be reminded of death and we know next to nothing about it. References to death in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles use analogies and this-world images to describe the afterlife because that’s all we have.

But many of those images seem to conflict with notions of the life of spirit and the absence of time or space – concepts that are impossible for us to imagine. We might ask questions like, “Where are all the humans who have ever lived? Heaven and hell must be huge places.”

The “Spiritual” Side

These questions, though understandable, ignore the absence of time and space and the “spiritual” side of human existence in the afterlife.

The Bible addresses these issues as best it can, at least in the case of timelessness.

“To your eyes a thousand years are like yesterday, come and gone,” writes the author of Psalm 90 (89 in Catholic bibles)…. The writer of 2 Peter in the New Testament repeats the idea, saying that “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”

I’m reading a book by Gerhard Lohfink, a German priest and theologian, called “Is This All There Is?” He speculates about the various beliefs in an afterlife, including the ideas of dissolution in nature, survival in descendants and continual reincarnation.

According to Lohfink, Plato, the famous philosopher who lived about 400 years before Christ, arrived at the idea of an afterlife that is close to the Christian notion without the benefit of scriptural revelation. “…The souls of the wise and just enter into the realm of what always is, the eternal, undisturbable, and unchangeable…” wrote Plato, “(and) participate in the perfect world of truth and beauty. The soul guides the body as a steerer guides a ship, but at some point the steerer leaves the ship, when it has reached its destination.”

But belief in the soul and life after death was not universal in antiquity. Many, then as now, believe people face nothingness after death

Part of My Faith

Personally, I believe in the afterlife because besides being biblical, it is part of the teaching of my church and its traditions, and rationally, as Plato testifies, it is at least as believable as eternal oblivion. Jesus used striking images to describe it, including the many “mansions” of his father.

But I think the afterlife will be so different from our current experience that we can’t imagine it. Maybe it can be described as another “dimension,” as in the old sci-fi TV show, the Twilight Zone.

In any case, I’m not bothered by how some of my fellow believers, and non-believers, describe the afterlife in obituaries. They use images that we know to describe what we don’t know. So, we keep coming back to heaven being “up there” and tell each other jokes about what happens with “St. Peter at the pearly gates.”