Why I Believe In Heaven
by Ron Patterson
Like many people, I grew up
wondering about heaven. I heard sermons which used heaven as a
sort of bait to hook me on religion. Most of these sermons left
me afraid or doubting. In them, heaven was painted as a place
where the streets were paved with gold and where there would be
no more pain and hunger and the wrongs of this life would be
redressed. The afterlife was where everyone got exactly what they
deserved -- which even as a child, I knew rarely happened in this
life. Heaven was where everything would come round right to use
the image of that great old Shaker hymn. And the problem with
most of these sermons was that we were invited to take as much
joy in the death of sinners as we were in the reward of the
saints.
I carried these feelings into ministry and for years avoided
the subject of heaven entirely in my preaching. I talked about
the promises of eternal life, but knew that what I was saying
lacked a vital element.
Don't Worry
Then one day, something happened which began to change my life.
For a number of years, I had been calling on a home-bound member
of my congregation. Hazel had worked her entire adult life as a
school cook. For over twenty years after her retirement, until
failing health forced her to slow down, she had exercised a
ministry of love in the kitchen of a small Ohio congregation.
Just after her ninety-seventh birthday, she was diagnosed with
cancer.
For weeks I visited her in the hospital and we talked about
her life and her hopes for the future. I began to learn her story.
In the late 1870s, her father and mother had gone west in a
covered wagon with their little girl. They left behind their Ohio
farm and sought a new future in the Colorado silver rush. Her
vivid memories of the journey and the early days in Colorado kept
me on the edge of my seat. Then tragedy struck. A typhoid
epidemic swept the camp and both of her parents died. A terrified
and grieving seven-year-old was placed on a train back to Ohio
with a small suitcase and a destination tag pinned to her coat.
She was raised by her mother's sister.
She spoke of the terror of that journey and the
disappointments and trials of her later life, but there was
always something unspoken just beyond her words. As our visits
ended and we shared in prayer, a gentle smile would pass across
her face. Her parting words to me were always the same: "Dont
worry, pastor..."
Late one afternoon, a nurse called and told me that Hazel was
asking for me. Her vital signs were slipping and death was near.
When I entered her room, the same gentle smile I'd seen two days
before greeted me. We sat in silence for a long time and finally
she said:
"Pastor, I'd like you to meet my mother." For the
next hour, I witnessed a mother daughter reunion and glimpsed the
life-transforming reality of faith. As Hazel's physical energy
decreased, the spiritual energy in the room increased until her
face became radiant. Her last words to me were: "Pastor,
Mother says its time to meet Jesus." I left her room in
tears.
Several years later. I met a man whose partner had died with
AIDS. They were beloved for one another in every sense and this
man's grief was as intense as any I had encountered. Pat came to
see me in great despair and loneliness and as we talked, he
confided with me the story of a number of mystical encounters he
had had with his partner after his death. He came to believe that
his partner came to him in a beam of light with comfort and with
hope about the afterlife. And while it happened during the night,
he was convinced that he was wide awake. Was this some sort of a
psychological projection caused by the survivor's grief? Was it
imagination or wishful thinking?
Pat had read many of the books about near-death encounters and
unexplained contacts between this world and the next. He was very
wise and not a person easily fooled and after some months of
conversation, we announced that we would offer an adult class in
the church. I forget what we called it, but on the day the class
was to meet, over a hundred people showed up and when we asked
people to share stories from their lives about their own feelings
about heaven, a dozen or more people stood up with first person
accounts. Each of these stories was about a feeling or a
premonition or a dream. Every one of them was unique, but they
all shared one thing in common -- their experience had become the
basis of their own faith in the promise of the life to come. None
of these stories were ghost stories. None of them were about
mediums or fortune tellers or that sort of thing. All of them
were heart-felt affirmations of hope in the promise of eternal
life.
Seamless Worlds
At about the same time that this course was happening, a woman
in my congregation named Alice had a massive heart attack and
went into a coma from which she was not expected to recover. Her
life hung in the balance for weeks and those weeks extended to
months. She was completely unconscious. Each time I visited her,
I spoke to her and prayed with her as if I believed that she
could hear me. I later found out that she had. After five months,
one day she woke up and over the next days, she began to tell me
that not only had she heard me, she had actually heard me while
she was traveling. A year or two before her heart attack, she had
lost her beloved husband. In the first hours after her heart
attack, she said that she could see the doctors and nurses
working on her. She said that it was almost as if she were
hovering over them in the room. (You have probably read that this
is a common experience.) At this point, her husband came to her
and together they traveled all over the world and experienced
many wonderful things. At the end of the journey, he told her
that it was not yet her time and that she had to return. It was
then that she woke up. This event changed her life and confirmed
the reality and the power of the faith she had lived her entire
life.
A few years later, I met a remarkable woman who had built a
successful business selling tiny plastic parts and other little
gizmos to the government. Her name was June. June found a way to
save millions of dollars for the government and had even been
decorated by the military for her work. She was a person of
profound religious faith and loved to talk theology. We spent
hours together discussing God and Jesus. Life had not been easy
for her, but through all of the tragedies of her life, her faith
had kept her going. The love of her life was her oldest grand-daughter.
At the time, this young woman was preparing for her wedding and
June was very involved. About two months before the wedding, June
suffered a massive heart attack and died. At her funeral, her
granddaughter spoke about her grandmother with an affection and
caring which touched all of us. The burial was held on a
wonderful spring day and as we gathered in the cemetery for the
grave-side service, a tiny yellow and brown butterfly flew around
us and from time to time landed on the people there. We all
noticed it, and in my eulogy, I spoke about the butterfly as a
symbol of the resurrection and new life and the hope we all can
have as people of faith.
Two months later, the day of the wedding arrived. It was to be
held in a lovely public garden. Everything was perfect that day
but as I gathered with the family, I knew we were all missing
June. I decided I would remember her love for her granddaughter
during my wedding sermon. I think you probably know what happened
next. As I began to speak, a small yellow and brown butterfly
flew through the crowd. It landed first on the edge of my worship
book and then moved off and landed next on the brides bouquet. It
finally its place right on the edge of her veil and stayed there
for the entire service. Was that butterfly the voice of God? Was
that butterfly a testimony of the seamless continuity between
this life and the next and the hope we are invited to have as
people of faith?
Now I am not sure that I have answers to those questions --
not empirical answer -- not mathematical answers. But can any of
the really great questions be answered in that way? Aren't people
of faith the ones who are invited to dream dreams and see visions?
Through the lives of Hazel, Pat, Alice and June, my heart holds a
vision of heaven and I have discovered courage to believe and
bread for the journey. Can I ask for more?
Dr. Ronald M. Patterson is on the pastoral staff at Marble Collegiate Church
in New York City.
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