On Saturday my mother was laid to rest beneath the rural soil of her beloved New Brunswick countryside. It was a peaceful setting, with a drizzle of rain and some sunlight that finally got the upper hand as the ceremony ended. The wind whined a bit coming up the hill, and birds chirped in the background.
My mom loved nature and its many creatures; it was a special passion that she passed on to her children and grandchildren. When Mother Nature flexed her muscles with blizzards, great winds, or thunderstorms, my mom would often call me to the window, to sit on a chair and look out, as if a movie were playing on the glass. Our kitchen window held a homemade feeder where the birds of winter fed on suet and seeds. I remember on one bitterly cold day, Mom brought me to watch a chickadee stand on one leg as it pulled the other against its feathers for warmth.
My mom died four months ago in the bleak midwinter, when deep snow and ground as hard as iron made it impossible to dig a grave. Today's late April burial is early by New Brunswick standards. About 25 people stood around the grave, some with umbrellas, all with warm coats. Mom's great-grandson scampered about, happily oblivious. We sang four verses of "Amazing Grace," and a country pastor read from the Bible. He made reference, as Christians always do, to the belief that such partings are temporary and that we would see my mother again in Heaven.
The pastor spoke these familiar words of hope with the same straightforward assurance as when he announced that my sister was providing lunch a bit later for everyone at her home not far from the graveside. In his mind, perhaps, both future events were equally straightforward, and he was untroubled affirming them.
The road that ran past the graveside had few cars on it, and I think two went by during the ceremony. My mother used to ski to school along a similar road, in the days before buses. She often told me, with great nostalgia, how the kids from up and down that road skied together to their one-room schoolhouse. The kids farthest from the school would start first and the closer ones would watch from their windows and join the group as it came into their yards. Gradually a parade of laughing children, wearing hand-knit scarves and mittens and breathing white clouds into the frosty air, would be lined up, skiing together to a school heated by a woodstove along a well-worn path through the snow. The younger children would sometimes fall behind and be rescued by a big boy at the front who would ski back and carry the straggler to the front of the line.
In my mind's eye I picture my mother as a seven-year old straggler struggling to keep up on her hand-made wooden skis -- eventually handed down to me -- and then being rescued by a hero twice her age who would take her to the front of the line. To be Canadian is to love winter and stories of winter.
As I stared at the oak coffin about to be lowered into the ground, I wondered what it would be like to see my mother again and share once again our mutual affection for the glories of Canadian winters. For the last years of her life she fought a long war of attrition with Parkinson's disease and died a little bit every day. The day she officially died was little different than the others; it was just the particular day that the cold winter wind pulls the last leaf from the tree.
The graveyard was surrounded by trees preparing their spring garb. The Christian belief in eternal life is often compared to the cycle of the seasons. We look ahead to new life in the spring even as we see the cold taking its toll in the fall. In faith we look ahead to new life in heaven.
Belief in eternal life, though, is hard for me. My mind has been largely taken over by science and has trouble getting itself around ideas so far outside the normal course of events. But I still believe...
In an exchange with a prominent "New Atheist," I argued that belief in God provides a "richer and more complex view of reality" than the purely materialistic belief that the physical world is all there is. My affirmation, not surprisingly, was ridiculed as a fancy way of saying "after I die I'll be able to meet my dead relatives in the sky." This isn't what I meant at the time, of course, but it came to mind, nonetheless, as I stood beside my mother's coffin and wondered if I would someday "meet her in the sky."
My atheist critic, speaking for so many of his materialistic brothers-in-arms, says that such a view does not enrich reality: "It's impoverished," he says, "by adherence to magic and superstition." Perhaps he is right, but I don't think so.
My belief in God grounds a hope that I might one day see the wonderful woman in that coffin again. This hope does seem magical to me, but it's not superstitious. Standing at my mother's graveside with that hope seems so much richer than standing there without it.
In memory of my mother, Ursula Giberson (1929-2009).
Karl Giberson, Ph.D: How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth
Wow.
"My atheist critic, speaking for so many of his materialistic brothers-in-arms..."
Materialism is no more a characteristic of atheism as it is of Christianity. If anything, I think we tend to appreciate the natural world even more than believers do.
he was using the word "materialistic" to describe the belief that there is no spiritual heaven beyond the tangible, phyiscal world. He wasn't speaking about a love of material things as in the Madonna song.
This kind of materialism really does separate atheists from many religious denominations. In fact, that is the whole point of atheism - to separate out from those who believe in God and a spiritual world beyond this life.
