Wrestling with Religion

American popular culture has a standard model of the afterlife in jokes, cartoons, and sentimental books such as The  Littlest Ange l. After death, the soul is an image of the living person, the same age and often in the usual clothes, that rises out of the body like a mist. This soul maintains the deceased’s name, memories, and other ego-traits and remains kin to souls gone before. “I’m going there to meet my mother." The first stop is a lectern on a puffy cloud in front of the Pearly Gates, where Peter consults a guest book. Souls whose names are written there (theories vary widely as to who qualifies) are issued white robes, halos, wings, and sometimes harps. The unlisted are dropped, sometimes through a trap door, to eternal torment by horned red devils with pitchforks in a fiery underground pit. Heaven is a walled city floating on clouds, with golden streets where the souls of the saved hang out forever in the presence of God and significant others, blissful renditions ...

    The years have taught us, on the rim of the unrailed pit of unknowing, to stare down at purest blank knowing the ledge we stand on is more, as we ourselves are, of that pit, floored with ignorance only, faith and consternation.                                Middle age returns us with a richer despair to that pubescent catastrophe (quaintly nineteenth-century) when our coats of knowing raveled us naked to winds of namelessness-- still without name.

Decades ago, after I turned forty and one of my sons left home for college, I suddenly felt old and found comfort (or cover at least) in the quip: “Growing old ain’t bad when you consider the alternative.” This assumes growing old to be better than dying, and most people would agree. Otherwise, seniors would be immune to death threats and impossible to hold at gunpoint.  I remember when I was a teenager, alive in the fresh horror of realizing that personal immortality was no Kalashnikov Truth--not a thing objectively verifiable or universally accepted--that for all I could ever know, death is oblivion. I was flying on my bike down a steep incline one afternoon and suddenly reflected that a blowout and crushed skull might instantly snuff out, not just Billy Green, past and present, but (as far as that Billy was concerned) the earth, sun, moon, and stars—and even the absence of these spheres. Not only light would vanish, but darkness. Not only existence, but nonexisence. Not ...