All Manner of Things: Meditations on Suffering, Death, and Eternal Life

By Jeffrey A. Vogel

The meditations in this collection originated from a series of questions about suffering, death, and eternal life put to the author by a friend who was dying from cancer. These questions included: How do we wait upon God and cancer at the same time? What do we know of the God to whom we go when we experience only the silence of God in our suffering? How do we long for heaven when what we want most is to continue on with our families and loved ones in this life? Is heaven removed from this world? Does the joy associated with it depend on ignorance of the suffering of those we leave behind? And so on. The meditations themselves are not intended primarily as answers to these questions so much as an attempt to enter into them more fully, the goal being to think about how we might best inhabit those places where doubt and faith, grief and hope, forsakenness and grace are so often made to coexist. For though the tension between suffering and hope cannot ultimately be resolved in this world, we can look for ways to stand within it a little more boldly, and to fall within it a little more boldly as well. We can seek out words or images that allow us to speak about it a little more clearly, a language that helps us to find rest in our longing and perhaps also longing in our rest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jan 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666705195

Jeffrey A. Vogel

Jeff Vogel is Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.

Book preview

Introduction

I never intended to write a book about heaven. Few people probably do. It is most likely a subject one writes about only when there is no other choice, a theme rendered necessary by circumstance. For a long time, I have regarded eternal life as a belief best clung to quietly, or one to be drawn on indirectly, as the deep source of the hope we direct at more immediate ends or the distant standard by which we measure our achievement of them. For its serenity does not now belong to us. We cannot yet look upon its fire—or even properly desire it. As little as children know in their mother’s womb about their birth, Luther says, so little do we know about life everlasting.

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Speech about heaven is fraught with many potential dangers in my mind: the possibility of blessing things that might not be blessings or of excluding things that are, mistaking strong feelings for considered positions and superlatives for information, diverting attention away from a world that already has sufficient beauty and trouble of its own, adopting a kind of haste toward the many things we suffer.

This is all simply to say that I have come to the current work in spite of a certain reticence about its subject matter, a hesitancy about addressing last things when so many other things warrant our concern. In everything that follows, I hope it will be clear to the reader that I claim no expertise on the topic—indeed, that I believe no such thing is possible. If I have gone ahead anyway, it is because I have come to believe that silence, like speech, is only ever a partial wisdom and that there are times when we must risk speaking in spite of our reservations and inabilities.

When a dear family friend—one of my wife’s oldest and closest friends from college and the godmother of our youngest daughter—was diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer a few years ago, heaven suddenly came to matter as few theological ideas ever do. It was no longer an idea out there, off somewhere at the end, keeping us safe while also keeping a safe distance, but one on which everything now depended. As her disease progressed and death came to be seen as increasingly likely, she asked many urgent questions: How do we long for heaven, when what we want most is to continue on with our families, with our husband and our children, in this life? Is heaven removed from this world? Does the joy associated with it depend on ignorance of the suffering of those we leave behind? Will we know our loved ones in eternity as we knew them in life? What becomes of touch in a spiritual world, the rich textures of embodied existence? How do we wait upon God and cancer at the same time? What do we know of the God to whom we go, when we experience only the silence of God during our suffering? And so on.

As is evident, these questions were the cry of great suffering, born not of detached speculation but of desperation, of a deep sorrow at being taken away from something that, despite its manifold hardships, is already a great good. Perhaps heaven can truly be inquired about only under such circumstances. She asked several of these questions directly to me, looking for the perspective of someone who, for better or worse, has made a career of teaching Christian theology. She asked them unapologetically, without pretense or hesitation—for there was no time for such things. It was a gift that she gave to me, inviting me into her grief, baring her broken heart, counting on me to share what wisdom I could, to look for a way to hold both sorrow and hope together. It was a demand that she placed on me as well, to accept the risk of speaking, to step outside of the safe confines of scholarly language, the habit of commenting on what others have said, and to stand directly before the mystery.

