Heaven is for Real and False Consolation

Is heaven for real? Of course it is. How do we know? Because Jesus Christ died, rose from the dead, and created a Church that has borne continuous witness to His Truth from that day to this. We need nothing more, at least as far as knowing that heaven is for real. If we think we need more, it isn't because there is a real need for more, but because we have not yet fully appreciated what God has already done for us.

This is one reason that the Church has always maintained a measured view with respect to visions or other private revelations. God, of course, is not constrained by the Church, and does what He will, so private revelations are a genuine possibility and, in fact, the Church has recognized a number of them throughout history. But it is not incumbent on any Catholic to believe in any private revelation, and there are some dangers associated with them, among which is the possibility of shifting (perhaps unconsciously) the basis of one's faith from the historical witness of the Church to a private revelation. Logically this makes no sense, since it is only on the authority of the Church that we should put stock in a putative private revelation in the first place, but emotionally this might happen since a private revelation - especially a contemporary one - can seem more immediate, fresh, and exciting than the ancient witness of the Church. And in that case we are on very dangerous ground, since while the historical witness of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, is both true and unchanging, a private witness not recognized by the Church may well contain a mixture of error and truth, and is liable to change with the vagaries of the individuals involved. This is indeed a house built on sand.

While we need to wait for the Church to pass judgment on an alleged private revelation before believing it, we need not wait for the Church to discover for ourselves sufficient reason to discount a private revelation. And it's not hard to find those reasons in the popular book, and now movie, Heaven is for Real. I read the book last year - I think - but didn't remark on it at the time. It's now received much more exposure because of the associated movie (which I haven't seen.)

Heaven is For Real is the story of Colton Burpo, the son of pastor Todd Burpo, and three years old when the critical events in the story occurred. What happened is that Colton became very sick, had an operation in which he nearly died, then later began making statements that implied he had journeyed to heaven while unconscious during the operation.

Colton's age is important. Three year old children have no clear understanding of the difference between truth and falsehood, fantasy and reality, and only a limited understanding of the moral implications of telling a lie. What they do have is a fine perception for detecting their parents emotions, and especially the extent to which they are pleasing their parents and gaining or losing their attention. What I think happened here is that young Colton, doing what three year olds do, which is saying whatever comes to mind, discovered that certain things he was saying drew an unusual, strong and positive reaction from his parents. Naturally this encouraged him to further explore this line of thinking, which was then reinforced by increasingly strong reactions from his parents. This is not a matter of Colton "lying." At that age, he doesn't understand what that meant with respect to relating events from his past - especially events that supposedly happened when he was unconscious - a realm where it is very difficult to separate fantasy, wishful thinking and simple dreaming from reality even for spiritual masters of profound wisdom and experience.

The dynamic is established right in the book's prologue. In the car, Colton's mother Sonja innocently asks him if he remembers the hospital in which he had his operation. Colton's answer is that, yes, he does remember, because "That's where the angels sang to me." Now this could mean a lot of things: It could mean he dreamed of angels singing, imagined angels singing to him, or he is simply saying something for no particular reason he understands, among other possibilities. The response of his parents is worth quoting:

Inside the Expedition, time froze. Sonja and I looked at each other, passing a silent message: Did he just say what I think he said? (Emphasis in original)  

Sonja leaned over and whispered, "Has he talked to you about angels before?"  

I shook my head. "You?"  

She shook her head. 

It's not exactly clear what Todd and Sonja think happened here. Colton has not talked about angels before, but there is always a first time, and there is no reason to think that he hasn't already overheard a lot about angels (his father is a pastor after all). What is clear is that, if Colton's parents think that by passing "silent messages" through looks and whispers Colton is not going to pick up what is going on (specifically, that something just happened that drew unusual attention from his parents), they are naïve. Paying attention to the emotions and reactions of his parents is virtually a full-time job for three year olds. And Colton's parents confirm the reaction by shortly following up with questions about the angels and what they sang to him. (In an odd note, Colton says that he asked the angels to sing We Will Rock You We Will Rock You but they demurred. It doesn't disturb his parents that Colton - three years old - is familiar enough with Queen rock songs to request them, but it should give us a clue that Colton may be more exposed than we might expect a three year old to be, especially as the Burpos belief in Colton's experience is largely based on what they think he hasn't seen.)

In light of what is revealed later, it is also interesting that Colton mentions angels singing as the significant event he associates with the hospital. Later, we learn that Colton, while on his heavenly journey, not only heard angels singing in heaven, but met Jesus, the Holy Spirit, his grandparents, a dead sister, John the Baptist, saw Satan, the gates of Heaven with gold and pearls, the Holy Spirit pouring grace into his father, and even the battle of Armageddon, among other things. Yet, here, it is none of those latter memories that spring to his mind when thinking of the hospital, but only the relatively banal memory of singing angels. We may be forgiven for suspecting that the real origin of the heavenly experience was in the car with Sonja's innocent question, rather than in Colton's operation.

