Girl’s Life

I’m in a pretty amazing book club with a handful of good friends. Because of it, I’ve had the opportunity to experience some great reads (soon to be listed in a “Current and Recent Reads” section I’m creating for the blog). Recently, we read Alice Sebold’s Lovely Bones about 14-year-old Susie Salmon who is raped and murdered in the first chapter by a shady next-door neighbor. Upon reading the first few pages, I wondered how I’d make it through the next 350. Don’t worry - it lightens up - a little. Susie then spends the rest of the book narrating the story of her death and the plight of her family’s struggle to deal with their loss from her perch up in heaven.

And this is what is interesting. Sebold’s secular view of heaven is a therapeutic one, one that reaches out to soothe and explore the inner child, one that allows the deceased to make peace with her life on Earth before fully moving on to the next “stage.”

Slate ran an article today about the 21st-Century American view of heaven, a paradise that is “Disney World, Hawaii, Paris, Rome and New York all rolled up into one”�the “ultimate playground, created purely for our enjoyment.” (Excerpts from A Travel Guide to Heaven, by Anthony DeStefano.)

Here’s what I don’t understand. Where is God in either of these views?

I’m as much for travel and great experiences as the next person, but my idea of heaven is neither an X-treme fantasy nor a therapy session where I can put closure on my life. My idea of heaven is one where I am in constant communion with God - one so far beyond this world that I would never be able to compare it to a tourist trip across the country. And I have the feeling that once I’m there, I will not have the smallest desire to concern myself with my past human experience and suffering. As Slate’s Adam Kirsch writes, “Instead of angelic choirs, it now seems, we will be greeted in heaven by the sound of a billion voices, all talking about themselves.”

Postmodernism strikes again.