Anna Shoiko’s husband is very sick and she’s gone back to Ukraine to care for him. She would come to our house early every other Friday for the past twelve years, leaving it tidy and immaculate. Anna was like family. She introduced us to her niece, who is to replace her, saying she was never coming back. “Never,” she said, several times. After we said goodbye and she drove off last Friday I felt something like grief.
I don’t like never. Can’t really grasp it. Forever either. Never and forever suggest that time disappears, before birth and after death. They are door-words behind which lies eternity, inconceivable yet an inevitable, an unsolvable mystery against which we lock our mental doors and turn on emotional alarms. We humans have invented worlds beyond these doors: reincarnation, the afterlife.
God, Atman or Universal Spirit, the omnipresent, undefinable, eternal reality, is the source and the energy of everything that exists. Like never and forever It is inconceivable. So we have given It names, placeholders, YHWH of the Hebrews, Moslem Allah, the Zulus’ Umkhuluwomkhulu. We have created mythical personalities, heavenly dramatis personae with human attributes, even defects like inexplicable favoritism and murderous vengefulness. These deities serve many purposes, solving mysteries of earth and sky, fortune and misfortune and, more important, assuring social order, legitimizing governing power. Tribal leaders like Moses to Henry VIII and since have combined religion with government, claiming a “divine right of kings,” conflating faith with obedience, enforcing it all by burning non-believers, critics and heretics alive.
The execution of tribal law was dependent on heaven and hell. Religion or spirituality was a risk/reward proposition, establishing behavioral guardrails, guaranteeing loyalty. The rules said that if I didn’t go to Mass on Sunday and if I should die on Monday that I would spend eternity in agony, being tortured and burned. Wow. Fear was supposed to be a motivator, but it didn’t really work. I skipped church anyway. The “loss of heaven and the pain of hell” did not work to conquer my desire for worldly pleasures. I was hell-bent, until I gave it some thought.
Now I am closer to death, and my afterlife consists of what I have done and yet can do, the change I have made in this world, for better or for worse. My fear of disappearing, my dread of Never is a motivating positive emotion, not of eternal bliss or torment, but of having taken more than I gave. The inevitably of my disappearance is a daily reminder that every day, every action, every relationship I have, every minute of my life is an opportunity for me to have a positive effect on Forever. That’s enough. My afterlife is whatever small goodness I can effect, benefits to be felt by those still living in a better world from now on.
Nick Hilton - Reflections 