A Meditation for Holy Week: An Afterlife Where Time Does Not Exist?

The little church where I’ve belonged for forty-plus years is what’s known as a liturgical church. We’re Episcopalians, and like our coreligionists, the Catholics and the Orthodox Christians, we like our rituals.

On Palm Sunday, we wave palm fronds. On Maundy Thursday — the Thursday before Easter — we do as Jesus did for his disciples just before he was handed over to be tried and executed: we wash each other’s feet.

I’m not kidding, we get down on our knees and pour water on each other’s feet. Then, like Jesus, we take out a towel and dry the feet.

The next day, on Good Friday, we sit in church and remind ourselves, blow by literal blow, of Jesus’s suffering and death.

All during Holy Week, we reenact the terrible story of Jesus’ passion. Then, on Easter Sunday, we reverse it; we take it all back. We celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Hallelujah! He’s not dead after all!

How We Do Holy Week

During Holy Week we try to keep our minds on Jesus’ suffering. We meditate on it. But it’s hard to stay focused, because we know darned well that Easter awaits us, just a couple of days hence.

There will be flowers. There will be Easter egg hunts. There will be the “Hallelujah Chorus.” There might even be Easter bonnets.

How We Do Life

Real life, on the other hand, is the opposite of Holy Week. We spend our mortal days all too aware of our suffering and grief. Trees fall on houses and tornados crash across five southern states. A job is lost. A cousin succumbs to cancer. A homeless person looks for shelter under a viaduct.

And so, the Easter side of things is hard to keep front of mind, most of the time for most of us. Resurrection? How would that work? Life after death? Implausible. Eternal rest? Boring as hell.

So. Maybe the point of Holy Week is not to make us aware of the suffering side of things. We already know about suffering. Maybe the point of Holy Week is to bring hope into focus — to make the Easter side of things pop.

The Afterlife — Where Time Does Not Exist

Possibly, you’re not a Christian. Maybe the Jesus story is not your jam. Christian or otherwise, though, neither you nor I know what awaits us on the other side of the grass. Though, as my friend Maggie said to me just weeks before she died, “You never know. It could be amazing.”

Pope Benedict thought it could be. Benedict was not my favorite pope (if a non-Catholic is permitted favorites among popes). But Benedict was a tough-minded theologian who, imo, has something to say to us still-breathing mortals:

“The question arises,” he wrote in a 2007 encyclical. “Do we really want this — to live eternally?” After all, for many the prospect of eternal rest is not all that appealing.

But the afterlife, Benedict went on to propose, would not be boring. It would be more like plunging into an ocean of infinite, joyful love, “a moment in which time — the before and after — no longer exists.”

What a thought — the afterlife as a state where time does not exist. Death as migrating from the time-bound to the time-less.

Jon and the Pope

Jon would like that idea. He was not a Christian. He’d often remind me that he was “not a churchgoer.” But Jon was fascinated by the possibilities of time, parallel universes, and timelessness.

Does that mean that my husband and my not-favorite pope are now having a happy meeting of the minds on the subject of time? Are they doing that right now?

Or are they in a place where there is no now now?

Missives from beyond the grave at “Breaking News: The Afterlife Is ‘Fantastic.'”  Also, “Advice From Beyond the Grave — Party On!”