A little gentle speculation .... on the afterlife

This little speculative meditation owes much to American spiritual writer John Eldredge’s book ‘Desire’. While Eldredge and I come from very different parts of the Christian world, I like a lot of what he writes.

For Eldredge (and I agree with him)

• The purpose of the Christian quest is to move into the deep heart, past the barriers of sinfulness, where we can enter into serious communication with God, and in so doing, find ourselves as God has intended us to be, and be in relation with Him at this level.
• The world after death is not sitting on a cloud with a harp, or a permanent worship service, but a ‘new heaven and a new earth’, where life continues as before, as initially intended by God before the fall, and without sin.

Let me try and take this a couple of steps further. Some of this may sound fanciful, or even a bit stupid and irrelevant, but I suspect we may learn something:

-          I ask whether finding ourselves as this deep level does not include a finding already our true vocation in the sense of specific task, as part of the larger whole, one which starts on this side of the new earth and continues on the other.  And perhaps, even if we cannot yet live out these vocations, we can prepare for them.

-          It is an interesting exercise to try and work out which professions will survive in God’s new earth, which will disappear and which will survive only in a very transformed way:

Examples:

o   Banking: gone, except perhaps in a transformed form of ensuring the correct exchange of goods in an economy of equality.

o   Gone also the whole defence industry: lawyers, security personnel, armed forces, except eventually for lawyers understanding how everything fits together.

o   Medicine and psychiatry: largely gone, except for maintaining a deep understanding of how man works, and especially how the physical and spiritual inter-relate, and maintaining the balance

o   Teaching profession: largely gone

o   Priesthood: leaders/organizers of the worship that will continue, but no longer as comfort-givers and no longer as organizers of power structures.

o   Translators/interpreters (my main profession for the past 30 years). Gone.

o   Artists, craftsman: in greater demand, providing their work is really to the glory of God.

Put simply: an awful lot of people are going to be without a job (including me). While no one will deeply mourn the absence of bankers, lawyers and soldiers, professions whose raison d’être is intimately related to human sinfulness, this raises a couple of interesting points, which also ‘kick back’ into the present world:

o   One ‘loser’ is the ‘people’ or ‘caring’ professions, traditionally seen as very vocational and also good options for Christians who want to avoid contaminating themselves with mammon.  Perhaps their absence in the new world forces us to distinguish between fundamental vocation (what we can continue into the new world, and which is rightly part of our identity) and temporary calling, that is jobs which need to be done in today’s present world, with both reproduction (children to be educated) and disease and death. This distinction could be more important than we think at first sight. In fact, the vocations that give fundamental identity and meaning are God-ward, and the humanity-wardness, essentially bringing Godward activity from an individual to a group level

o   There is going to be an awful lot of spare capacity. This suggests that a lot more time is going to be spent on creative (and in the present world non-remunerative or badly remunerative work) what we loosely call art, that is the praise of God through singing, painting, gardening, creating beautiful landscapes, creating beautiful buildings and the like. If you like, a lot of things that many of us would deep-down like to do, but cannot, or can do only to a limited extent, because of the need to pay the bills. With an outbursting of creativity. And, as with good artists today, out of an inner necessity, an expressing back towards God of what he has put in our deepest hearts.

What am I going to be in the new world? Right now, if God will allow me, I think a woodworker, possibly with some sort of photography as back-up.