Several years ago, I was talking with someone who made an odd confession. He said he wasn’t sure that he was looking forward to Heaven. Since I don’t hear that often from fellow Christians, I asked why. He said he wondered about the usual picture of the afterlife — with the saints gathered around singing eternal hallelujahs. “It sounds . . .” He paused, not wanting to say the word out loud. Then he did. “It sounds . . . boring.”
I admitted that the thought had crossed my mind, too, and we decided that we must be looking at Heaven through mortal eyes, from the perspective of human bodies that get tired, human imaginations that crave variety, and human attention spans that wander during the fourteenth loop of “Light the Fire.” Surely, we decided, if the promise in Scripture is true that there will be no sorrow or pain in eternity, then it could not possibly be dull. The emotion of boredom may not even exist.
But the conversation revealed that as a species, we can be awfully conflicted about immortality. On the one hand, we are terrified of death and fantasize about cheating it. On the other hand, we are afraid of being stuck — like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day” — in a never-ending cycle of sameness.
Even in silly versions of the idea, we wonder. When Willy Wonka invents an “Everlasting Gobstopper” in Roald Dahl’s classic book, it sounds both brilliant and foolish. It’s a sucker that never gets smaller, but has the inventor really thought through that business model? Who will buy more than one?
In a far more serious way, poets have wrestled with the issue. When Alfred Tennyson lost his best college friend to a stroke at 22, the English poet struggled with the tragedy for years. He worked through his grief and pain by writing, and early on he produced two masterpieces about immortality. In “Ulysses” the speaker is the epic hero of Homer’s “Odyssey,” returning home after twenty years of adventures.
“How dull it is to pause,” the king complains, lamenting how his return feels like a forced retirement and wishing that he could keep sailing forever. “Life piled on life would be all too little,” he admits.
No matter how many lifetimes he had, they would never be enough to satisfy his curiosity. And, of course, as Ulysses grieves his mortality, so also does Tennyson wish his friend could have lived on and on.
But at the same time, the poet remembers another mythic character. Tithonus is a human who falls in love with Aurora, the goddess of the dawn. As much as it does for his street cred to date an immortal, Tithonus knows that this relationship is doomed. So, he gets Aurora to ask Zeus to let him live forever. The good news is that Zeus agrees, and suddenly, Tithonus cannot die.
The bad news is that Aurora forgets to ask for eternal youth for her boyfriend, and suddenly Tithonus cannot die. He gets older and older and more decrepit, trapped in a state of permanent decay. As he begs for release from this torment, Tennyson is imagining a situation where living forever would be a curse.
Of course, writing about Ulysses and Tithonus does not resolve the poet’s grief, nor does it give answers to the haunting questions of “why?” But the process does help Tennyson accept the fact that in limiting the lifespan of human beings, God has granted us a precious gift.
I confess that I have little idea of what Heaven will be like. But usually, when someone makes that confession, he is about to tell you exactly what Heaven will be like. So, with all the humility I can muster, I will venture one speculation: that eternity — in a resurrected body in the presence of God — will not be boring. Eternity anywhere else, and in any other form, would be rough.
In her classic novel “Tuck Everlasting,” Natalie Babbitt imagines a family that has discovered a fountain of youth and has lived for a century without aging. They survive accidents that should be fatal and remain young and vibrant always. Yet to hide the source of their power, they must stay on the move, lest people notice that they go decades without needing skin products. But when a young woman named Winnie stumbles into the woods and meets the handsome young Jesse Tuck, he reveals his secret. Now she must choose between immortality with him in a static world, or mortality without him in a world of change, “never the same two minutes together.” To find out what she decides, you’ll have to come see the Homecoming musical. It’s a beautiful story that will stay with you forever.
