Our consciousness vanishes in dreamless sleep every night. It’s such a familiar experience that we pay no attention to the annihilation of our sentience. I imagine we experience death as the dreamless sleep from which we never awake to notice that time has passed and the world has gone on without our awareness.
All the earth is a grave and nothing escapes it,
nothing is so perfect that it does not descend to its tomb.
Rivers, rivulets, fountains and waters flow,
but never return to their joyful beginnings;
anxiously they hasten on the vast realms of the rain god.
As they widen their banks, they also fashion the sad urn of their burial.
Filled are the bowels of the earth
with pestilential dust once flesh and bone,
once animate bodies of man who sat upon thrones,
decided cases, presided in council, commanded armies,
conquered provinces, possessed treasure, destroyed temples,
exulted in their pride, majesty, fortune, praise and power.
Vanished are these glories, just as the fearful smoke vanishes
that belches forth from the infernal fires of Popocatepetl.
Nothing recalls them but the written pate.
(A poem purportedly written by Nezahualcoyotl, King of Texcoco)
It caused me to think, as funerals tend to do. The man who died and the services held in his honor were emblematic of my relationship to Mormonism.
The man who died was the bishop to whom I first confessed my sins. He tried to help me the best he knew how, but our shared belief in Mormonism got in our way. Instead of telling me that I was acceptable just exactly as I was, he tried to help fix me, to help me meet an arbitrary standard. Though he was kindhearted, our interaction led to years of heartbreak.
Everything in my life has been a mixture of good and bad.
Going to the funeral was a homecoming. The church was the same building where I spent long hours in stake conference as a child and where I attended my freshman year of early morning seminary. The people that I saw were the faces of my childhood: teachers, leaders, old friends, people whom I haven’t seen in years, people with a smiles of recognition when they see me, everyone a little older and worn down by life. The lilt and rhythm of Mormon thought weaved itself through the entire occasion and helped to impart to my mind a sense of timelessness. So many parts of my life were connected in this moment. My childhood folded in on the present moment.
I appreciate Mormon funerals. Because they sincerely believe that they will see their family and friends again, their funerals take on the air of a somewhat melancholy family reunion. I don’t share their hope for a continuation of life after death, but I want my funeral to celebrate that life goes on. Saying goodbye is the inevitable price of building relationships. We can’t have the one without the other.
I sat listening to stories about his life mixed in with assertions of supernatural miracles and certainty for unjustified beliefs. I briefly wished that we could dispense with the nonsense and focus on who the man was. However, these beliefs were part of him. They were an appropriate part of his funeral because he received a sense of meaning from them. Even though my feelings about Mormonism range from ambivalence to repugnance, if I wanted to acknowledge this man as a friend, I had to make peace with the parts of him that I dislike.
I can’t say that I willingly accept the bad with the good. But what choice do I have when the two are inseparable?
…But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of? (Hamlet)
To lie about a far country is easy. (Amharic proverb)
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (songwriter of Hurt) in a 2005 interview for Rolling Stone about seeing Johnny Cash’s video cover for the first time: “I saw the video and it took my breath away. Immediately my throat had a lump in it, and at that point, it really struck home. It was heartbreaking. I had goosebumps, which I have right now even thinking about it. It became really inspiring to me.… It works. And it probably works better than my version.… I haven’t listened to my version since then.”
Let me recap. God wanted to show everyone how infinitely loving he is, so he created Adam and Eve and put them in a paradisaical garden knowing that they would break his rule about eating of the fruit one particular tree. When they broke his rule (just like he knew they would), he cast them out of paradise into a torture chamber inhabited by a malicious demon he refuses to rein in. Adam and Eve and all of their children suffer at this demon’s hands. He creates earthquakes, floods, plagues, famines, pestilences, and all manner of suffering to punish Adam and Eve’s family for the time back in paradise when their first parents dared to eat that fruit that God tempted them with. Before the demon can do this, however, he must get God’s approval to make sure that no one who believes in God’s love suffers more than necessary, such are the protocols of the heavenly bureaucracy. Satan is on God’s payroll, doing all the dirty work God doesn’t care to do.
Millions upon millions upon billions of people are tortured and killed in this torture chamber with God’s approval. God’s sense of justice demands that God punish all of humanity for Adam and Eve’s sin of which they had no part and for choosing evil themselves, just as he created them to do. He couldn’t show his love if people didn’t suffer, so his plan from the beginning was to create humanity in such a way that they would certainly sin, torture humanity when they sinned according to his plan, and come to their rescue.
Seeing his plan was going well (what with all the suffering and dying going on), it was time for God to show his love, so he took on a mortal body. After being tortured for a day or two, he gave up and died. (Or even worse, he tortured and killed his own Son to make up for his own actions.) This made God feel better about the suffering of all the billions of people who he’s banished to his torture chamber.
If God let all those tortured souls live forever in paradise, it would probably make up for all his hellish sadism. Yet he still put a condition on humanity’s relief from suffering. They had no choice to come to this nightmare chamber in the first place. He never asked them their preference beforehand, yet they bear the final responsibility for getting themselves out. They must first believe—while still being tortured—that he loves them. Not only that, they must love him in return. Anyone who can’t muster the credulity necessary to believe that, anyone who doubts his love in the face of all his sadism, anyone who doesn’t thank him for the chance to suffer and die at his behest will go on suffering forever in an even worse torture chamber reserved for the skeptical and the ignorant.
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