Though of course much has changed since then, when I was a child, I thought often of heaven. Though it would be incorrect to say that I was raised in a secular household, my fascination with the question of what awaits us when we die was nevertheless unusual, given that my parents concerned themselves chiefly with that which they could see clearly. They were the best kind of materialists, eschewing boats and starter homes and the prevailing logic of acquisitiveness for an abiding interest in the decaying infrastructure of the local low-income housing units, the family across town who did not have enough money to go to the movies and the quality of the children’s literature collection at Gilbert Public Library. My brother once said of them that they were people who believed in the ontological supremacy of that which was right in front of them, and for my part I’d add that if spiritual near-sightedness results in the sort of lives led by my parents, then perhaps seeing through a glass darkly isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Even as I child I sensed the tension between, on the one hand, my incurable curiosity vis-à-vis la vie d’après, and, on the other, my parents quiet and insistent rootedness, their practiced avoidance of any and all theological questions not directly tied to the project of making the world a more hospitable place. Of course, I was never reprimanded for my unorthodox musings, it’s just that, were I to have articulated them, I would have been hard-pressed to find a willing ear. What, after all, has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Or, as my father was fond of saying, if dreaming of heavenly mansions were a legitimate Christian task, then Paul would have extolled it, and not charity, in his epistle to the Corinthians. Again, I use the word tension here rather lightly, and it’s important that no overeager reader understand that word to gesture towards some unresolved childhood trauma—I was, am and always will be supremely indebted to my parents for the quiet grace with which they raised me and my siblings. For it is in fact the case that my preoccupation with heaven reached its climax in a cathartic episode whose central message was that my parents’ religious stance was more robustly Christian than I’d previously thought.
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Dreams, like lives, are difficult to pin down, and I for one am wary of any attempt to use them as some sort of guide for how one ought to behave. My general skepticism towards the project of decoding the unconscious via careful analysis of one’s dreamscape, however, did not keep me from once having a dream that transformed the way I approached reality. By all accounts it was an unremarkable night in mid-November, or at least it started out that way. I’d gone jogging earlier in the day, so I was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. Initially I didn’t even recognize the dream as such, since its opening scenes were entirely familiar. I was walking down a footpath strewn with red and yellow leaves, my hands clasped behind my back and my head tilted slightly towards the horizon. I recognized the stance as imitating my neighbor Emerson Melville’s, who could often be seen taking long and contemplative strolls between his home and Virginia State Route 287, which made for an out-and-back loop of approximately three miles. After walking for a few minutes I noticed a speck on the horizon that gradually revealed itself to be my younger sister Louisa, who was apparently in the midst of a late-morning jog; I was anticipating that we’d each acknowledge the other’s presence with a nonchalant nod as we briefly crossed paths, but as she neared my position, Louisa stopped running altogether.
“I have something to show you.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll see. Follow me and I’ll explain things as they unfold.”
I’m partial to the notions of flux and complexity and imbrication and chaotic order, so when she said the word “unfold” I knew I had to follow her.
We immediately turned off the path into an adjacent stand of trees, and as we moved through the woods the scene shifted, and we found ourselves approaching a small brick rambler surrounded by a raucous garden bursting with tulips, zinnias and sunflowers. To me it seemed to be the house of a stranger, so I was surprised when Louisa walked confidently up to the door, turned the knob and then stepped inside as though she were entering our grandparents’ home.
“Where are we?”
“Not where, Peter, when.”
Normally I would have been bothered by such a cryptic response from my little sister, but apparently the settings of the dream were such that my heart was softer than it tended to be in real life, and I didn’t ask any follow up questions. We stepped into the kitchen, where we saw a woman slide a pan of brioche into the oven, wash her hands and then walk into a back room as though she couldn’t see us. We stepped out of the kitchen into the dining room, where we saw a middle-aged man with glasses composing a letter on a gleaming table of pure mahogany. Both Louisa and I were rather taken with the scene, and though neither of us said anything, we both sensed that this was a person who used the written word as a means of making others feel cherished. As we prepared to leave, the man opened a worn copy of the novel Gilead, and I blinked back tears as he carefully carved the following lines into the blank page that lay before him: “If you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.” As we stepped back out into the raucous garden we both held our breath, not wanting to undo what we’d just seen.
