HERE'S a tip: If you ever want to test your belief in a Great Beyond, try thinking you're having a heart attack.
This was a conclusion I reached some years ago while washing dishes. Before I get into the story, some background:
I wasn't raised in an especially religious household - a fact which in retrospect, I think was in part an outgrowth of having British parents. The Church of England, ever since it outgrew its awkward settingfire-to-non-Protestants phase, has by and large been a pretty low-key institution. Contrary to the experience of my Catholic friends, many of whom have grown up convinced they're going to burn for eternity for double parking, the few services I attended were not so much about railing against sin and heresy as about quietly agreeing god seems nice and then spending the rest of the morning eating biscuits.
Add to this my parents' background in physics and engineering, and it made for a view of the supernatural that was pretty watered down by secularism ("And in the third billionth of a second, He created muons . . .") .
Nonetheless, when I turned eight or nine, I was handed an illustrated book of Bible stories - in what I can only assume was a bid by my parents to cover their bases in case they were backing the wrong horse - and was told to read them.
My young self quickly came to the conclusion that god, in the first part of it anyway, seemed kind of mean. The stories were all about people getting plagues or drowning by the thousands or being reamed out for burning fruit. Even the popular ones like Noah's Ark seemed pretty dark:
"Aw, look, the giraffes are walking two-by-two." That's because the rest of their species is about to be WIPED OUT.
Nine-year-old me also had some questions about some of the logic. Eden, for example, seemed like a questionable setup:
"Okay, so the deal is you two can hang out in the garden and do anything you want, as long as - and this is very important - you don't learn anything. Also, incidentally, I've planted a tree over there that makes you learn everything, so better not go near that. Okay, I've been at this all week, so I'm taking today off. Later."
I could nonetheless see the appeal. I liked the idea that there was a grand plan; I liked the idea that I had someone who could destroy the entire universe in my corner; and, in light of a recent and unfortunate incident involving Booble the gold fish, I especially liked the idea that there was an afterlife.
The popular depiction of Heaven, however - a generally fluffy place where everyone wears some variation on bathrobes - troubled me. It seemed, well, kind of boring. People could fly, which was cool, but it was limited where it came to other activities: No TV, no board games, no Frisbee. Just, as far as I could tell, harps. And if the recorder was anything to go by, I figured I'd max out on that in about an hour.
It was obvious the image was oversimplified. Heaven, I thought, must basically be a place where all the most awesome things in the world are amplified a zillion times: Tag is infinitely fun is; school is perpetually burnt down; doughnuts are the size of cities.
But if that's true, it occurred to me, you run into conflicts. What if Heaven for one person is playing the Macarena on repeat until Judgment Day? Would that detract from the experience for others?
And what about the interspecies issue? Some people might want their cats there, but clearly Cat Heaven would look markedly different. If our pets were anything to go by, it would revolve mostly around potted plants, unattended black sweaters, and, importantly, absolutely no other cats. Also, in the afterlife, no one would ever, ever turn on the blender.
Maybe the answer was Heaven was just a bland, inoffensive, crowd pleaser.
"Welcome to Eternity. Plain bagels are over there; Diana Krall CDs are at the back. Do you like decaf?"
The whole thing left me a little uncertain - for years in fact. Was Heaven something I could believe in?
Here we come to the dishes. One day, when I was 23 years old, I was cleaning up after breakfast at a friend's cabin, when I twisted weirdly and - unknowingly - tore a muscle between my ribs. This particular injury, it seems, can result in a
remarkable stabbing pain in the chest as well as dizziness and shortness of breath. I don't want to get into who misdiagnosed himself with what, but the long and the short of it was I wound up in an ambulance calmly screaming at the paramedics that there were a thousand thousand shrieking fire eagles tearing at the inside of my chest. Admittedly, I was a little young to go into cardiac arrest from rinsing plates, but it didn't seem entirely unlikely to me at the time given my diet to that point in life, which was comprised of roughly equal parts sodium and cow.
As I started to lose consciousness - I was breathing strangely enough that I was making myself pass out, apparently - I became convinced I was going to die. The strange thing was, in that moment, I was overcome with a sense of peace, with the perfect certainty that dying wasn't a bad thing, that it just meant going to a better place.
As it turned out, that better place was a Vancouver-area emergency ward full of longsuffering doctors who treated me by rolling their eyes and putting me back on the street.
But the experience taught me something. Maybe somewhere deep down, despite my skepticism, I did believe in a Sweet Hereafter. I find it kind of reassuring.
Hopefully I remember to bring a Frisbee.
