I got a phone call the other day from a guy who knew my friend Bob. I hadn’t seen Bob for decades. He was a former professor of mine when I was an undergraduate, who had moved to the Midwest to teach at his alma mater, a Catholic university. Bob was very Catholic.
The distance, in time, and geography, was probably good for our friendship. Bob was also very conservative, not just in his Catholicism. Let’s put it this way: he was a Bushie and a Clinton-hater. Politics and metaphysics had put quite a strain on our association in recent years and our communication became infrequent.
Bob’s friend had phoned me because he had found my last letter to Bob (who would have nothing to do with email) among Bob’s “effects.” Bob had a stroke and after a couple days in te hospital, he died. So I expect that he received Extreme Unction (last rites) since Bob was no piker when it came to dropping green into the collection basket at mass. He had paid for the full Catholic send-off.
From his friend I learned that Bob was already dead at the time I was writing that last letter. In the letter I was jabbing away at his political conservatism, expecting that he would respond, fulminating in paragraphs of dense pica text in a return letter, typed on an ancient IBM Selectric (Bob had no use for a computer).
Bob was an Italian-American from Philadelphia. His ideal of haute cuisine was a Philly cheesesteak sandwich (hence the stroke?). He had been an electrician in the Navy, after which he took degrees in sociology, concluding with a Ph.D. thesis that argued against the liberal use of annulments in the Catholic church to dissolve marriages. After securing a post at a well-know Catholic university in the Midwest, Bob met an ex-nun. They were married and had, I believe, three children. Twelve years later Bob came home one day to find his wife and children gone, along with then contents of his bank account. She moved to a state further west, divorced Bob, who wrote with much bitterness that he was wiped out by the settlement and she poisoned the kids against him. He said that she must be on a twelve-year cycle, since she had been a nun for twelve years before quitting the convent. Bob, never recovered from the experience. Ironically, he could not remarry since he was a on record as supporting the church’s position on divorce. Only golf, a game he loved, it seemed, gave him any please or respite from sinking further into his bitter conservatism.
When I think about Bob now I think about him from an eschatological point of view. Put another way, I wonder where IS Bob?
I think that there are three (maybe more) possible places where Bob might be.
Bob is in heaven. He is in just the sort of heaven that he and I, and all Roman Catholics and other Christians, have been given to believe exists and where we will go if we die in a “state of grace.” Bob probably received Extreme Unction, which would have cleansed his soul of any mortal sins (these are the sins that will send you straight to Hell ), and therefore Bob is probably in Heaven (Yea, way to go, Bob!).
Oblivion. But then again, Bob might be nowhere, because maybe there is no “other side.” Nobody has ever seen heaven, or Valhalla, or the Elysian Fields, of Nirvana, or the Happy Hunting Grounds, or even that place with rivers of wine and seventy-two virgins for every guy who blows himself to bits. There might be no afterlife, only non-existence. So there used to be Bob, but now there is non-Bob, a Bob-less void where Bob used to exist. There is only the “remains” the “dust unto dust” part of Bob, corrupting in the earth, but no Bob elsewhere, because elsewhere doesn’t exist. This is a tough conclusion to comprehend—that existence is like a switch; for a while you are switched “on,” then you are “off.” Maybe the physical Bob is just recycled into some other arrangement of carbon atoms and Bob just becomes “building material” for something else. There was a time before we existed, so why not a time after our existence.
Another dimension. But maybe there is someplace that Bob, or some aspect, or manifestation of Bob, is now; some place beyond our comprehension, imagination, or that our science has yet to reveal to us (notice I did not say “scripture” has not revealed). This dimension might be different than the nexus of Time and Space that we have some familiarity with. So maybe Bob—at least what a non-materialist would call the “spirit,” or the “soul,” or what I would call consciousness, or self-awareness, of Bob has just passed into, or through, some great black hole into a new dimension of space-time.
I find such a possibility much more plausible than the fairy tale afterlife of religious imagination with God, his Son, and Mary sitting on some cloud, where all of the faithful observers of religious dogma assemble at some grand, eternal, boring, picnic (or, the rejected roasting in the eternal Hell fires with people they didn’t expect to meet there).
We have only been wondering about “the other side” for about 100,000 years or so—a nano blink in the great span of time since the big bang. It is to be expected that we do not care for existence to end with only the few years given to us. It seems reasonable (a distinctly human attribute), even to the agnostic, to posit that there is no purpose to existence, although one must wonder if that purpose is to attain some sort of celestial retirement, whether it be a picnic with the holy family, or a frolic with seventy-two virgins. What is to happen to all human achievement, both individually and socially? Is it all for no purpose beyond this lifetime? These are reasonable questions, but why has human imagination come up with such silly and fanciful objectives? But if it seems a waste of the achievements of the human experience just to chuck it into oblivion, what a waste it seems for nit to have been nothing but a contest in which one wins an eternity of just pleasure or pain. That it has all been some silly game of choosing the right religion and following, or not following, its dogma to the grand prize of eternal salvation or damnation.
We, of course, have had the hubris to place ourselves, mankind, as the central purpose of creation. We think we are the reason some creator (in whose image we are created) came up with then idea of the universe, to relieve his loneliness, so that he would come to have a “holy family” that we would join at some celestial picnic on a cloud. All the rest of Nature, of the vast universe—why was it necessary to create such a vast entity as the universe, and why was it necessary to take such time and the process of evolution?—was that all just matrix for the human race and its dreams of a heavenly afterlife? Nature is not wasteful, why should it waste cockroaches and whole galaxies?
So maybe we should consider that we are not the end purpose of existence, that we are part of a process that is longer than our lives and imaginations. Perhaps you might think that such musings simply substitute science fiction for metaphysics.
What’s the matter with Jim? Perhaps the question should be what matter is Jim? And now, what matter is Bob?
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©2008, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 2.21.2008)