Golf, breakfast, famous people, and sex ― or not

Having recently read Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and feeling it was one of my better book encounters in 2012, I decided to revisit  A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. It turns out I did not fully appreciate it when I read it the first time ― about 20 years ago.  I thought I was quite intelligent back then, but I guess I was wrong: so much escaped me in my forties.

Anyhow, being moved by something you read is often the product of the state of mind you’re in when reading the book. Where you find energy in the book is often where it is in yourself. And in re-reading Barnes’s earlier work, I was taken with the half-chapter entitled “Parenthesis,” a meditation on love, as well as with the tenth chapter, entitled “The Dream.”

In that sardonic final chapter, a man gradually finds himself bored to death in Heaven.  Two angelic messengers (pardon the repetition ― assuming there is one) instruct him about his situation. It seems there are two groups in Heaven. One consists of those who want to spend it with God, but their numbers are declining ― alongside the definition of what constitutes a good time there. The other consists of those for whom heaven is whatever they want it to be.  It’s a toss-up between eternal praise to their Creator for the one group, and eternal rounds of golf, breakfast, famous people, and sex, at least for the protagonist.

It got me thinking of what I would wish for in Heaven or put another way, what would be Heaven for me. It’s not that I don’t like golf, sex and breakfast, well actually, I have no interest in golf, but the idea of its being heavenly to do anything one pleases didn’t particularly appeal to me over the long haul.  Eventually, yes, it would get boring ― like chalking up the number of books one has read in a given year. After a while, so what!

And I am not sure about the conventional religious view ― blinding light, choirs of angels and endless praise. For an introvert like myself, it seems overwhelmingly brilliant and too noisy, but then I am seeing it from the outside as it were. From the inside, it could be what the ecstatic union with “what is” feels like, rather than an actual place full of choirs and jewels located somewhere up there for us after we die; sadly, the literalists seem to have won the day in insisting upon the latter configuration rather than the former.

Barnes is not all that far off the mark when he says, “Religion has become wimpishly workaday, or terminally crazy, or merely businesslike ― confusing spirituality with charitable donations.” Some would say having any sense of Heaven is terminally crazy.

But nevertheless, I wonder what would sustain me over eternity?  The other night, plagued by insomnia, I had a personal whine-fest about 4:00 a.m., in which I mulled over how often I feel forgotten: the Mother’s Days and birthdays gone unheeded, the reneged lunches not re-booked, the parties not invited to, the omission from photos everyone else is in.  And while I confess to this self-indulgent whining, nevertheless it hurts to be on the receiving end of ― nothing.

I expect I am not the only one who from time to time feels forgotten.  One of my Facebook friends posted this plea on his wall recently:

Good morning wonderful family members today is Aunt E’s 93rd birthday, can you all take a minute to give her a call, she will tell me that she has heard from no one in ages...........love and hugs

Now even if Aunt E is totally forgetful and her relatives do call every day, she fears she will be forgotten and that is what is important, especially as you grow older: the sense that no one wants to remember you. Hence, I suppose, the popularity of grave markers, and not just for the family genealogist.

The urgent plea for personal remembering occurs over and over in our culture. Sarah McLachlan sings, “I will remember you. Will you remember me?”   Hamlet’s father’s ghost intones, “Remember me.”  Christina Rossetti asks only that her reader should “remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land …”

In September 1914, Laurence Binyon wrote of his battlefield comrades in a poem called For the Fallen, “At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we shall remember them.”  One of the most poignant parts of Remembrance Day is reading the names of the fallen soldiers.

Similarly in some churches (I’m thinking here of St. Thomas’s Anglican in Toronto), a list of the souls departed from the parish is spoken on All Souls’ Day. It may seem interminable until people you love have died, and you hear their names read from that list: they are remembered.

To be held in someone’s memory is a powerful comfort. At the crucifixion, the one thief asks Jesus only to “remember me when You come into Your kingdom.” Jesus answers, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  Being re-membered is being put together again: reconnected and present with the essence of life. And many Christians reciprocate by participating in communion for “the remembrance of Me.”

I’m not about to make any claims for the existence of a literal Heaven nor am I about to debunk the idea. But I am ruminating on what is means to be remembered, for as Laurence Binyon’s poem continues, if the dead are remembered, whether by their human survivors, or by the energy of the universe, or by God, it is as if 

To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

 

And the converse is also true, if we are not remembered while we live, we are as good as dead.  

I sometimes think that in remembering and being remembered, we are in something analogous to that eternal presence of Love, which, like the Higgs boson, makes everything matter (yes, pun intended).