#acl All:read

Link to FaithDevelopment

= Introduction =

Do you ever think about life after death?  You must do.  We all do, do
we not? What do Jesus' words on resurrection mean to you?  Just to
remind you, Jesus said to Martha as he was comforting her on the loss
of her brother Lazarus: "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who
believe in me will live, even though they die."  (John 11:25)

I write this as I am travelling
through Idaho, and its collection of Bible Belt chapels churches and
chastisements, especially from roadside hoardings and church notice
boards.  "Are you going to Heaven or Hell" asked the last one.
"Neither", I said, "I am going to Spokane"

I discovered that Spokane is pronounced "Spoken" (with a short 'o'),
and it made me think of the contrast of the spoken word versus the
written word.  Sure, we read our bibles, but do we talk our bibles?
The Faith Development Group is keen to raise the level of faith
discussion in our church.  We enjoy our fellowship with our
parishioners, but do we hear and feel the human hurts and hopes behind
them?  Do we know what others think about the Resurrection?  What is
their view of life after death?  What makes ourselves and others tick
when it comes to deep and meaningful insights on Life, The Universe
and Everything?

I shall not give you answers in this series of reflections, but I
shall give you some thoughts upon which you might reflect.  I guarantee
that when you come up with your own interpretation to them, you will 
find a greater confidence in your own faith!

There are 6 chapters in this series of reflections:
 1. Consciousness
 1. Soul
 1. Spirit
 1. Death
 1. Resurrection
 1. Life Everlasting

= Consciousness =

What do we mean by the word "consciousness"?  My dictionary says it is
"the state of being aware and perceptive of one's surroundings".  We
know that animals have consciousness, but that rocks do not.  What
about living things such as plants?  There are trees that respond to
touch (mimosa), and there are plants that close traps upon
unsuspecting insects (sundews).  Are they not "perceptive to their
surroundings"?

My guess is that you would say not.  After all, they cannot choose to
do otherwise, their responsiveness is mechanical, and demonstrates no
thinking process.  But a cat, on seeing a mouse, can choose to chase
the mouse, or not.  Why would it not?  It might perceive the presence
of a large dog near the mouse, and decide that its hunger is not
sufficient to force it into danger.  Clearly some form of
consciousness is at work here.

So should we add some form of choice into our definition of
consciousness?  This touches upon the philosophical notion of free
will, and I have just come from a bible study on Jonah.  Now I had
always dismissed Jonah as an interesting story about failing to follow
God's commands, but it is indeed much more than that.  Perhaps the
Faith Group might sponsor a bible study on Jonah some day?  But I
digress.  Jonah's story is much more about man's choice between acting
on God's word, and the consequences of running from it.  Indeed, you
could say that that is the whole message of all the Old Testament
prophets.  "Repent, for the Wrath of God is at Hand" is a fair
paraphrase of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Hosea, Habakuk and all the
other prophets starting with 'H'.  And that is certainly the message
pushed by many of our more evangelical brethren.  If only you repent
and declare the Lord as your Saviour, then you shall find eternal
life.

And that is a very comforting message if we wish to think no further.
But it pushes a lot of responsibility away from ourselves.  It gives
us little choice in how we are to behave, in fact it gives no guidance
at all.  When faced with ethical dilemmas, how does the Lord as our
Saviour help us to respond?

I would argue that the idea of the Lord (as) our Saviour is of little
use.  But Jesus of Nazareth is.  Jesus faced many ethical dilemmas in
his time, and he made it clear that it is an issue of choice.  The two
ethical dilemmas that he faced that stand out in my mind both involve
women: the womand taken in adultery, and the woman at the well.  In
both cases there was a clear case of sin, and the possibility of
judgement.  But in both cases, Jesus responds not with judgement, but
with compassion.  He makes it clear that the women have choices: "Go,
and sin no more".

Incidentally, I heard a funny story from one of the preachers on one
of the cruises that I took.  The Rev. Barrie was in good form, and told
a good joke about Douglas !McGregor, a scottish house painter, who
always cheated on his customers by thinning down his paint, and not
putting enough coats of paint on. One day he was commissioned to paint
the local church, which he did with his usual dishonesty. As he
finished, there were several bolts of lightning, and a big clap of
thunder, down came all the rain, and washed off his newly applied thin
paint. He fell to his knees, and cried out to God, "What must I do?"
in much anguish. Back came a voice from the heavens: "Repaint!
Repaint, and thin no more!"

Our consciousness allows us to make choices, and it is in the choices that
we make that God develops a relationship with us.  Without
consciousness, we cannot make those choices.  Without the right
choice, we cannot have a right relationship with God.  That is true of
life before death, and it is what defines our relationship with God
after death.

