I cannot ever remember when this concept has found a true understanding within my thinking. It is almost one of those things that you believe in without ever having to think it through; it was just there like electricity. With all my years of playing with it, wiring irons and all the household items I have ‘tinkered’ with over the years. It just simply existed as a fact of life.
A lot is expected of a ‘preacher’ and not all of it by the organisation one is called to minister in, or by the God that is accepted as the initiating force of the preaching. I was never a good preacher and would never claim to have been a successful teacher, if there is such a person; however I was always aware that little Mrs Brown was sitting in the third back row. She had been there for forty years and heard hundreds if not thousands of sermons. What did she require of me, the preacher, when I got up to preach? Was I going to sprout a new doctrine or step away from what was accepted doctrine by my organisation? Or was I going to give her what she was looking for; support, encouragement, a sense of place in this world and the next? I have to confess it was the latter and I very rarely thought about it. When I was pushed I would say things like ‘it is unclear but I know it is there’ (wherever ‘there’ may be) and move on. I always enjoyed what I was doing and there were times when I would say that I believe in Heaven and that it is going to be ‘better’ than what we have got here; I can’t understand that because I am having such a good time - I couldn’t cope with anything better than this. I know that there were times when I was pulling the chain, but generally I believed it and it also did not encourage me to think any deeper about it.
There were two instances that I remember when it took on great importance for me in this struggle to define the hereafter. It was 1981 (I think) I was having trouble with my knee and it required that I was to be in hospital in Horsham for 5 days, at the least. It was unfortunate that I went in to hospital the week before Easter but I was confident that I would be out by the weekend. It seems a statement of the bleeding obvious that Easter for me, as a Christian, has always been significant, but it all centred around Easter Monday. I could never cope with the concept of Good Friday and all that it entailed but Sunday was the day for me with its promise of the future. The resurrection narrative has always had an air of mythical reality about it, but what it represents is very real. This is not all there is there just has to be something after it. I can almost picture the Doctor, Mr Brownstein, a South African who was in Horsham at the time, a great man and I really respected him but as he stood at the end of the bed on the Thursday before Easter and had an argument about me being discharged. He won and so I was in the Horsham Base Hospital for Easter. It was Ironic that also in my ward was a young guy who had been in a bit of a car accident and was just like you see in the movies all bandaged up with two broken legs in plaster, but he wanted to go home also and in the middle of the night he kept on swinging his legs out of the bed and trying to ‘escape’ which was great until he fell over and couldn’t get up again. It happened a couple of occasions and the nurses kept on picking him up, the sides of the bed went up and finally I think sedated; but my reaction was one of admiration and why didn’t I have the guts to just get up and go home? I could walk and hobble with sticks, but I stayed.
I was determined to make it count and so Easter Sunday Morning I got one of the nurses to let me into the day room on the top floor that faced due east. Horsham is the capital of the Wimmera a huge area of Western Victoria surrounded by wheat fields. A little further away it is sheep grazing, a long way to the south east is a range of hills called the Grampians and to the north is heading into dusty scrub country; generally speaking it is fairly flat country and so from the forth floor; the horizon could be easily seen. I was there for about an hour before dawn and settled into a rather high easy chair where I could see the horizon clearly. It was a fine day with some early cloud but generally speaking it was clear. I had read the resurrection story a few times the day before to in some way prepare myself for this little adventure to the fourth floor. Sitting in the dark in a deserted hospital day room was quite eerie but as time passed I felt quite a deal of anticipation of this coming event. Then there was this almost imperceptible change on the horizon and I had to rub my eyes to make sure that I was not seeing things but no it was dawning; then there were the streaks of light that outlined the horizon and the sky began to change colour. There were a few clouds on the horizon and the light played with them in a magnificent manner and the horizon was more sharply defined. Then the sky was a beautiful dark blue and then it was lightening to what I would call the normal sky blue the day was dawning. It seemed like an age later that the sun started peaking over the horizon and so the transformation from a slither of sun to the full sun over the horizon happened as I watched. It was a magnificent and emotional moment and the words the first disciples heard when they went to the tomb in that ‘first Easter day’ have become etched into my being - ‘why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here; he is risen’
From that moment I was sure that this was not all there was, I had, and continue to have, this burning confirmation that there has to be something more to life than just what we see and experience here.
The second event was the musical ‘Glory’ written by the Gowans and Larsson team as one of their highly successful musicals of that era. It was a high energy production with Salvationism oozing out of every line. There was all the expected lines and characters and was based around the concept of will happen when William Booth gets to heaven. It is based on the poem by Vachel Lindsay’s immortal poem of 1912, the year William Booth was ‘Promoted to Glory’. I have always loved the concept of meeting loved ones and I used to say at some of my history seminars ‘When I get to heaven there are a few question that I want to ask William Booth and one of them was why his 4 cleverest kids left the Army? In the intervening years I think that I have found out and it has more to do with poor parenting than anything to do with the Army, however life moves on…. But the concept found a very powerful and emotive place in me. The poem was based around the old song ‘Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?’ but the new song that came out of this play was ‘They shall come from the east; they shall come from the west and sit down in the kingdom of God’. It has this theme of eventually death, new life, heaven will be the great leveller and it will not matter what you were in this life because there will come a time when we will all sit down together and be one, with love, tolerance, respect and understanding. Heaven! I can not hear it or even think about it and not think of the people we served with in Africa but also then people we served with all round Australia and I can easily expand it out past its obvious Christian theme and include all the people I have known even from my latter fundraising days. Who knows, but it is something that I can in the privacy of my own mind enjoy thinking about the people who I would like to meet when the time comes. I have even created a Brass Band that is going to play for me when I get to heaven. I have put names alongside each instrument of the people who I would like to play in ‘my’ band. It makes interesting reading.
