Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven...?

C A V E A T  L E C T O R

(Let the Reader Beware)

The Provocation Starts After This Warning. I suggest you read the warning.

There is a huge well of anger and overwhelming emotion as I contemplate this provocation.

The subject is, I suppose, preventing death and its fundamental and intrinsic wrongness in the thought and spirit and subsequent actions of disciples of Christ.

As some of you may know, my wife Vicki, had breast cancer. We sought every treatment for her to defeat the terminal effects of that disease. I did so with a crystalline clear conscience and should her cancer return, I would back whatever measures she chose to fight again and hopefully win and would do so without any qualm or reservation - a crystalline clear conscience.

We have friends who have fought for years against multiple recurrences and metastasis of cancer and we pray for their restoration to health. We’ve had family members and friends who have died from various and sundry cancers. And there are, society would assert, preventable deaths - things to do to reduce one’s chances of getting cancer or a chronic disease or dying by accident.

I have coronary artery disease and had a quadruple bypass in 2001. Thus far, and I am somewhat certain to the surprise of my cardiologist, I have beaten every survivability rate prediction for mortality (death) and morbidity (complications from the procedure). I literally have done nothing to slow the course of the systemic disease or prevent the need for surgery again.

This provocation is NOT in ANY WAY meant to POINT A SINGLE FINGER at ANY PERSON, disciple, pagan, agnostic or atheist in their fear of death or in the ways they have chosen to avoid whatever disease they may fear or how strongly they chose to try to remain alive by undertaking preventive medicine or aggressive medical treatment to remain alive. These are personal decisions of spirit and conscience and, as far as I am concerned, are sacrosanct from interference and judgment by third parties, regardless of motivation..

That said, I only wish to share the feelings welling up in my spirit for your meditation as befitting your lives.

C A V E A T  L E C T O R

(Let the Reader Beware)

I am often pleasantly bemused by my shrink - an internist who then switched specialties to psychiatry, so a very smart doctor - who has come, over the course of our clinical relationship, to share that she is a member of the United Church of Christ though, she, like a good deal of UCC’ers I have known, doesn’t really believe in Christ. Go figure.

But I digress.

My puzzlement is this - which I have shared with her - that when I look at the Universe down to one celled organisms, I can only see the absolute hand of a supreme being, whether you want to call it a him or her, the Tao, the Void, Fred the Squirrel, Skipper, Gibbs, or GOD. The complexity and consistency of astronomical phenomena down to the innumerable replication of perfect copies of the smallest virus to billions of humans. I can not even begin to fathom random processes at work. Thus I base a large part of my faith: on the ultra complexity and consistency of creation.

IF the cosmos was not so rigidly ordered, if there were a species of animals on the planet that could only be classified as Heffalumps because of certain shared internal consistencies, making the case for random selection then and only then would my faith in GOD be shaken.

She - this very, very intelligent person - looks at the same datum and sees - Darwinian evolution. “It” all just apparently happened over the 4 billion years and change that the astronomers and physicists say the Universe has been around.

And therein - “it” just happened and continues to randomly mutate - lies the Theory of Infinite Monkeys, a statistical theory demonstrating infinity and randomness. (British evolutionary biologist and noted atheist Richard Dawkins, in attempting to disprove the statistical theory, “disproved it” but only by introducing a non-random element in the mutation of typing output by the infinite monkeys. Apparently even random selection needs a helping hand.)

I just finished watching maybe 45 minutes of PBS’s Cancer: The Emperor of Maladies, Part III. Once cancer researchers managed to map the genome of a cancer cell, they were able to see that compared to a normal cell, the cancer cell had damaged/mutated genes and then there was a wave of hope for a definitive targeted medical cure.

There are “oncogenes” and “Tumor Suppressor Genes” in normal cells. Oncogenes have the potential to mutate into cancer, dividing into more and more cancer cells, faster and faster. While Tumor Suppressors Genes are supposed to do just that - suppress the creation of tumors. One commentator explained mutations in both those genes thus: Mutated oncogenes are like a gas pedal stuck to the floor - creating ever more cancer cells at an ever quickening pace. Mutated  Tumor Suppressor Genes are like defective brake linings - they can’t perform their braking function.