Being rather clumsy on my feet in conversation, I would often commit my thoughts to paper and share them with her at a later time. Most of the chapters that follow began like that, as a paragraph or two written in dialogue with her and her husband. In every case, I have added to these paragraphs considerably as I have had more time to think about things. Most of these expansions were unfinished when she lost consciousness. A few chapters I have written in their entirety since she died, apparently unable to let go of the conversation she initiated during the last months of her life. It turns out that her questions and the longing that drew them out into the open were nourishing me more than anything I might have written benefited her. It is a cruel feature of our existence—or, perhaps, its greatest mercy—that we are often awakened to life in this way, that the grave is ready soil for planting, that the holes left after a great disaster sometimes lead to water.

It is only in one sense, then, that I ran out of time. In another sense, her suffering and death, her struggle to hold on to hope, have made an ongoing demand on me. Her questions, though I do not believe they require answering, seem to me now to require continual asking. They cannot be put back away. Nor are they her questions only. Though the original impetus behind some of the following meditations was quite personal, they are, in the end, about matters that affect every person. We are all acquainted with suffering. We all move toward death. We all must eventually accompany someone along that way and be accompanied along that way ourselves. We know the temptation of the self-defensive answer, the reluctance to allow another’s questions to become our own or to find that we have become a question to ourselves as a result of them. And we know the surprise of discovering gifts within our suffering as well, of catching our breath at all that grieving gives to us. There is much that is common in our sorrow, and it is for that simple reason that I have decided—with the encouragement of my friend’s husband—to share these meditations with others. Perhaps we are tempted to forget this in the midst of our suffering, convinced that our situation is uniquely painful, our lives singularly forsaken, or our questions are too small. The first hurried walk into the hospital is usually a reliable cure for this belief. The sign over its door, the one you approach from the parking garage, should read, . . . and so the universal thump is passed round.²

And so it is. But we suffer the shock of this thump differently, grieving over the loss of goods particular to our own lives. We reach for different lights to show us the way as we move out into the valley of the shadow of death, hoping to find at least one that can withstand the conditions there—strong wind at times, complete lack of oxygen at others. And, in the end, we do not all die in the same way. For this reason, I have chosen to retain the personal language with which I first wrote some of these meditations in the current work. For it was the specific situation of suffering out of which they were born that gave them their shape, providing me with the freedom and the necessity, the space and the limitation, within which to think on these things. The narrowing effect of this personal language may make parts of these meditations less directly relevant to others’ situations, but my hope on the other side is that it will spare them from the pretension to universal truthfulness to which this kind of writing often falls prey. In my experience, such pretension is an unbearable burden on reader and writer alike. I make no such claims here. I have more questions than answers. And even the questions I have aren’t necessarily ones that others would consider the most urgent, born, as they were, of a particular experience of grief. But perhaps these meditations could be more hearable for that very reason. There may be value in considering questions that were not at first our own, in looking upon mysteries not directly, with our own eyes, but in their reflection on someone else’s face. That is my hope, anyway. That has been my experience. I believe it is also one of the implications of the gospel that we are best able to hear a word particularly, that light doesn’t often come to us generally but rather in finite form.

The Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper has said that we should be wary of originality in thinking on matters such as those addressed in the following chapters,