So where is my concept of heaven taking me too on this particular occasion? Heaven is a very emotional word and means so many different things to so many different people. To the religious fundamentalist in me there is always the picture described above, related to whatever the current particular faith might be, but always something to do with the ‘after death’ experience. Then there are those who might associate it with some form of physical delight like eating a block of chocolate or some other sensuous pastime that would be different for everyone. Over recent years I have found heaven in many places sometimes possibly with other people whose company I have enjoyed, it could have been things that I have done or been involved with; the day all the people arrived for the first Madison Down Under, arriving in England from Canada after 9/11 and seeing Beth & James at the Heathrow to meet me; that really was as close to heaven as I can remember, and then meeting Judy at the station in Edinburgh on the same trip. There are times when I have been speaking and just seem to be in the flow, where the words come easy and people respond and tell me afterwards that I have helped them; even after a mentoring session. I sometimes feel pretty good about it and so associate it with ‘heaven’.
However these days I am not as much concerned about what the ‘after life’ holds for me, my theology now is more along the lines of doing all I can in the here and now, with the time that I have left and tending to leave the hereafter to itself. But that does not mean that I am unconcerned about what comes after me. I have always been impressed with the Australian Aboriginals view of the world that sees everything as connected to each other where nothing is isolated and alone. ‘That mountain over there is my brother and that stream is my grandmother’; of course with the underlying commitment to look after it for all the future generations. I am feeling that way about so many of the things that I am involved in at the moment and feeling again the importance of ‘passing on the fire’ to people who will come after me. I am struggling to get to the point that ‘Heaven’ is more for me a concept of what I leave behind than what I take with me or ‘enjoy’ after I leave this earthly shell behind.
There are a number of people who I have had contact with over the years who in my mind will never die, for a number of various reasons. There are people like Arthur Venn, who showed me and a lot of other people the importance of a commitment to a profession. There are people like Michael Downs who could write and speak about fundraising in such a powerful way that you felt motivated by their words to a degree that what we are involved in is life changing and community changing stuff. There were people like Major John Smith, who had the ability to make all people feel good about what they were doing, and important as well. I have never met anyone who has made me feel more important, that everything depended on me and that he had no doubt that I was up for the task, whatever it might have been at the time. He was one of my all time great mentors, in print, or real life, as I ever expect to have. A book could be filled with narratives about people who left behind something that made other people feel good, more committed, more competent to continue their role in life. I see the importance in their life as what they ‘have done’ rather than what they are ‘going to do’, when this earthly life has run its course.
There is also the analogy of being a link in the chain, where even these brilliant people would recognise someone in their past who has motivated, inspired or educated them so that they have the skills to pass it down the chain to the next generation. It was Freud who spoke about the Golden Seed that most successful people have that was planted in them my someone who completely believed in them. The Aboriginals had it in abundance although they had no concept of chains until the white man came and many of us have the concept in some form or other.
So! What is Heaven?
The Catechism of 1024 states; "Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfilment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness." And I guess that if we want a theology based in the Christian Faith then this is as good as it gets; however I am sure that there are other definitions. It was Helen Trinca & Catherine Fox in the 2004 book ‘Better than Sex’ which I purchased in 99p store, commenting on previous generations as compared to the present generation who states that ‘…unlike earlier generations who offered hard work and activity up to God, most of us expect to be happy in this world, not the next. This very much fitted in line with my thoughts in regard to earlier in this piece where my default was belief was that the next life was going to be better than this one. I think it was Malcolm Muggeridge who stated that Hell, as he understood it, was not a place but a state of mind when you would be in heaven and remember what you should have done for others that you fid not do while you had the opportunity. It was C S Lewis in his book ‘The Great Divorce’ who discusses heaven and hell from a visionary point of view almost as an allegorical story and talks about the ‘Grey Town’ and the bus that takes people from this place of purgatory, and gives them a chance to stay in ‘heaven’ where people already knew them and all that they had done in their lives; the good, the bad and the very bad, but their response was not one of condemnation but of welcoming and acceptance because ‘We understand why you were like you were – and it doesn’t matter now’. Now that to me is my idea of heaven if we are looking for it as part of an afterlife, but I want to look at it , more as what happens to others after we have left this life rather than what happens to me.
In conducting many funerals in a past life there were so many times when the words seemed so empty to those left behind. It often seemed words for the sake of words that meant very little. They have gone to a ‘better place’; that they were ‘no longer suffering’ or even the concept, which I actually like, of ‘forever with the Lord’. All expressed great truths but nothing approached the concept of the influence that they left behind when they died.