Karl you say, "Standing at my mother's graveside with that hope seems so much richer than standing there without it." "Richer?!" You must agree that you have no idea what "standing there without it" feels like?
One thing I wish that believers would get is that we non-believers can no more choose to believe than you believers can choose to not believe. We aren't being mean or contrary. We actually don't think there is anything supernatural going on here. Many of us believe that having a life as a human being is a dazzeling phenomena. And that each and every one of us is an occurrence in time and space that is rarer than the existence of a galaxy.
The Galactic Federation of Light says we will meet up again with all of our friends and family.
They say we will be together with our family in Heaven. They say they will help clean up Earth and teach us the truth about where we came from. Our family is really alive just right on the other side in a different dimension and that is where we all will be soon. Think of Heaven as an acid trip on steroids. That is our real home. We are now in class learning how to live with love in Heaven. They believe in God also and can teach us how to speak to God ourselves.
Google Elohim and Sumerians.
Then the Bible say "the dead in christ will rise (reincarnate) first then those who alive and remain..." will all go there. Matthew 20:1-16 indicates in a prorated manner beginning with the last to enter the straight way with a narrow gate first. To my way of realizing life, seeing your mother and rehearsing old times will not happen.
Preacher man, don't tell me,
Heaven is under the earth.
I know you don't know
What life is really worth.
It's not all that glitters is gold;
'Alf the story has never been told:
So now you see the light, eh!
Stand up for your rights. come on!
Most people think,
Great god will come from the skies,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. jah!
We sick an' tired of-a your ism-skism game -
Dyin' 'n' goin' to heaven in-a Jesus' name, lord.
We know when we understand:
Almighty god is a living man.
You can fool some people sometimes,
But you can't fool all the people all the time.
So now we see the light (what you gonna do?),
We gonna stand up for our rights! (yeah, yeah, yeah! )
Get up, stand up!
Don't give up the fight!
The Honourable Robert Nesta Marley, O.M.
The real beauty of this, though, is not just that I have proof Don said goodbye. It is the fact that he was SO happy. He had always spoken wistfully of taking a cruise around the world. As his spirit departed up and away from me, it was if he were boarding the gangplank of that ship.
We not only survive our physical death, we get the greatest experience of our lifetimes. Call that "fantasy" if you choose. I know that it is fact.
Sounds like a nice fantasy to an atheist or unbeliever but my reactions were witnessed by my brilliant then-husband, a chemist and engineer who, glancing at his chronometer, brusquely called out to me that I was going to make us late for our engagement. "It's ten minutes to eight and they're going to turn the lights out in the arena," he called out from about ten steps ahead.
When we went out to SF for his funeral a few days later, we were told he died at exactly ten minutes to five, Pacific time (ten minutes to eight, Eastern) as the bullet that killed him had passed through the antique pocket watch he was wearing in his vest and stopped it then, confirming the testimony of other eye witnesses.
Everyone has stories like that. It's the law of large numbers.
In a way that I find hard to explain, but also in a way that has helped me a lot with my own grief of losing my "favorite" sister, I remind myself from time to time that she's not really completely gone until the last living memory of her is also gone, especially my memory, since it's the one I refer to daily.
I'm a pretty staunch atheist, like everyone else on the planet, (I just go it one god further than many) and I agree with your debating partner in that subscribing to a better afterlife cheapens the one we have in front of us right now.
When my sister died, my family hired a preacher for the service, and he did a fairly good job of exploiting the grief (not that it was a difficult job, it's what they do in these situations) with all the Jesus and Savior talk. Of course my bible belt, very loosely believing family, knew where all this went, and received zero comfort from his words, as we all knew my sis didn't subscribe to this stuff at all. Ce la vie.
Atheists have watered down the meaning of the word atheist to be almost meaningless. I am not an atheist simply because I don't believe in some gods. An atheist does not believe in any kind of god, a theist believes in some kind of God. Big difference.
If you do not believe in any old god, then you would not act as if gods besides yours exist, right? You don't spend your days worrying if Shiva will punish you or if you are not properly respecting Odin, do you?
What we DO know about 'life after death' is that a person's essence still has influence in this physical realm once 'they' are no longer. Our DNA continues on in the bodies of our offspring, but so it is with animals. Our remembrance affects those who knew us and the future generations to find out about us, but so it is with villians. The results of our efforts remain, but so do an asteroid's. So, what meaning does our being have?
Maybe, THAT we wonder AT ALL about fulfillment/posterity, is more of an answer than we realize.