What does it mean to “believe” in God? or in an afterlife?

Is it like agreeing with a statement? Where you have an idea that seems to be verified by logic or experience or an expert teacher?

Or is it more like an affective state, where a strong feeling overtakes your body? Where the presence of something is so integrated into your experience that no questioning is possible?

Today it seems to me to be neither of the above.

Today I dreamed:

In my role as rabbi, I am visiting an elder in the hospital. The unit is a wide room with many beds. I notice my father and an old friend of his lying in a nearby bed. The next day, I come back to the hospital to join my father for a special event in the auditorium. He is alert, sitting between two friends. One friend is wearing a diving mask and snorkel. My father glances at his friend and playfully rolls his eyes at me. I am ecstatically happy that my father has moved to Vancouver and that he is in the company of two close friends.

I woke from the dream into predawn darkness, too uplifted to fall back asleep.

It seems I had dreamed of heaven. Though my father has been dead for eleven years, I dreamed that he is happy, he is loved, and all is right with the world.

I’ve just one nagging doubt: I don’t believe in heaven. At least, not in the way that one agrees with a statement.

I do believe that heaven is a metaphor used by prophets and psalmists to describe the awesome power of God in nature — vast, beautiful, part of our world and yet beyond it. And I do believe affectively in this power when it overtakes my body and fills my experience. “Heaven” seems a good word for this power, because it evokes a sky so blue it hurts to look.

But I don’t believe that people’s bodies or souls go to a beautiful place called “heaven” after they die. I don’t believe in that statement.

In fact, I don’t often think about this kind of heaven at all. It isn’t part of the basic vocabulary that shapes my thinking. It isn’t an image that holds my personal longings and wonderings about death.

And yet, the dream came into my thinking, fulfilling my longing and soothing my wondering. Heaven – a place of love, comfort, and happiness so bright it hurts to feel – is just the right word for what I saw in this dream.

Of course I know the dream offers a reflection of my own self. My father has appeared to remind me that I am loved, so that I can be happy, and feel – even for one pre-dawn moment – that everything is right with the world.

For one moment, I believed in heaven in the affective way.

Now I know that I “believe in” heaven in a third way, a way that isn’t quite cognitive and isn’t quite affective.

Heaven, I now see, is a metaphor that shapes my thinking. It is an image that can hold my personal longings and wonderings.

I “believe in” heaven the way academic scholars of religion speak of believing in a “myth.” For them (us), a myth is neither true nor false; it’s just very, very basic. A myth is a story so foundational to a person’s thought that it shapes the very categories in which thought appears.

The myth of heaven certainly shaped my dream, and made it possible for me to represent and access the comfort I needed.

Thank you to prophet and psalmist, and to the theologians whose own teachings were shaped by the myths you taught them.

Image: your-nursing-guide.com