"Do you know for certain that if you were to die today you would go to heaven? If God were to ask you why he should let you in, what would you say?"
I was a fearful adolescent,
and approaching strangers to ask them questions like these did not come easy in
high school. I did it anyway on occasion, knocking on doors along with other
church members in an effort to draw our unbelieving neighbors’ attention to
matters of eternal significance. One time the uncomfortable field trip was part
of a weekly class on sharing our faith, where we studied chapters from a book
titled Telling the Truth. In another
instance, during a youth conference, a handful of my peers and I were carted to
a busy downtown district to videotape such conversations with people on the
street.
At the time, I took it
all very seriously, and much as I struggled to be bold, I believed souls were
at stake. Acquainted with worry from an early age and less than confident of my
own eternal destination, I think I also participated in the evangelism in
search of a surer sense of salvation for myself. I wish I could have imagined
being in the shoes of those we approached enough to let them be. I knew what it
was like to lie awake worrying about hellfire, in want of the assurance others
professed.
Upon leaving the church
in my twenties after a crisis of faith, I soon found
myself on the receiving end of evangelistic attempts at dialogue. The volume has
tapered off the last few years. But the comments, concerned letters and
arguments still come calling now and then – a less-than-pleasant reminder,
among other things, of my own efforts as a teen. The latest – a handwritten
letter – arrived earlier this fall.
“One day each of us is
going to die,” the relative wrote to my husband and me. “According to an
atheistic belief, we will be just like an animal, nothing more. But according
to my belief we will bow before the triune God, and we will go to one of two
places, Heaven or Hell. I would rather be in my shoes than yours. Only one of
us is right.”
This divide was
sandwiched within an otherwise cheery update on our loved one’s life and several
expressions assuring us of much affection and regard, the authenticity of which
I appreciate and do not at all doubt. But here it might just as well have been
Blaise Pascal, or my younger self, imploring us to place a safer bet before it’s
too late. Pensive and stuck on the question
of God’s existence way back in 1670, Pascal reached a moment where he took a
pragmatic leap toward Christian belief, despite personal uncertainty.
“I look on all sides,”
he wrote, “and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing
which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed
a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the
signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith.”
He moves beyond this
dilemma soon enough, reasoning that he has significantly less to lose in
wagering that God in fact is. Any troubling ambivalence about the matter is
laid to rest, at least on paper.
Another possibility is to set the whole matter
aside, embracing the uneasy state of not-knowing and pouring our finite energies
into equally difficult, but hopefully more productive, inquiries - questions I don't ask nearly enough: How can we
make things better? Where can I help?
