🎼 Weekend Song Break: Skeptic in Heaven
With a new pope in the spotlight, here's my song about an agnostic's adventure in the afterlife.
I know many devout atheists (I use the word devout intentionally). I know many devout adherents to a host of religions. I’m culturally Jewish but agnostic - kind of unsurprising considering that I am, in spirit, a lifetime member of the American Tentative Society (founded decades ago by some veteran journalists I admire).
Whether or not there is a deity (or a batch of them) shaping existence, it’s evident that religion matters enormously. This is on vivid display at both ends of the spectrum of human endeavor, from death-dealing extremism and religion-driven war to the wonderul communitarian and service orientation of so many people of faith.
Popes matter, both for the 1.4 billion Catholics out there and as a wider beacon potentially influencing human values and practices, for better or worse. Pope Francis certainly tipped things way over toward human betterment, as I witnessed in a remarkable week at the Vatican in 2014 setting the stage for his second encyclical, Laudato Si’ — On the Care of Our Common Home.”
From his early statements and evident social media record, it looks like Pope Leo XIV will follow in Francis’s track. For instance, last year, as NPR reported, the pope, as Cardinal Prevost, said “humanity's ‘dominion over nature’ should not be ‘tyrannical,’ but rather a ‘relationship of reciprocity’ with the environment.” Time will tell. Please also read
’s essay Hope in a Pope.
With all this in mind, I thought this a good time to offer up a song I wrote awhile back in which I try (playfully) to wend my way between my personal skepticism and the feeling that it'd be awfully grand if there were surprisingly great things beyond the scope of an individual life. Here goes (the tune is also on YouTube):
Skeptic in Heaven
Spent all my life a doubter, a skeptic through and through, ‘til I found myself in heaven one fine day.
Don’t know how I got here. Seems you can’t recall your end. But here I am and I still am amazed.
Everyone is smiling, happy as a clam. We all share a look of slight surprise. Even lifelong believers are somehow shocked to find that heaven really is a paradise.
The view is quite spectacular. You can see the grand design. You can finally see the forest for the trees.
Down on Earth they’re running round like frantic little ants. They should relax. The afterlife’s a breeze.
Everyone is smiling, happy as a clam. We all share a look of slight surprise. Even lifelong believers are somehow shocked to find that heaven really is a paradise.
Way, way down you can make out a different destination – a place for those who did not make the grade. But up here we nibble angel cake. The choir is divine. Life in heaven is one big parade.
Everyone is smiling, happy as a clam. We all share a look of slight surprise. Even lifelong believers are somehow shocked to find that heaven really is a paradise.
Thoughts welcome!
My friend and Maine neighbor (by Downeast Maine standards),
, who teaches jazz studies at the University of Maine and also composes liturgical music, offered a serious and playful critique from a theological vantage point:As with "A Very Fine Line" you embed some profound themes between the "playful" lines. It is a Christian essential that eternal life is unattainable by human moral effort. We simply can't keep the divine law sufficiently to "make the grade". God's solution to this existential dilemma is to give us eternal life through a "surrogate obedience", that of Jesus Christ's who did everything perfectly. That's what substitutionary atonement means. And this eternal life is received through believing, so the only way to lose it is through rejecting the offer.
I.e. your "different destination."
I especially like your reference to lifelong believers being "surprised" too, either because it's unimaginably lovely in eternity, or because they finally discover how amazing the grace is which got them there.
I think you'd enjoy C.S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce".1 His whimsical proposition is that some people, when they arrive in heaven, actually prefer your "different destination."
What songs are keeping you going these days?
Here’s the Wikipedia entry on this CS Lewis novel with a section on his “grety town” as Hell.
Love this, Andy! Great vibe and thought-- reminds me a little of how another non-believer wrote "God's Counting on You":)
When Thoreau was asked if he had made his peace and was ready to enter heaven, he said he was too busy making the most of this life and would cross that bridge when he got to it.
Im now thinking about becoming a Catholic with the Pope serving Chicago deep-dish communion wafers. Seize the day and make the most of it. It’s the journey, the life, not the destination. Let’s all take better care of others.