= Soul =

I have asked several people about the difference between the soul and
the spirit, and I have never been entirely comfortable with the
answers.  To many people, the two terms are synonymous, and it is easy
to see why, when we often use them interchangeably.  If we are to talk
of death and resurrection, then I think we need to be more careful in
our use of the two words.  We talk of our "immortal souls", and "his
spirit lives on", but do they carry the same meaning?  I think there
is a subtle distinction.

My on-line dictionary defines "soul" as "the spiritual or non-material
part of a human being ... regarded as immortal", and "spirit" as "the
non-physical part of a person that is regarded as the seat of emotions
and character; the soul", so they do not make a distinction, and are
not much help.

So how would I distinguish them?  Before I answer that, think about
what you think the difference (if any) might be.  Ready?  The
distinction is in fact partly evident in those two definitions above,
but we must tease them apart.  The soul is that part of our make-up
that is irrevocably linked to who we are.  It is that word
"irrevocably" that lies behind the notion of "immortality" in the
definition above.  When we talk of "immortal souls" we mean that that
person, that entity, that living being (even if "living" applies only
a short time frame) can be thought of, can be referenced at any time
in the continuum of infinity.  Yes, we can talk of "souls departed",
and have distinct memories of the fleshly form of that soul.  But we
can also talk of "future souls", whose fleshly form is yet to appear.
We do not know how they might think or act, but we can certainly posit
their existence.  It is what the Bible means when it talks of "Abraham
and his seed forever", or what people in the modern day mean when they
talk of climate change and its effect upon "future generations".  We
do not know who or what they are, but they are a powerful force in our
thinking.

But what of the spirit?  Here is where our notion of consciousness and
choice comes into play.  Souls do not necessarily have consciouness,
but spirits do - or at least, the choice part of consciousness.  For
what makes the spirit of a person is how they behave in the light of
the choices they are faced with - their "emotions and character" in
the definition above.  More of this in the next chapter.

Let us return to the soul.  I have said that it is that part of us
irrevocably linked to who we are.  Moses asked God who He was, when He
appeared to Moses in the burning bush.  God's answer?  "I AM what I
AM".  The great existential statement of all time.  God is Being.
There is really no other way of saying it.  When we talk of other
people, we must use grammatical artefacts just like "I AM" to refer to
them.  We use names, labels, pronouns, epithets, anything but the
soul, because we have no "label" for the soul.

At the risk of becoming too technical, allow me a slight computing
digression.  Computing has this same problem of referring to objects,
and how we manipulate them, without have to have "them", the objects
themselves, immediately to hand.  We make explicit distinctions
between the labels and the objects.  It is easy to understand that "6"
is a label for the number 6, but far more subtle to know that when the
label "6" is used in different programs, even though the labels appear
in different places they still refer to the same object - an abstract
object, in particular, an integer number.  A student of mine once
wrestled with this idea in an exam, when asked to explain the binary
number system (as opposed to our decimal numbers, based upon 10).
"2", he said, "is the number of legs on a normal man".  He had grasped
the fact that the idea of 2 and the label 2 are different, but the
idea could be referred to in a number of different ways.

We call such labels (like '2') "persistent identifiers", because they
always reference the same object.  It gets more complicated when we
use persistent identifiers like "John" in different places,
because what happens when John changes his name and decides that he
wants to be called "Angas"?  '2' is always the number 2 (or we would
be in a great deal of semantic trouble otherwise!), but everywhere 
that "John" is used as a name for the person, the name becomes "Angas", 
but the person does not change.  The label is alterable, but the thing 
being referenced is not.

Things become even more complicated when we overload labels with 
multiple referents.  I went on a tour last year with 10 couples, 
and 4 of the blokes involved were called "John".  We solved the 
problem by changing the names to keep them unique, attaching the 
wife's name as a suffix - so I became "!JohnBarb" to distinguish 
me from "!JohnMarg", "!JohnJenny" and "!JohnSandra".  (Most normal 
people use surnames to distinguish between Johns.)

You will see how difficult this becomes.  "John", "Angas" and
the person John are three different things, and we have to keep the
distinctions clear.  I might change my name, but people who know me
still know the same person, even when my label changes.  "John"
is a convenient way your brain recognizes what to call me, and many
readers will have experienced the embarrassment of knowing the person,
but losing the label for the person.  This holds for many of our
attributes.  Even if we don't change names, think phone numbers or
email addresses as another example of labels that change.

But the soul is an "irrevocable" or "unchangeable" part of us.  It 
cannot be changed, whether we want it to be or not.   Even when we die, 
it remains that irrevocable part of us.  That is what makes the soul 
immortal.  Or,  as Tom Rose put it recently in one of his services, 
"The table of  eternity whispers your name".  It does not matter what 
that name is,  but eternity forever identifies your soul.

