The Beth Murray Sunday School Class at All Saints is beginning study of Bishop Jack Spong’s latest and perhaps last book entitled Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell. I’m really excited about the book, so I’m sitting in on the class. In some religious circles Spong is considered a heretic. I beg to differ. Spong’s legacy is that he has given thinking Christians (no, that’s not an oxymoron) fresh and intelligent insight into ways of thinking and speaking about the true nature and practice of the Christian life. His is a sane voice amid the cacophony of literalism and superstition in what passes for Christianity in a culture that eschews the art of critical thinking. Spong’s work not only makes Christianity believable, but he also makes it livable. He has given us new and helpful ways of thinking ( scripturally based) about the so-called miracles, virgin birth, Jesus as human and divine, resurrection, ascension, and in this his new book he explores the illusive concept of eternal life and the speculation of life after death.
I have read just the first few chapters of Spong’s new book, but that’s got me thinking ahead. So here are some of my reflections on eternal life, before we read Spong’s take on it: The Eternal is found in truth and beauty…that’s my starting point. And Eternal life is not just about the future; it finds its way into the present as well as the past. Through the imaginative memory, individual and collective, eternal life can be found and named in past events, some of which we barely noticed when they actually occurred, but in memory we see the truth of the matter to which this often mundane event points….And we see it in the present, the truth of the matter…in the dynamic of life and death in the delta…the flashing trout…the wheeling gulls…the fading sedge…the taste of salt in the wind…the northeastern squall…all outward and visible sign of the profound divine that pervades the universe….In art: Picasso’s Guernica, Shakespeare’s Tempest….Dickinson’s images of death,….it goes on forever, these ways into the eternal…. and eternal life pervasive among the human community…in every act of mercy….in every gesture of kindness…in each locale of bestowing justice and dignity…where there is hope…where love is imaginatively engendered, Eternal life is surely self-evident….a quality, an aesthetic of the divine that is seen, heard, felt and tasted by the imagination, the essential midwife of the eternal.
And of the future? Science tells us that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We humans now sojourn for a season in earth as self conscious beings; perhaps there is a consciousness far beyond that which we know: a transcendent consciousness of matter and energy, things animate and inanimate, dancing within the song of the universe…We know in string theory that the ultimate rudiment of the universe is tonality, sound waves, music. The song will forever be, and we forever in it and of it…forever a part of the creation’s becoming, forever alive in the creation turning towards its perfection always apprehended in the sacramental common things of creation….starfish and star dust…. forever singing in high celebration of a high consciousness beyond all reckoning that perhaps waits in hopeful joy for us all…Imagine that.
