Heaven and Hell

A few weeks ago I had a very vivid dream that I just can't forget. In my dream I died and went to heaven.

When I entered heaven, I was truly puzzled. I looked around and all I saw was Earth but it was not the same Earth that I had just left, it was a pristine, unpolluted, breathtaking, awe-inspiring Earth! There were beautiful mountains, white sandy beaches, amazing foliage and most surprisingly, really beautiful houses and buildings. Surrounding me were many of the people I knew from my life and, of course, all the people I dearly loved like close friends and family...and oddly enough there was a disproportionate amount of children! Unlike the teachings of the Church, these people were not sitting on clouds playing violins, they were actually doing normal, "human" work like tending the gardens, building structures, taking care of animals, etc. It was Earth in its un-ravished, unpolluted state being cared for and maintained by people who were happy, content and completely at peace. The best way to describe how we all felt in this "heaven" is to have you to close your eyes and imagine the times in your life when you were the most at awe....whether it was watching a sunset, or listening to beautiful music or looking into your babies eyes...that is just a glimpse of the fullness, wonder and love that filled me when I arrived.

I turned to God, who was just "one of us" in appearance and started asking a million questions but he (or she, can't remember) just sat me down and explained.

"You see, what you see in front of you is Reality. Before you 'died' you were in a pre-reality state and when you 'died' you left that temporary state and started living. Everything you knew before, that you thought was reality, was actually just temporary place where your true character was being discovered. As you lived in that place you made lots of choices and while you thought you were making choices for that moment, what you were actually doing was deciding which reality you wanted once you left your temporary life. All of what you knew as 'life' was actually just a testing ground to see if you really wanted to come here or go to the other world." (By the way, I didn't see the other world, but I assume it was just Earth devoid of all the goodness.)

It suddenly became crystal clear to me. Everything I thought I knew before about life and the "hereafter" was exactly opposite. I didn't live and then die, I pre-lived and then lived! My "death" was just a transition from pre-reality to reality. It dawned on me that the Catholic Church had it wrong when they said that when you die, you go to Purgatory, i.e. a holding place where your fate is decided, what I knew as "life" was actually a Purgatory of sorts where I made choices that determined where I truly would live.

Now, to be clear, this was just a dream but honestly, it was the first time in my life that heaven made any sense to me. I completely understood how the choices we make now affect where we go when we transition over to our new lives. It also gave me such a different view of death as being not the end of anything but the beginning of everything!

Finally, in my dream I understood that when a child dies for whatever reason, it's actually going to a beautiful, safe, caring place where it will never experience pain, hunger, sorrow... it's just doing it sooner than those of us who live longer. And since children are born pure of heart, when they "died" they automatically went to this beautiful "heaven" to continue their lives. That is why there were more children than adults.

When I awoke from my dream, I felt a weird mixture of awe and sadness. Awe at the dream and sadness at the fact that it was just a dream. I'm not even the slightest bit arrogant enough to think that I truly did get a glimpse into the "hereafter" but with all my heart I wish my dream was true. When you boil down many of the religions of the world, at their core they encourage caring, love, understanding, respect, truth, benevolence and tell us to stay away from pride, anger, killing, cheating, etc. In the context of my dream, religions are simply saying "choose wisely now and you will choose your life." I wish religion was this simple...

I wish...

Our Handicaps

A couple weeks ago I went to the grocery store and at the checkout a mentally and physically handicapped (challenged) young man who asked me if I needed help getting my groceries to the car. I wasn't really paying attention, didn't understand him and asked him to repeat himself. Halfway through him repeating the request it dawned on me that he was handicapped and the oddest thing happened...I got really nervous. I sputtered out something like "no thanks" grabbed my stuff and headed out to the car. Since then I can't stop thinking about why I got nervous? I've presented or talked to large audiences, to very senior levels of management, to presidents of companies, even to a hot Swedish girl at my work (okay, I was really nervous the first time I approached Sofia so that doesn't count). Why in the hell would I get nervous talking to a mentally and physically handicapped teenager? I never have before.