The car story in the book's prologue is meant to whet our appetites for further revelations and keep us interested while we get the backstory of Colton's illness, operation and aftermath in chapters one through eleven. In chapter twelve we get back to revelations of Colton's experience in heaven. This time it is explicitly prompted by his father:

Sitting at my makeshift desk, I looked over at my son as he brought Spider-Man pouncing down on  some nasty-looking creature from Star Wars. "Hey, Colton," I said, "Remember when we were in the car and you talked about sitting on Jesus' lap?" 

Still on his knees, he looked up at me: "Yeah." 

"Well, did anything else happen?" 

He nodded, eyes bright. "Did you know that Jesus has a cousin? Jesus told me his cousin baptized him." 

"Yes, you're right," I said. "The Bible says Jesus' cousin's name is John." 

Todd takes it as given that the only explanation for this "revelation" is that Colton actually went to heaven and met Jesus and John the Baptist (who, we are told, is "nice.") The obvious explanation is that Colton is merely repeating things he has overheard that he thinks will please his father - especially since we are told, just before this incident occurs, that Colton is playing near Todd while he works on his sermon.

And, as is natural, as time goes on the revelations get more detailed, elaborate and sensational while Todd Burpo's critical faculties increasingly abandon him. Todd is blown away when Colton mentions that Jesus has "markers", his word for Christ's Wounds, because he somehow thinks it impossible that Colton would know anything about them since Protestant kids aren't around crucifixes much. For my part, it's hard to believe that a three year old as perceptive and attentive as Colton, in a very religious household headed by a pastor, wouldn't have had any exposure to the fact of Christ's wounds. The kid has never seen a picture of Christ on the Cross? In any case, in his description of the "markers" Colton leaves out the fifth wound - the spear wound in Christ's side - which might be explained by the fact that the wound would be less visible behind Christ's robes, but it is also just the wound one would expect not to be retained by a three year old when he is briefly exposed to a crucifix or picture of Christ on the cross. Todd is also amazed by Colton's description of Christ as wearing a white robe with a purple sash, when such a description pretty much describes the generic picture of Christ found in children's books.

In the next chapter, Sonja Burpo remarks with respect to Colton that "It's like he just pops out with new information all of a sudden."  It doesn't occur to her or Todd that this might be because it really is new information, in the sense that no one, including Colton, knew about it before. And this particular new information really is tough to swallow. According to Colton, everyone in heaven has wings; not just angels, but men as well (everyone but Jesus).  Furthermore, they all have halos. This isn't meant allegorically, but literally. Todd Burpo struggles mightily for scriptural support for this vision of physical halos, and the best he can come up with are references to Stephen's face "becoming bright as an angel's" before he was stoned to death, an angel's appearance "like lightning" after the Resurrection, and John's vision of an angel's face that "shone like the sun" in Revelation. Of course these aren't references to halos, and in any case halos and wings have their origin, and have always been understood, as physical signs of non-physical reality - in the case of wings, the transcendent nature of angels with respect to terrestrial reality; and in the case of halos, the sanctified nature of the individual's soul. Naturally a child will miss the allegorical nature of these symbols and take them literally, but an adult certainly shouldn't. And when a child explains that he saw in heaven the physical manifestations of medieval artistic motifs, we don't really need to search our memories to discover if we ever mentioned wings and halos to him, as the Burpos do.

Things become more serious in the succeeding chapters when Colton moves on from wings and halos to encounters with his dead relatives. He meets his grandfather ("Pop") and, then, a sister who died in the womb. This may be the most affecting section in the book, and we cannot but feel sympathy for the Burpos in their pain and joy in their consolation when Colton tells them that their little girl is in heaven. The Burpos say they never told Colton about the miscarriage, but they did tell Colton's older sister Cassie; it is surely not outside the bounds of probability that either they or (more likely) Cassie let something slip at some point to make Colton aware of a missing sibling. In any event, there are several interesting things about Colton's sister in heaven. The first is that she doesn't have a name, which comes up when Sonja asks about it:

Sonja's eyes lit up and she asked: "What was her name? What was the little girl's name?" 

Colton seemed to forget about all the yucky girl hugs for a moment. "She doesn't have a name. You guys didn't name her."   

