Light On Dark Water

What We Shall Be

Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of
unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean
lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.
– Isaiah 6:5

Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet
appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear,
we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. –I
John 3:2

Today’s Gospel always makes me think of the
belief—manifested, if memory serves, in more than one
Biblical passage like the one from Isaiah quoted above—that
to see God is death. Although the details are never specified,
the older passages suggest that the ordinary human frame would be
destroyed by whatever unimaginable forces would constitute the
direct experience of God. The passage from St. John seems to be
the other side of this coin, implying that one must in some way
(also unspecified) become like God in order to survive his
presence, and that this change is in store for the redeemed. (It
also suggests, interestingly, if the English grammar is
reflective of the original intent, that it works the other
way—to see Him is also a cause of the change.)

Much has of course been written about the nature of that
vision, and its position as the summit of all imaginable
happiness. But I sometimes wonder, thinking of the accounts of
the risen Jesus: what else might this change allow us to do?

One of the taunts of the materialist to the believer is that
the universe is so vast, so inhospitable and indifferent to human
life, that the latter cannot really mean very much. If the
numbers involved in counting the objects in the universe and
measuring the distances between them are so great that we can
only express them as mathematical concepts so far out of scale
with anything we are capable of experiencing that we can’t
really claim to grasp them, how is it possible that our existence
is anything other than an insignificant by-product of the forces
that have produced those numbers and distances?

That’s hardly a syllogism, of course—as many have
pointed out, it’s a mere subjective impression, and not a
very convincing line of attack for someone wanting to prove that
others are operating on subjective impressions. The numbers and
proportions prove nothing, they only amaze. And the imputation of
purposelessness is an unsupported materialistic preconception
that has nothing to do with science. We assume that because we do
not see what purpose distant galaxies have, they must have none.
And we assume that because we are very much smaller than, and
very distant from, them, we must be insignificant to them, and
they to us. So might a cell in the far reaches of my little left
toe assume that nothing as far away as the heart could possibly
have anything to do with it.

It’s odd that we inhabitants of technological
civilization should make this sort of assumption, since we know
there is more to the world—our immediate world—than
meets the eye: electromagnetic radiation, for instance, of which
our ancestors of even two hundred years ago knew nothing, and of
which we make very ingenious use. Isn’t it likely that
there is also more to the cosmos? When we look up into the night
sky we see tiny lights which we are assured are terribly vast and
distant balls of something which is like fire but far, very far,
more intense, and which is produced by an altogether different
physical process. There is no reason whatsoever to think that
this is the last word on stars. In fact, there is very good
reason, based simply on extrapolation from past progress in
knowledge, to assume that there is a great deal more to learn,
and I don’t mean simply the filling in of details in the
picture we have.

Who knows what the phenomena available to our senses really
are? One supposes that the resurrection of the body, as
mysterious as it is, means that we will have some relationship to
the physical world. What will the stars and planets look like to
the resurrected person? What will they be? Is it possible
we could live among them? Having deduced the conditions on or in
them, we feel certain that they have no inhabitants anything like
us, but could they have as inhabitants, or somehow be material
manifestations of, living entities whose nature we don’t
even have the means to conceive?

Before you laugh too much at that, think of what Alexander the
Great might say if someone traveled back in time and showed him a
radio. No matter how much he and his sages studied it, they would
never be able to guess what it was for, and if you told them,
they’d either call you a liar or think you were describing
magic—which might make them a bit more open-minded than the
average modern, who believes he knows what is and isn’t
possible.

Over the years I’ve heard a lot of people complain that
they don’t understand the ending of the movie 2001: A
Space Odyssey. The astronaut who is the only human character
in the latter part of the story is seen, in a series of
vignettes, to go through the process of aging, and in the end to
be on what appears to be his death bed. And then a human embryo
is seen floating in space above the earth: The End. Maybe
it’s because I had already encountered the basic idea in
one of Arthur C. Clarke’s earlier novels, but I thought
what had happened was obvious: the hero had been taken away to a
world ruled by super-beings of some kind who had conveyed him
into a new mode of existence and sent him back to earth for some
mysterious purpose, probably having to do with the enlightenment
of his fellow humans.

Clarke was not a Christian (I think he was a sort of atheist
with Buddhist trappings), and he was only daydreaming, as
science-fiction writers often do, about a god-like race of aliens
who would rescue us from our earthly misery. But perhaps he was
closer to the truth than he suspected. Perhaps “Mother
Earth” is more than just a figure of speech. Perhaps the
moist, warm atmosphere of our planet is a sort of amnion in which
we are only passing through the first stage of our growth, and
death will be the doorway to a mode of life in which we are hardy
enough to live outside it, much as a baby, when its time comes,
is ready to live outside the womb.

This is only a flight of fancy; I’m not proposing
anything for belief. I’m only trying to find ways of saying
that we should take seriously all those Biblical passages that
tell us we have, and for the time being are capable of having,
only a faint hint of how very much more than we have imagined may
be true. It doth not yet appear what we shall be.