Again the scene shifted, and soon we were making our way through a tunnel of grape vines, and though the tunnel likely came to an end at some point, we both sensed that that was irrelevant. That somehow beginnings and endings were things that obscured more than they illuminated. The tunnel was thickly populated with translucent white grapes, and as I stretched to pick one I heard the gentle grinding native to manual pencil sharpeners; confused, I pushed through the foliage and came face to face with a young girl wearing a pinstripe dress and pink Converse sneakers. Sure enough, she was carefully turning the handle of a pencil sharpener, and she was so absorbed by her task that she did not even break stride when I stumbled into her private universe. It quickly became clear that this was not the first pencil she’d sharpened, and that the process of whittling wood and lead into a fine point capable of dusty calligraphy was its own justification—on a table next to her sat at least one hundred perfectly sharpened pencils, all ready to engage in free writes or timed essays or pop quizzes in algebra class. Though I couldn’t be sure, it somehow seemed obvious that none of those pencils would ever do anything other than lie dormant on a table, while an undersized carpenter perfected her craft on a pencil sharpener next to a tunnel composed of grape and vine.
And I rested on the seventh day from all my work, and all things which I had made were finished, and I, God, saw that they were good.
Louisa had followed me out of the tunnel and was thus a second witness to this strange act of aimless creation, and yet she seemed untroubled by the severing of instrument from function; indeed, she fingered one of the untold number of delicate writing utensils as though she were handling sacred fire, and as I watched her struggle to make sense of what she was feeling I couldn’t help but think of Dickinson’s description of “narrow Hands” spreading wide to “gather Paradise.” That glorious imperative of the Mosaic Law also came to mind, and I swear I heard the ground shake as Louisa enacted the Deuteronomic injunction to “open thine hand wide.”
Louisa’s face drained of all color—
“What is it?” I asked.
“I have no idea. It’s sort of like when fireflies spark in unison even though you could’ve sworn that, a moment earlier, the only thing there was darkness and grass and houses cloaked in shadow. Or when you see someone in a crowd and you want desperately to become their friend and then somehow, eventually, you two are inseparable. It’s just that so often the world looks and feels flat and knowable and comprehensively circumscribed, and then something like transfiguration happens and you realize that you don’t really know anything at all.”
“Ok yeah that’s well put. And you just experienced something like that now?”
Before she could respond, the scene shifted once more, and all of a sudden we were sitting on a bench overlooking a hillside, and on the hillside sat a man and a woman both dressed in plaid flannel shirts. Both were crying, and the woman kept running her fingers across the man’s knuckles as she struggled to conduct a difficult but necessary conversation:
“I just don’t get it, it makes no sense that we’re unable to find some sort of solution to this incredibly petty and stupid problem. We’re both intelligent and articulate human beings, we care deeply for each other and we both want to do the work necessary to nourish our relationship—shouldn’t that be enough? Isn’t that, ultimately, all that we have to give?”
“Absolutely. But I’m wondering whether that might be the point. What if this is some sort of divine test whose only viable solution is a sort of genuflection? What if God would have me tell you that I privilege your long-term well-being over the fulfillment of my own desires? I love you Cate, more than I’ve ever loved anyone before, and I’d be devastated in every sense of that word if we were to go our separate ways. But I can’t shake the feeling that in this instance I’ll be required to do as Abraham—”
“Mitchell!” screamed Cate. “I am not your son, and I will not be sacrificed on an altar to satisfy the cruel whims of a capricious God. I too believe in sacrifice, but in this instance I’m convinced that the animal you’re to slaughter is not our relationship.”
“What could it be then?”
“Perhaps your insufferable adherence to the notion that anything good in your life, especially the prospect of a life spent with a woman who loves you and wants to carve out a space beside you, must end. Maybe God wants you to recognize that tragedy is inevitable but that it’s never the ultimate reality.”
At this point Louisa and I were deeply engrossed in the drama that was playing out before us, but before we could hear Mitchell’s response the hillside disintegrated into a thousand points of green and was replaced by an overwhelming brightness. I sensed that the dream was coming to a close, and as it did I heard the voice of my art history professor as he once more expressed something that he’d often shared in class:
“Next month I’ll turn 61, and increasingly I’m asking myself the question ‘Is this all there is?’ I’m married and I have one psychopathic son, which means that there are a slew of things that I’ll never get to experience—being a father to daughters, being a grandparent, celebrating graduations and marriages and other milestones that populate the lives of neurotypical children. Is this really it God? Are these the sorts of experiences that are going to permit me to realize my divine nature? Really?”
It was at this point that my eyes popped upon, and suddenly I knew that heaven was going to be just like this.
And this is life eternal. That they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.