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and I agree. In the moment we are thrown into the fire, when our building crumbles into a pile and our future disappears, we need nothing so flimsy as opinions and speculation. During the days of our losses, we learn only too quickly what little weight such things can be counted on to support. They get caught in the whirlwind, along with everything else, and flap and drift and disappear. Something far more solid is needed, a deep draft of aged wine, the shade and stillness of an ancient forest, words we have not uttered to ourselves. Scripture, creeds, traditions that have been passed down to us—these things are heavy with both suffering and hope. They have weight. In one sense, that makes them formidable, hard to carry all at once, slow alongside the speed of our racing thoughts. But it also means that they are able to cut through the clouds that begin to settle over us in our suffering. They give us solid ground on which to stand, compacted from much use, and a sure place to fall down in the end. They have borne others up before us and will bear others up when we are gone, for they are neither as young nor as old nor as fleeting as we are. We are probably wise to entrust ourselves to these things, to their weight and stability—one might even say to their spaciousness—when our own lives start to slip away. They are deep enough for our despair and wide enough for our longing. For they don’t offer us mere encouraging words, bright flashes that illuminate us for a moment and are then gone, but rather a story within which to plot our own, one that includes both the beauty and the terror we have known. They give us a language with which to speak about these things, and yet promise us that neither our speech nor our silence will be the last word about our lives.

Still, we must raise the wine that we receive from these sources to the light that falls on us. We must see it through our own tears, taste it in our own mouths. Part of the implication of faith in a Word that becomes incarnate is that it must always be interpreted. We must hear these words in our own situations, push down on them where we stand, speak them in such a way that they address our suffering and strengthen our hope. We must find a way to fit our lives into the story they tell—imagine and interpret and question our way in. They can bear such particular use. They always have. In fact, the Bible itself is a record of writers doing this very thing—of taking the Word into their words, not timelessly repeating received traditions but addressing them to their own questions and concerns. Perhaps this is what gives it its unique weight, this way of making the familiar strange and accommodating what is unexpected or unforeseen in the familiar. Perhaps this is the defining characteristic of revelation, that it speaks a word that is at once old and new, worn from use and sharp to the touch, utterly recognizable and fresh with surprise.

The topics in this book can be spoken about only imaginatively. For we have no direct experience of death, none at all of eternal life, and suffering takes us to the edge of language itself. But I would argue that speaking about these things imaginatively is not the same thing as speaking about them speculatively. As I understand the word, to speculate is to think and speak about something about which we have no information. We may do it intelligently or stupidly, with big words or small, but, in the end, we can trust the result only as far as we can trust ourselves. As a speculative topic, I believe the afterlife is completely unknowable to us and should be left in silence. From the standpoint of the Christian faith, however, which is my own standpoint, heaven is not a topic of speculation in the same way. The faithful imagination starts from a promise already heard and believed, a story of salvation found to be compelling, and thus is based on a kind of information. In that context, heaven is simply a way of speaking about this story of salvation when considered under the aspect of its completion. As such, it is not nearly as unknowable as I made it out to be above. It is not distant but near, not another world foretold but this one renewed. It is not separated from us by some great divide but continuous with the faith, hope, and love we seek to practice in this life. For heaven is simply the eternal life of God shared with others, the life that even now is present to the world—hosting it, transforming it, taking it up in its breaking, making it new even as it becomes old. If we can speak about it only imaginatively, it is because we do not yet know this life in its fullness, not because we have no basis for our expectation. That basis is the confession of faith itself—the Scripture, the creeds, the long tradition of thinking on these things in the church. Such things have guided my imagination throughout this book. It is likely I have imagined poorly out of these sources at times, but I have been careful to try to avoid speculation in the sense mentioned above. If and when I do mistakenly cross that line, I encourage the reader simply to dismiss what I have written there. It should give way quickly enough on its own.

It is still worth asking why the risk of such imagining is even worth taking, why, in other words, silence cannot be said to be the entirety of wisdom in our most painful moments. That it usually is, I have no doubt. The danger inherent in speech is a prominent theme in the wisdom writings of the Bible. The danger inherent in speech to the suffering is a more prominent theme still. In my view, the act of eschatological imagination is not rightly understood if it is taken as an attempt to improve upon what has already been given to us, as originality, in Pieper’s sense of the word. Nor should it be seen as an effort to provide information about what has not been given. The current work certainly does not aim to be a book of information in that sense. Instead, the act of eschatological imagination is one by which we venture to speak up before what remains hidden from us precisely in its hiddenness, to utter a few small words in the face of a great silence. But why do this?

