sinners welcome here
every day i drive past a church with this sign. this is the most massive church with a parking lot to hold 8 million cars. sinners are welcome there. that's nice to see. lets people take down their guard a little, i guess.
i must have driven by there a hundred times before it started to make me think just yesterday. it was a lightening fast thought process, but it went through a dozen things, each of them further beneath the surface.
i spend some time with friends of ours and their two little girls. not long ago, the husband of the couple, chris, told me a story about an old couple consisting of a devoted wife and a dying husband. she sat by his hospital bed, as the doctor had told her he wouldn't make it through the night. the husband awoke in the night and called out to his wife, asking "are you awake" to which she replied "of course" and he said to her "do you see those three lights?" she, of course, didn't. he said to his wife "come here and kiss me goodbye... the virgin mary, the holy ghost, and jesus are here for me" and so she kissed him and he died moments later, as the story goes.
this story gave me chills and brought tears to my eyes for some reason (might have been the bottle of wine i had to drink). but more importantly, it spawned a conversation with these friends of mine about heaven... i mean, yes, the story was touching, but as a jew, i'd be pretty freakin' surprised if any one of those three came to escort me for the long haul. so i brought up heaven, and who they think are the gatekeepers, and who gets in. well, those friends of mine are christian, and this is what they told me (neither was exactly sure, but this was the gist of it). jews are the chosen people and have a free ride into heaven no matter what. anyone else has to accept jesus christ as their savior in order to get into heaven. now, forgive me for just a minute, but WHAT???? i mean, i LOVE the idea that i can live whatever kind of life i damn well please and still be looked on favorably in the big guy's eyes. however, i don't know if i think that's the case.
millions of people of so many different faiths are willing to die for what they believe. so why would i have a gate-pass just because of who i was born to? and what makes these people so sure that just by believing something they will go through the pearly whites?
i once made an appointment with a rabbi to ask him about afterlife and heaven and hell. he gave me a really ambiguous answer that left me confused and kind of hopeless. many jews don't believe in heaven or hell, he told me. but of those that do, many believe that heaven is the way you're remembered fondly, and hell is the negative memories of you. kind of dismal, but it's nice to think that someone might remember me in a nice way. so, life ends after, like, 2 generations after you live, if that? that doesn't sound so great. what about forever??? what's the point of trying to live a good life if you don't reap any reward later on? (besides that whole feeling good about what you do and freedom from guilt, thing... whatever. we'd find reason to feel it anyway, i think) jews fast for 24 hours on yom kippur to cleanse themselves of their sins and get written in the good book of life (i don't know what i think about how valid that can be, either). so why try to be in the good book of life? it doesn't change what you did, and it doesn't change where you're going.
i just don't get it.
maybe religion and faith are both just ways for people to have some reason to not feel hopeless. maybe they're just ways for them to try to figure out the big picture when really there isn't one. maybe it's just a way for people to make friends or family that they believe are like themselves.
i guess there's only one way to find out and it's not really reversible.