How did he know that? (Emphasis in original)

Well, he knew it because children are typically named when they are born. More revealing is the fact that Colton, clearly a perceptive and intelligent young boy, is generating a conclusion rather than reporting a fact. He doesn't know the girl's name. This might be because Colton never asked her name and she never volunteered it, even if she actually had one. (Colton doesn't say that she told him she doesn't have a name). Instead, the girl-with-no-name is taken by everyone as just another fact of revelation, when we are given its deductive origin. And it would be strange if the girl really did have no name. Colton's heaven is beyond our ordinary understanding of time (this is how Colton's elaborate visions of Armageddon, meeting relatives, watching the Holy Spirit beam grace into his father, etc., are fit into the three of minutes of Earth time Colton says he was in heaven.) So, in this realm beyond time, Colton's sister is doomed to be ever-nameless? Or is she waiting for her parents to join her in heaven and name her? Then heaven isn't really beyond time, is it? In any case, Christ has told us familial relationships in the beyond aren't quite what they are on Earth (Matthew 22:30), and there are precedents for God naming children - Jesus Himself, for one. It's hard to believe that God, the angels, and Pop would be content with "Hey you" when addressing Colton's lost sister.

The second interesting thing about Colton's sister is her age. We later learn from Colton that no one in heaven wears glasses and no one is old (Pop exists in heaven as a man in his prime). Yet Colton's sister's heavenly existence is not as a mature young woman, but a young girl in the age range of Colton and his sister Cassie. The question then arises: Is Colton's sister physically growing in heaven? If she is, does she reach a particular age and then stop maturing? Or does she stay a young girl, as both Colton and Cassie grow to adulthood here on Earth? Colton, naturally, imagines his sister as something similar to himself and Cassie, and so imagines her in heaven as a child, even though it doesn't really make any sense. Indeed, the whole notion of physically meeting people in heaven is suspect. Angels do not have bodies; we men are awaiting the end of history and the general Resurrection when our souls will be reunited with our glorified bodies here on Earth (which will also have been redeemed.) Heaven, for us, is a state of peace and joy in the presence of God, but we exist in it as disembodied souls awaiting the end of time. The only individuals with physical bodies in heaven are Jesus and, perhaps, Mary (if you are Catholic). Yet Colton makes no distinction between Christ and everyone else in heaven insofar as physical being is concerned; everyone is pretty much the same, wearing white robes with different colored sashes and wings of various sizes. (An aside: The uniformity of clothing in Colton's heaven makes one think of futuristic sci-fi movies like Logan's Run or Star Wars. Why do we tend to imagine advanced states as always involving a monotonous uniformity of appearance? The story would be more believable if Colton related seeing things of unimaginable beauty and variety - even if as a child he was at a loss to describe them - rather than unimaginable banality. Dante didn't miss this point. And another aside: Colton describes many animals in heaven, but animals do not have immortal souls and they are not in heaven. They may be present on the redeemed Earth, but we will have to wait for them till then.)

Colton's initial announcement, recounted in the book's prologue, about angels singing to him in the hospital, gave some clue about the psychological dynamics at work in this story. So too with the circumstances concerning Colton's revelation about his sister. Colton is attempting to get his mother's attention, and doesn't get it until he comes out with the announcement that his mother lost a child in the womb. And just like in the car, time stops for the Burpos:

At that moment, time stopped in the Burpo household. and Sonja's eyes grew wide. Just a few seconds before, Colton had been trying unsuccessfully to get his mom to listen to him. Now, even from the kitchen table, I could see that he had her undivided attention. 

"Who told you I had a baby die in my tummy?" Sonja said, her tone serious.

Certainly a good way to get your Mom's attention in the Burpo household is to announce a new bit of heaven-inspired information. And, of course, to have the same impact, the revelations must get increasingly sensational. Announcing that angels sang to you wouldn't grab Mom's attention so much if you already told her you met your grandfather and sister in heaven. And, so, by the end of the book, we get into full-fledged accounts of the Battle of Armageddon, complete with swords and bows and arrows. If this sounds familiar, you may have read C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or seen the movie. And so has Colton. In fact, it is right after seeing the movie that Colton comes out with his Narnia-like account of Armageddon. By this point, the Burpos seem to have abandoned whatever critical distance they had and simply accept Colton as an all-purpose oracle concerning things heavenly.

Isn't this all harmless? Not really. Take Colton's grandfather Pop. Is he in heaven? Maybe, but maybe not. The Church encourages us to pray for the dead because our prayers may benefit the souls in purgatory. But if Pop is in heaven, he is in no need of our prayers; in fact, he may be praying for us. Were we to think conspiratorially, we might consider that, while the Devil cannot steal the souls in purgatory away from God, he can make their time there longer than it might be by somehow tempting those on Earth not to pray for them. And a good way to do this is to convince men that the souls of the dead don't need our prayers.