This question has hounded me for a couple weeks and here are a couple theorems:

1. Perhaps I was just caught off guard. I am, after all, fairly absent-minded and just wasn't prepared for that exchange. Of course, that's too simple an explanation.

2. Maybe it's like my issue with racism. When I moved to the US from Columbia, I honest-to-goodness did not know that people judged each other based on skin color. Call in naive but that's what happens when you grow up in the middle of the jungle. I didn't know about racism, didn't have the term "racism" in my vocabulary and certainly didn't practice racism. Oddly enough over the next few years, I learned racism from both whites and blacks (the "in" term during those years). The more I learned, the more I was puzzled because my young mind could not comprehend how someones skin color could in any way have anything to do with anything. I kept saying to myself "skin color is only a thin covering on your body, so what's that got to do with what is inside the person?" Unfortunately, the more I learned the more difficult it became for me to feel free around "black" people. I found myself censoring everything that I said to a black person to make sure it didn't have racial overtones and the more I did that the more awkward I became and which led people to believe that I was racist. (Even in this paragraph, I felt bad saying "black" because that is not the right PC terminology.) So sad because in my heart, I love or hate all people equally regardless of race, education, sex, height, etc. People are people...black people are people, white people are people, yellow people are people. "People" is the common denominator. However, I am prejudiced against mean, hateful, arrogant, hurtful, demeaning, dishonest and pompous people...all internal, not external traits.

So, how this relates to the handicapped (challenged) boy is that I might have been rattled because society has put so much emphasis on not seeing handicapped (challenged) people as being different that I over correct my reaction to make sure I was not violating social norms.

The truth is that while this might be part of the reason I got nervous, I still didn't feel like it was the whole reason.

A couple night ago, something happened that made me fully understand my reaction.

Every night I go by Oliver and Siena's beds and I check on them to make sure they have covers or are tucked in or are breathing (yes, I am paranoid) and while by their bedsides, I say a little prayer of thanks for the amazing gifts that we have been given. Well, the other night, I was laying in bed after my little ritual thinking about how fortunate I am with the amazing people in my life...Sofia, Siena and Oliver...when the thought crossed my mind "would you still love them as much if they were disfigured, or mentally challenged or not as smart as they are?" I thought about it for a long time and came to the conclusion that yes, I would love them as much. The reason is because when I think of Sofia or Siena or Oliver, I actually don't think about what they look like on the outside or of all the individual little things that make them amazing but somehow I'm able to look inside and what I see is pure goodness and beauty and that makes me fall in love with them over and over again.

So I'm laying there basking in these good feelings and the thought crossed my mind "do you see yourself the same way?" After much deliberation, I realized that I just cannot look past all my defects, character flaws, physical flaws, painful memories, mistakes made, etc. to see the goodness and beauty that resides inside. In my heart, I know there is lots of goodness inside but my mind puts up such a stink about my handicaps that it completely overrides my heart. I realized that every time I've tried to convince someone that I was a good at my job or in my abilities or in my character, it's only been myself trying to convince myself that in spite of all my handicaps, I am a good person inside. (Of course, this is completely linked to the hundreds of hours of preaching that I was exposed to growing up where I was told that we are all sinful, hideous creatures that can only be redeemed by grace, but that is for another blog entry altogether.)

Finally, I realized that I got nervous around the young man at the checkout is because I saw in the flesh a representation of the way I view myself inside. He reminded me of all the ways that I am handicapped inside and it rattled me. I'll bet that inside that person in front of me was a pure, beautiful, amazing being but what I actually saw, in that split second, was a personification of the way that I often view myself.

So, what's my point? I am learning to get comfortable with the beauty and goodness that resides inside knowing that it's greater than all my handicaps, mistakes, painful memories, etc. And I think if we all take the time to do the same, we will find ourselves so much more at peace with ourselves that we just might start taking the time to see each other for who we are on the inside, not for all the things we are or are not on the outside. We focus on the expression "love your neighbor as yourself" as a reminder to love each other but the hidden gem in that expression is that if we don't love ourselves, then it sure doesn't bode well for the neighbor!