Animals In Eternity

Fr. Paul with Rummy A few days ago various news sources reported that Pope Francis continues to show he's anything but traditional. During a recent public appearance, Francis comforted a boy whose dog had died, noting, "One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God's creatures." Apparently, some “theologian” said that the pope’s comment was just “conversational.” Well, so were nearly all of the words attributed to Jesus, including his merciful words on the cross to the man crucified next to him (according to Luke’s gospel):  “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  Only use of “Paradise” in entire bible. The word was picked up by Jews in Persia, and comes from two Farsi words meaning “enclosed garden,” I have read.  Note that the Pope uses the symbol as well. Anyway, was Jesus just “being conversational” to the dying man?  Or was he speaking truly? Note that Pope Francis did not say that anyone “goes to heaven.” That is a fairly late phrase, and not technical, but picturesque, as “heaven” (ouranos, in the Greek of the New Testament) means “sky.” The image is of “going up,” ascending, not meant to be literally in space, in the sky, although I have noticed that some fundamentalists take it that way.  All symbols can be misleading, and “heaven” is one of them. (Imagine a small child crawling up on a roof to find God!) Anyway, the Pope’s words as quoted are more precise than “going to heaven.”  He said, supposedly:  “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ.”  Those words to me are more precise, more profound, then “in heaven.”  But are they true? Brief note for now: I do not speculate on “afterlife,” on “resurrection of the body” (literalistic, quite nonsensical to me), or even “immortality of the soul,” borrowed from the Greek philosophers (from Pythagoras to Plato and Aristotle). I am content with a far more stark fare.  All die, but God lives.  And that which we call “God” is the Mind which conceived all of creation, and “brought it forth” out of sheer creative freedom and love. That Mind is what is “eternally,” or non-temporally. The rest passes.  But to be in the Mind of God, in the eternal mind of the creator, is more than enough. When some clever fellows tried to trap Jesus into talking about “afterlife,” in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke), he referred his interlocutors back to “the passage about the bush,” and said that when God spoke to Moses, God called himself “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”  And then Jesus comments:  “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all are alive to him.” That is it, and that, once again, suffices for me. To be alive to Life is to be alive.  I look for no “separate existence.”  To see that Abraham, for one, is alive, because God identifies himself with Abraham, is an amazingly profound scriptural interpretation. For how many centuries did Jews read the story of the burning bush and not see in the passage any awareness that Abraham is alive now! Application. I think of my parents, and Leah, Rummy, Zoe, Binti, Misha, and so many others, as having died. Yes, I remind myself, Zoe died.  But I do not think of her as “dead.”  What would it mean to be “dead”?  Non-existent in any form? I think of Zoe as alive to the One that matters. And if Zoe is alive to the Creator, then I think of her as alive to me as well. In God all live, all “find their home,” in biblical symbols. And I love the Pope’s inclusivity: “Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.” The Pope sees that, because he is himself open to all of God’s creatures. We see according to what we are. I may be putting in a verbose and intellectualistic form what is a very old Catholic teaching: the communion of saints. “To God, all are alive.”  The mainline Christian tradition has no trouble talking to those who died. We just do it. Those who died are not treated as if “dead and gone,” but deceased and now living only in God. We pray through saints or deceased loved ones, not to them as the end-point. But in God, all creatures can address each other. Why should death hinder communication of mind and mind, heart with heart? And if I am wrong? What if no one is alive to God, because there is no God? What if Nietzsche was right? Suppose there is absolutely nothing ultimately real, no first cause, no Beginning, no End, no Absolute Beauty, no Truth, no eternal Love, no “God”? Then what? No God, no being. No being, no beings. No beings?   Then why and how are we communicating?  If there is no cause of all that exists, then nothing exists. If nothing exists, nor do we now. But…. something is happening.  My goodness, we do exist!  So there is a cause, there is reality.  The Cause of all causes, the being of beings, the Beauty in all that is beautiful, the goodness in all that is good, is all what is symbolized by the common word, “God.” The rest is indeed passing. As for Pope Francis, I appreciate his deed for mercy for the young boy, and I think that he was speaking far more truly, and not telling a “noble lie.”  Francis knows well: Love never ends. He is speaking out of his experience of divine Presence here and now.