And what will happen when Colton finally grows up and develops some critical thinking abilities of his own? In the best case, he would see his childhood revelations for what they are and confess their mundane origin. To use an old word, this would cause "scandal" among those who used his story as part of the foundation for their faith. Maybe some will fall away. Again, thinking conspiratorially, the Devil cannot prevail against the Church, but he can tempt us to give our faith a false foundation in something other than the witness of the Church. In the worst case, Colton would go "all-in" on his story - perhaps because of the humiliation that would come from admitting it wasn't really what he thought it was, perhaps because he doesn't want to embarrass his parents, or perhaps because he knows it would cause scandal - and continue to defend it even though he now knows better. In this case the Devil would have a victory that keeps on giving.

We all struggle with uncertainty in this life - St. Paul tells us we see through a glass darkly - and yearn for the certainty of seeing Christ face to face. But this is the condition of our existence, in which we must work out our salvation in fear and trembling (Kierkegaard). We are all tempted to grasp at certainties that are not ours to have - not unless God has willed it, which in the case of private revelations, He rarely does. We need to remember that God has already given us everything we need in the Birth, Death and Resurrection of His Son and the historical witness to that in the Church. And we need to remember that the primary spiritual weapon of our adversaries is temptation, and among the most dangerous of those is the temptation to replace the true foundation of our faith with a false one; to exchange the house built on rock with one built on sand.

Cana and Being a Spiritual Superhero

That's Tintoretto's Wedding at Cana that's now the banner of my blog. The miracle at Cana is perhaps my favorite that Christ performed. It's got a self-verifying quality to it that some of the other miracles lack. That Christ would miraculously cure the sick is something we might expect when God visits Earth; it's the kind of serious thing we imagine God would do, and therefore we can imagine someone imagining he did it. But who would imagine that the first miracle God would perform would be... to refill pots of wine so that a party could continue? And who would further imagine that God would perform this miracle because his mother asked him to? The miracle has a frivolous quality to it that is everlastingly shocking, as though the miracle really belongs in the Gospel According to John Blutarsky.

We find it difficult to accept one of the obvious implications of Cana: Christ expects us to have a good time. Maybe not with Animal House level excess, but the man who thinks he's too busy being holy to have an occasional beer with the lads is probably missing something important concerning what Christ is about (this post is inspired by a recent exchange I had in the comment box at the Maverick Philosopher blog on this subject. As usual, I was an utter failure at getting anyone to see my point.) Indeed, we tend to think that being seriously religious must involve being seriously miserable. So serious, in fact, that the necessary misery involved is reason enough to dismiss the claims of Christ altogether. Perhaps Christ performed the miracle at Cana, and spent so much time at parties, just to remove the excuse of those who avoid religion with the claim that they are not cut out to be spiritual superheroes.

But whereunto shall I esteem this generation to be like? It is like to children sitting in the market place. Who crying to their companions say: We have piped to you, and you have not danced: we have lamented, and you have not mourned.  For John came neither eating nor drinking; and they say: He has a devil. The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say: Behold a man that is a glutton and a wine drinker, a friend of publicans and sinners. And wisdom is justified by her children. Matt 11:16-19.

Like most other reasons for dismissing Christ, the refusal to entertain the idea that Christ doesn't expect, in fact doesn't even want, us to try to become spiritual superheroes comes down to the sin of pride. The implication is that Christ is satisfied with spiritual mediocrities. Who wants to be mediocre? But there it is. Peter, James and John were not spiritual superheroes - especially Peter, yet he was chosen to be the primum inter pares, better to show forth the glory of God, who is content to work with mediocrities.  Nor are the saints spiritual superheroes; they are just mediocre enough to give up doing it themselves and allow God to takeover.

Religion and the test of Life

I have been arguing that, if we desire miracles, we need look no further than the eternal miracles that are the Jews and the Church. Besides the fact that these miracles have the peculiar feature that they are not merely historical (and therefore at most probable) but are ever-present and therefore as susceptible to certainty as anything, they have another remarkable feature. God himself has defined the parameters of fulfillment for these miracles. These are not miracles that come as complete surprises, but are predicted by Him in the form of a promise. Consider the following passage from Deuteronomy, where Moses speaks in the Name of the Lord to the Hebrews as they are about to enter the land of Israel:

See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statues and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you this day, that you shall perish... (Deut. 30: 15-18)

