Heavenly Boredom

Today my girlfriend and I were watching an episode of The Good Place and she noticed me suddenly tense up at a seemingly innocuous scene. I won’t go into the details since the show is very easily spoiled, but since the entire series is about the afterlife, I think it’s reasonable to reveal that this episode was about a basic problem with heaven: wouldn’t it get boring after a while? I mean, with an infinite amount of time and a finite human imagination or attention span, it would have to get old eventually. The promise that there will be no pain, no fear, no uncertainty basically erases any reason to care about the world. It’s a problem that’s been bugging me since third grade, when I waited so long for summer vacation, then a week after it started I woke up with all the time in the world and nothing to do with it. It probably seems reductive to compare the infinite glory of God’s Almighty Kingdom to an elementary schooler getting bored of summer break, but I’ve never really been able to separate the two.

This complaint about heaven is historically rather new, actually. Last year, when I was visiting my sister in New York, we went to the Met museum, where we found a medieval painting of heaven and hell (pictured above). I said that hell looked a whole lot cooler than heaven, thinking that I was making a very original insight. I mean, yes, hell was mostly comprised of naked corpses being skewered by demons, while everyone in heaven had fully clothed and intact bodies. But at least hell had emotion and color, while heaven was just a couple dozen bearded men in robes, standing with perfect posture and blank expressions. My sister explained that she’d actually read a paper on the subject (which I’d name-drop here, if I remembered it) about how heaven was so much more appealing in the past because people back then valued order and stability so much more than we do now. After all, back then even the kings and queens couldn’t stop disease or miscarriages from claiming their children, while most of the population suffered daily toil and drudgery. A world with no work or pain seemed like an improvement, and they saw no reason to see past that. Meanwhile, us affluent people have running water, heat and cooling, light at any time of the day, and so much entertainment that our biggest problem is usually there being too much to keep up with. We’ve made what most people throughout history would call a heaven, and we still want something more.

In The Good Place, the characters decide that, just like life on earth is meaningful because it ends, an ideal heaven must end, that bliss has no meaning if it’s eternal. That’s why this episode got me so scared: they’d laid out so many of the same worries I’d had about heaven, then answered them by saying that the afterlife can’t really be a full afterlife, that even it needs death to be worthwhile. And, as I’ve said before on this blog, I’m terrified of any kind of permanent death. The idea that I won’t be able to escape it, that I can’t be happy without it looming over me, is enough to tighten every muscle in my body just upon hearing.

The Good Place misdiagnosis the problem with heaven, though. Actions on earth don’t have meaning because one day we’ll die forever. Whenever I try thinking that way it makes it seem as though nothing we do on earth is meaningful because it will all come to nothing in thousands of years. Actions have meaning because we don’t know if we’ll succeed or fail, if our lives and accomplishments will endure or not. Faith, or the lack thereof, is nothing but a hope or theory; no matter what we claim, I think deep down everyone is some shade of agnostic. Looking at it this way, eternal life and permanent death seem almost identical: an eternity of certainty.

All of this probably sounds very anti-Christian, and sometimes I question if that’s still a good descriptor of me, given my doubts. But one thing I love about the Episcopal church is how it embraces these contradictions and paradoxes and makes them part of our very creed. A key tenant is the mystery of faith: that God is ultimately unknowable, no matter how deep your faith. I can’t speak with certainty, but I think that after we die, we won’t understand or know everything. We won’t escape pain or worry. We won’t even know for sure that this lasts forever. But we’ll maintain the same faith that we had on earth, and hope to hell that it does.