But the optimism for finding a targeted cure (a medicine that would treat the specific cause of the mutation. Herceptin is an example of a targeted cure in breast cancer) went from disappointing to fear as more and more genomes were mapped. Rather than there being just a few oncogenes or Tumor Suppressors in any given organ system, there were dozens and in one case of breast cancer 120 potential oncogenes were found.

Along with the hope of a targeted cure was the supposition that all cancers were genetically the same within all humans. Not so, found the researchers to their horror. Now the researchers worry that all cancers may not be the same in any one human being. This makes finding a targeted cure statistically improbable but not impossible. The probability would be something on the order of 1 to a ridiculously large number - a number to the power of literally billion billion billions - of finding targeted cures for all the potential oncogenes & tumor suppressors.

Complexity and consistent randomness.

With statistical probability against them and the rising cost just to produce one targeted medication, financial resources from both the government and charitable sources getting tighter than the pre-Nixon years, oncologists and patients are forced to look at a rather coldly pragmatic calculation: If, to hold off your death for three months during which time your are likely to be horrifically sick from the chemo and likely bankrupt your family due to costs, do you do everything possible to prolong your life to the bitter end or do you make the most of what time you have left and call it quits?

Things have not changed since Shakespeare (or an infinite number of monkeys in a parallel universe?) penned Hamlet’s Soliloquy in 1599:

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

The program showed oncologists laying out the options to their patients and one patient inparticular got me: an old gentlemen, wearing an oxygen cannula, holding back tears and eventually openly weeping as his oncologist told him, gently, he was more or less at the end of days.

The spin of some patients was they wanted to stay here on earth. Paradise. No matter what. But I think the old gentleman wasn’t thinking Paradise but dreaded something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns…

I knew how he probably felt. I confessed and was baptized believing and fearing my death and judgment and trip to Hell might occur sooner rather than later than I expected. Now...faced with the “noise and commotion of life” or the “worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth” I no longer fear judgment and that trip to the Undiscovered Country. But to my shame as a disciple of Christ, I feel no strong desire to be with my Master. To be a Heavenly ambassador recalled Home.

I don't know what Heaven will be like other than what GOD has said in Revelations: that He Himself will wipe away our every tear, there will be no more crying or pain or death. The old order has gone and the new has come.

And I do rather look forward to be able to say, as Paul said to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:7, I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the Faith.

Yet, still no strong desire to see GOD, to put off death.

Two quotes for C.S. Lewis from his book, “The Problem of Pain”

“All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”

I tend to believe if Lewis is correct, the unattainable ecstasy will be Heaven, Paradise.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.”

Have you ever considered if you have a pure heart and if so, do you long to see GOD?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Anybody want to hang out here when circumstances give you a call home? 

Do you want - do you desire - to see GOD?  

Have you ever felt the stirring to wake up to ecstasy?

It takes time and concentration to shut out the charms of this life along with its fears. And always encouragement from those along on the road of discipleship.

Something to think about. Until the next time,

May the Peace of Christ be With You,

† Scott V.D.M., ev

Post Script: 

In about my third or fourth proofreading of this post it dawned on me that I had probably failed to expound upon my stated subject of discussing the prevention death and its fundamental and intrinsic wrongness in the thought, spirit and subsequent actions of disciples of Christ. If anything I maybe glanced off the topic but Death is a big subject. I'll get to it eventually.

In the PBS special on Cancer, with enough of the high level cancer researchers being bummed about the dwindling prospects for a cure by now, the subject has turned not to a cure but the prevention of cancer.

At this point in the program I had my wife pause the program and I expressed the horror I felt at seeing the zeal with which the oncology community was going to pursue cancer prevention. I told her we were witnessing the slow slide down the slippery slope that would end in a nightmare society and I was overwhelmingly glad, I said, tears starting to brim in my eyes, that I would be dead before I had to see the nightmare and live it. 

Then I came to the computer, plugged in my earbuds, turned on the music (Vonda Shepherd & Searching My Soul, Toad and the Wet Sprocket, Sense Field) to drown out the TV and started writing this. Bad move?

Maybe, probably, a Part II is in the offing. Death is a big subject. I'll get around to it...eventually.

I need to check on the infinite monkeys. They get snarky when their bananas run low; start flinging poo. And then the Macaques in the next parallel universe over get snarky... :-)