Skeptics like to make a big point concerning the apparent irrationality of all the minutiae of Old Testament Law. What's with all the petty details about oxen and sheep, the slaughtering of animals, circumcision and the rest of it? How is that conducive to human flourishing? This misses the point. If you told me that if I and my family all got mohawks and dyed our hair red, and did that for generation unto generation, then God would bless my family with enduring life till the end of history, I would be skeptical. But if you showed me an ancient book where God commanded a people to do that very thing, and that people had been getting red mohawks for twenty-five hundred years and remained intact as a culture and a people, outlasting by far any other people, then I would be tempted to head for the barber myself. So what if it doesn't make sense to me? There are stranger things in the world than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

God does not offer the Law to the Hebrews as something reasonable. He does not even offer it to them as something true. God is "realistic" in the most basic sense, for he offers the Covenant in terms of the most basic realities, life and death. And it makes it clear to us, today, the terms in which it is appropriate to judge the Old Testament: Did it and does it give life? Is it alive today?

Jesus Christ casts the New Covenant in similar terms in the New Testament (John 3:16). Jesus does proclaim himself to be the Truth, but his constant refrain is that his Gospel is a gospel of life. And so we may judge the New Covenant in the same terms as the Old. Did it and does it give life? Is it alive today? Yes, in the Body of Christ in the Roman Catholic Church.

Miracles and history

Brian Holtz makes this point:

Why such ambiguous and picayune miracles? Why not raise a new mountain in the desert, or install a new star in the heavens?

One of the typical assumptions of atheism is that the nature of "miracle" is clear and easily stated, and that it is easy to propose indubitable miracles. I wonder if getting a grip on miracles is so easy.

Let's consider Holtz's request (demand?) that God raise a new mountain in the desert. Suppose God were to perform such a feat. As soon as the mountain is raised, it becomes just another feature of the landscape and its origin a matter of history. That is, how the mountain got there is a matter of the reconstruction of the past from present facts. A point that Kierkegaard hammers home is that the category of history is probability. There is no reconstruction of the past that is absolutely certain, only reconstructions that are more or less probable. Therefore as soon as a miracle becomes history - i.e. as soon as it is over - Humean arguments against its occurrence immediately become available. It is always possible to ask: Is it more likely that an honest-to-God miracle occurred, or that some natural explanation is behind it? Maybe the raising of the mountain was a freak natural occurrence. Maybe the mountain was there all the time and we simply couldn't see it because of some bizarre natural circumstance. The longer time goes on, and the more the miracle recedes into the past, the easier it becomes to argue that the mountain was really there all the time, and its absence a mere concoction of Christian apologists.

The Old Testament records the story of the voice of God speaking to Moses from a bush that burned yet was not consumed. An impressive physical miracle. Yet who is to say what really happened once the burning ceased? Presumably, once the burning ceased, the bush looked like any other bush untouched by flames. At that point, it is easy to suppose that Moses imagined the whole thing. And once Holtz's mountain is raised it will look like any other mountain. Who is to say how it originally got there? And even if we admit that its origin was sudden and spectacular, how can we claim with certainty that God was the cause? Maybe intelligent aliens with far superior technology are playing tricks on us. Not probable, for sure, but less probable than the occurrence of an authentic miracle?

The only way for a miracle to overcome the necessarily uncertain and probabilistic nature of history is for it be, in some manner, an eternal miracle; a miracle that does merely happen at a brief moment in time but that happens continually across time; a miracle that is ever-present. What would such a miracle look like?

One such miracle would be the ongoing life of something that should, by all reasonable expectation, have already died many times. I have pointed to the Jews, an ancient Middle Eastern tribe that still worships the same God it did three thousand years ago, as one such miracle. The Roman Catholic Church is another living miracle, a Roman Empire-era institution that continues to survive and proclaim the same message it did two thousand years ago. The Church is sometimes criticized for not being "relevant", but it has proven itself relevant in a far deeper sense than the many secular institutions that have come and gone in its long history. It is not merely relevant at some point in time, according to passing taste, but in a way that transcends time. This is not just apologist rhetoric but a matter of historical fact.

The miracles of the Jews and the Church are easy to overlook because they are mundane. We see Jews and Catholics every day; we assume that what we see every day has an every day explanation. We therefore filter out the mundane in our perception of miracles. But our thirst for the bizarre reflects our prejudices concerning the nature of miracles, not a reasonable theory about what they must look like. I suppose if we saw every day people walking around wearing ancient Egyptian headdress, worshiping Isis, and building pyramids and sphinxes, we would not find it remarkable. We might not pause to wonder how amazing it is that a three thousand year old civilization and its cult have persisted to this day. But someone who was not jaded by Egyptians would be startled by them; he would demand an answer to the question of just what these people are still doing here... What is the secret to their survival?