In one sense, such speech is unnecessary. The only thing needed is the sure conviction that the one to whom we go is good. That is enough. Which parts of us go and where we wind up when we do become distant questions in the light of this conviction; or, rather, it is the answer to each of them. The reason for this, the reason one’s focus is appropriately placed only when it is on the one to whom we go (and not the what, when, or where) is that our hope can be sustained only when it is placed in God. Nothing else can bear the load we need it to bear in our suffering. In addition, the attempt to flesh out this conviction in any detail runs the risk of a certain kind of haste, a presumption that closes us off to the transformation that becomes possible when we stretch out in the unseeing act of hope.

These things are true. And yet, the risk might still be worth taking. For after a devastating diagnosis or loss, the mystery we face can suddenly seem like only an immensity. It becomes only distance, and time only impending. Time and space seem to take on contradictory aspects all at once, much too soon and far too slow, immeasurably vast and unbearably confining, our future absence threatening to become a kind of current presence. They become a single thing—at times, the only thing, looming over us directly. They can reduce a person to silence. To speak into this silence is not to lay claim to the distance, as though the one speaking has traversed it already and is now returning to tell of it. It is not to assume the certainty of the knower or the confidence of the visionary. At least, it should not be that. Rather, as I understand it, and as I try to engage in it here, the eschatological imagination is an act by which we put forward a smaller vantage on the mystery, a knowingly smaller one, from exactly where we are in the middle of things. The point of this is to provide a frame or a window—or a series of them—through which to look out upon the mystery, a foreshortened perspective on the immensity that stretches out before us, with the simple goal that we would not be overwhelmed by it all at once.

It is perhaps precisely in the shortcomings of meditations like the ones collected here that this immensity could come slightly more into focus, be seen as a depth and not only a diffuseness, that which transcends this specific thing—this text, this image—and not only that which is beyond all things. The hope is that, in coming to see the mystery as so clearly other than what can be communicated in any image or text, we might also come to see it as other than what we land on in our silent apprehension as well. More specific. Nearer and farther than both. An approach and not only an impending. More simply put, the hope for these meditations is that, in their very insufficiency, they might have some ability to make clear once more the welcome present in the mystery, its goodness, and thus to offer some small footing to any who find themselves looking out on it from a situation of suffering.

The meditations that follow are fragmentary on purpose, carried along most often on a note of perhaps, ending at times all too abruptly. They started out this way, of course, as thoughts written down with great urgency. But there is also a sense in which the form is the content itself. The very topics I address here—suffering, death, eternal life—are such as to demand inconclusive treatment, one that highlights our inability to speak fully on them, even in the course of attempting a word. Henri de Lubac offers a similar justification of the fragmentary form in the preface to his Paradoxes of Faith, noting that it keeps one from the illusion of completeness, when no such completeness can be had.

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And, certainly, no completeness can be had in the current context. Speech about heaven is fraught with danger on this score as well, on account of its tendency to show up wearing a mask of completeness, offering what is mysterious as an answer, when we aren’t even sure what our questions are yet. We are most likely to hear about it precisely when our lives have been ripped apart, when we are clutching at the remaining fragments in the hope of keeping them together the rest of the way. We certainly don’t need something that will get pulled under with us in that situation. We don’t need that. But perhaps we also don’t need something that hangs over us with a premature completeness or an alien glory. We need something that accompanies us, dwells with us, allows room for our grief and our hope, our speech and our silence. We need theological language—if we need it at all—that is a bit shorter on superlatives and bit denser with earth. For just as the sorrow is, so should the hope be.

In fact, the grammar of eschatological speech is most naturally interrogative and vocative. It is not primarily descriptive, an account of otherworldly facts alongside this-worldly ones. For eschatology is the language of those who sorrow and yearn, those who, for one reason or another, find themselves compelled to look beyond the world they have known and often loved to one they have not known. It contains promise, of course, and, in that respect, has a declarative aspect; but this promise