That is the key to understanding how we might think of life after
death, and resurrection.

= Spirit =

So what of the spirit?  Back to that definition, and the connection
with 'emotions' and 'character'.  I came across this phrase in a
recent "Faith" article in The Sunday Age, talking about a 13-year old
girl diagnosed with leukaemia: "although her movements became limited,
her spirit did not diminish".  Clearly the physical persona and the
emotional persona diverged as the disease took hold.  We talk of
people whose spirit rises above their physical disability as having an
"indomitable spirit", a spirit that "cannot be tamed".

The spirit is how we like to think of a person.  It is our "everyday"
definition of the soul, and that explains why the two terms are often
conflated.  We say "her spirit lives on", in an attempt to capture how
the personality, rather than the person, still survives in our
collective memories.  But we understand from our collective faith that
it is the soul that is immortal, and that is why we feel the need to
express the notion that the "spirit lives on".  For if the spirit
sometimes does not "live on", what happens to the soul in this case?

The spirit is the embodiment of the choices that we see in a conscious
person.  We do not see the spirit in a non-conscious person (whether
they be simply asleep, or more profoundly, dead) except in our own
memories - there is no consciousness exhibiting that array of
choice-making decisions that we associate with personality and the
spirit.  So "spirit" and "consciousness" are inextricably linked.

And here that semantic distinction between the object and its
identifiers becomes relevant again.  How can you relate the spirit of
some person, the collection of choices that a person makes, their
ethos, their morality, their behaviour, indeed their personality,
without using some collection of words, some identifying symbols, some
images such as photos or movies - all of which are not the person
themselves?  Those words or images are not the spirit.  Those words or
images are not the person.

I had a revelation when I recently visited the Kimberley.  You must
have noticed that television broadcasters will often comment before
showing images of native peoples that "Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islanders are advised that this programme may contain images and
sounds of deceased persons"?  I discovered why on my trip, when being
guided down the Geike River by a Bunuba elder whose soul I shall refer
to as Bill (clearly not his "real" name).  It is because when
aboriginal people die, everything associated with that person is
destroyed. Even their names cannot be used, and others in the tribe
with the same name will change their name out of respect for the
deceased person. While this may sound very odd to Western ears, I find
that I have a certain spiritual sympathy with this custom.  Indeed, I
wrote in my diary at the time:
  "We only have a limited lifespan in our earthly form, and when we
  die, our spirit is absorbed back into the Divine
  Presence/God/Gaia/Earth Spirits, call it what you will, but we become
  part of the universal history of the universe, and just like ancient
  plants and animals, our life forms no longer live. Who cares about a
  rock face (perhaps beautiful, perhaps not) that was destroyed in some
  geological uplifting 2 million years ago?  Who will care about us in 2
  million years time? We are blended with the spirit of that ancient
  rock face and become part of the "great dreaming", the great
  existential history of the universe."

The message in all this is that our spirits are changeable, whereas
our souls are not.  We can make conscious choices as to how our
spirits may appear to others - whether we are generous or mean,
whether we are peaceful, or aggressive, whether we are introverted, or
extroverted, and so on.  I deliberately used that last example because
I know there will be those that say "ah, but introverted or
extroverted is part of our nature, like the colour of our eyes, and
cannot be changed.  A good point, but I think the real touchstone is
that when it comes to relationships with others, we always have a
choice.  The colour of our eyes, or indeed of our skin, should
{\bf not} affect our relationships with others (and vice versa!),
since we have no choice about them.  But whether we engage or retreat
from relationships is certainly part of the range of choices facing
us, and we can work at changing them if we try.

= Death =

So what happens when we die?  Do we see those transitional bright
lights that people with a near-death experience report?  Is there a
"light at the end of the tunnel"?  I don't know.  My scientific
mind would like to believe that such experiences relate to some form
of the brain shutting down, as it suffers from lack of oxygen, and
this would give a convenient explanation for those near-death
experiences.  Not all of us may experience that of course.  Our
consciousness may well have slipped away long before the brain suffers
from lack of oxygen, and those effects can be imprinted on our brain
cells. 

I prefer to think that death is just the permanent loss of
consciousness.  I remember reading that someone once said that death
was just like not being born.  Before we are born (perhaps it might be
better to go back slightly from there, and say before we are
conceived, but the point is the same), we have no consciousness.  Same
after death.  When people ask me if I believe in life after death
(however you might care to define "life"!), I reply that I did not
believe in life after birth before I was born!

