Eternal

Do you believe in an after-life?

In Rob Bell’s book, Everything is Spiritual, he talks about the miracle of conception, and then he paints a picture of coming through the birth canal as a newborn, not knowing what is happening to you. Leaving the world you have known for roughly nine months, and having no idea if you will emerge into another world, or simply die. Rob suspects (or at least he seemed to when he wrote the book) that when we die, we exit this world, unsure of where we are going, perhaps afraid that we will cease to exist. But it is just as plausible that there is life after death, as it is plausible that there is life after the womb.

I have sometimes felt as though I am in communication with my deceased mother. I would dare to posit she understands me better on the other side than she did while she was here. She loves me more and I sense her pride or, at least, her positive acceptance of my life choices.

I have been attending a spiritual group recently where group members talk about “past lives” as commonly accepted experience. I have wondered about this too. In fact, an atheist once challenged my belief in eternity / after life / heaven, by asking if I thought I existed before I was conceived (something along those lines), and I admitted that I already felt as though I had always existed… At my spiritual group last week they asked us to share a description of ourselves that begins with the same letter as the first letter of our first names, and I said “eternal.”

Do you believe that our essence is eternal?

As we ponder eternity, I want to share this meditation with you from the book of Ecclesiastes as translated in the Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers ©2007