Undoctrinating: Tears in Heaven

A Time to Weep, or Nah?

Photo by Mayank Dhanawade on Unsplash

Today, we’re going really simple, but the aftershocks of this particular bit of indoctrination develops quite deep and complex root systems in our mental wellness.

To illustrate, let’s look at two Bible passages, one from the Old Testament and one from the New. First up is Ecclesiastes 3:1-8:

 There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

    a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
     a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
     a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
     a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

Obviously, the corresponding popular song (since I’ve been on that trend) is “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by the Byrds, to the point that it’s physically impossible to read the passage without thinking of that song, Matthew Sweet, or R.E.M. (this might just be me).

Now, I’ve bolded two phrases within that passage to call attention to the ideas that a) the Bible does make fairly clear that sadness and its expression has a divinely appointed (or maybe sanctioned is the better word?) appropriate time as natural as the seasons, and b) this entire catalog of the seasons of humanity are set outside of heaven or “under the sun,” as the author of Ecclesiastes liked to say about everything.

But let’s sum up this phase of the deconstruction with a good old fashioned biblical sermon point: God has appointed unto us on earth a time to be sad. Let’s say being sad is the before picture.

The next Scriptural/pop-culture pairing begins with the book about the end, Revelation 21:1-8:

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”

Again, I’ve added emphasis but included all the context to, you know, avoid being accused of taking stuff out of context. The first point is that, as Eric Clapton prophesied as well, there will be no more “Tears in Heaven.” So in heaven, with God, no more crying, no more sadness, no more pain. It sounds great, BUT . . . as Clapton alluded to toward the end of his song, “I don’t belong here in heaven,” and neither do the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, the magicians, the idolaters, and the lying lying liars. They die AGAIN and burn forever in Sulfur Lake, which is really quite lovely in the spring, but the summers are death squared . . . and, here’s the kicker:

NO ONE IN HEAVEN IS THE LEAST BIT UPSET ABOUT THIS.

No one in this heaven is upset about anything. None of the pain and suffering that happened to them or their loved ones or the random strangers throughout history who died their own personal deaths earned by their own indulgence in the sin passed down through every generation from the time Adam and Eve ate fruit as toddlers . . . none of it bothers anyone in heaven in the slightest.

So, sermon point number 2: God has a plan to eliminate crying and sadness from the list of stuff His people do (though it’s definitely on the agenda for everyone else, but we literally don’t care about that).

Okay, so I need to step outside of the sermon here. Point one is a ten out of ten, no notes. It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to cry. It’s natural to do so, and, like a season, it comes and it goes. Point number two is bona fide psychotic and sociopathic. If you dream of a paradise in which a certain group of people suffer forever, I find that problematic. And if you dream of a heaven in which the suffering of all of these people, some of whom you must have known and loved on earth, causes you zero pain or distress, I wonder about that too. Like, one of the benefits of heaven is a god-like detachment from the suffering of others? That’s bizarre.

But even if you remove the existence of hell from the equation, there are still serious psychological implications. I’ll even grant a temporary stay of judgment on the bizarre lack of emotion over past suffering. The point I think we really need to reckon with, and I don’t think this is limited to Christians at all, is the idea that if there are no tears in heaven, if they ideal afterlife is perfect and harmonious and free from all pain or recollection of pain, and if we therefore have sadness-free existence in our minds as the end-all be-all of life . . . then it becomes next to impossible on some level to accept sadness in the here and now as a natural human emotion we can really embrace as okay to feel.

And that’s not okay. It’s a form of torture to tell yourself there is a season for weeping now, but when everything is perfect in heaven you’ll never cry again. Sadness becomes something you can tolerate because, like a bad house guest, you know at some point it’s going away for good. It’s not necessarily a normal part of life. It’s bad and awful and the result of sinfully sinful sin, but its redeeming value is that it’s temporary. This causes us to see a touch of death in sadness. A touch of hell. And it sees as a remedy the assurance that when everything is perfect, the things we’re sad about won’t bother us in the slightest . . . not because they’re repaired, healed, or undone necessarily, but just because we don’t really care anymore.

Sorry, that’s messed up. I don’t want to live in that heaven. But I also don’t want to live a life where I’m constantly subconsciously or consciously feeling guilty for feeling sad. And I don’t want that for you either.

Being sad is . . . sad. But it’s okay. And even in some far-off future, I hope we’ll still take time to grieve past pain, even if it goes away forever.