But birth and death are different, clearly.  The big difference is
that before we are born, other people clearly cannot relate to our
spirits, but after we die, our spirits "live on" (in some form)
through the interactions we have with others, and the memories in
others that we generate while we are alive.  And as discussed above,
our souls now have labels, names, symbols that allow others to
reference that immortal soul that we suggest is there even before we
are born.  Nothing can change the fact of our existence on earth (even
if totally erased from living memories); we have been here, our
immortal souls have interacted with people and things on earth, and
none of the circumstances of our birth, life or death can ever change
that.

Neither the tragedies of a short life, nor the accomplishments of a
long one, alter our essential being or our unique relationship with the
Divine Presence.  That is the WE ARE, just as God is the I AM.

= Resurrection =

So John, you are a Christian, and you recite the Nicene Creed,
including the phrase ''I believe in ... the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting''.  Are you saying that that is all baloney? 

I have to admit that "the resurrection of the body" is not that
straightforward.  Scientific evidence shows that our bodies do
decompose, and Christianity freely admits that cremation does not
flout this aspect of the Nicene Creed (save for a few unusual sects).
So how can we have resurrection of the body?

The short answer is, I don't think we can.  If your belief system
admits of a mechanism whereby a cremated body can somehow be
reconstituted by God's almighty power, then fair enough, hold to that
belief.  But I don't think that earthly understandings can begin to
encompass what Christ meant when he said "destroy this temple, and in
three days I shall raise it up" (John 2:19).  The conventional
wisdom is that Christ was referring to the temple of (his) body, and
that he was predicting his resurrection on the third day.  The literal
text of the gospels is very clear - Jesus reappeared to his disciples,
and they took his appearance to be in the flesh.  Thomas exemplifies this
astonishing thing.  He would not believe "unless I put my hand in his
side".  Jesus invites him to do just that, and there is no suggestion
in John's gospel (the only gospel to record this event) that Thomas
and the others with him saw any reason to comment that Jesus was not
in the flesh at that point.

Nevertheless, there are two key points that must be made: a) the
disciples in Jesus time were creatures of their own time and culture,
and relayed things as they appeared to them; and b) something happened
after the crucifixion that totally changed the lives and behaviours of
all the disciples.

Many authors have commented on this latter point and it remains for me
the most profound aspect of the gospels.  How could such a bunch of
poorly organized, under-resourced, and totally demoralized people
bounce back in such a world-changing way?  Either they were the most
comprehensive con-artists the world has ever seen, or they saw and
experienced something that took them well outside their earthly
experience.  If they were con-artists, why would they argue for such a
selfless view of the world?  No, they '''did''' have a completely new
spirit-life, and the choices they made after the resurrection
appearances were totally new choices, indicative of a new spirit (in
the sense as defined above) within them.

Those choices were so profound, and so different that the words
subsequently used to describe their experiences must be different from
the words that we use to describe our everyday experiences.  So I
don't think it matters much exactly what they saw with the appearances
of the post-crucifixion Jesus.  Yes, they described those appearances
as best they could; no, we do not need to take them literally.  What
we must do is to be aware of the profoundly life-changing forces at
work in those early Christians, and see that as a resurrection of the
Jesus life-force.

Our souls live on after death anyway - but our spirits can be
resurrected to give new life to the choices we would make, had we the
consciousness to act upon them.  That is resurrection of the spirit,
if not the body.

= Life Everlasting =

I made the comment above that when we die, our spirit is absorbed back
into the Divine Presence.  Clearly our souls, our unique identity as
human beings, are part of this Divine Presence (as they always have
been, forever and ever, amen).  But what do we mean by saying our
spirit is also part of the Divine Presence?  Here I must turn to
Michael Morwood, whose book ''It's Time: Challenges to the Doctrine of
Faith'' contains some of the answers to this question.  He has a list
of some 13 articles of faith, which I will not list here, but appeal
to three key statements in that list:
 1. The Divine Presence is always present and active.
 1. The Divine Presence was/is/will be present in all that exists, including humans
 1. Jesus died into the Divine Presence as we all do
We are surrounded by the Divine Presence (call it "God" if you
will) (point 1).  We cannot escape it, even in death.  It is the ultimate
consummation of spirit (point 2).  Indeed, our "spirit" is in a real sense
"borrowed" from the Divine Presence during our earthly existence,
and returns unto the Divine Presence when we die (point 3).

I do not know whether we might be conscious of that state of returning
to the Divine Presence.  But I do believe that the Divine Presence
will be that much more enriched when we do return.  The choices we
make in this conscious life will determine the extent of that
enrichment.  As the words of George Handel's wonderful anthem 
"Lord, I trust Thee" puts it: 

  "When the breath of life has left me,
   May my soul be blended with thee."

John Hurst
April 2018