I was raised Catholic.  I don’t mean “We went to the Catholic church on Sunday.”  I grew up on the campus of a Catholic boarding school, where my parents worked.  We got the Full Catholic Experience.  We went to church on Sunday, and catechism on Wednesday:   Confessions and Rosaries and Stations of the Cross.  Every church service was an aerobic work out – sit, stand, kneel, repeat.  There were candles and incense and hymnals and holy water.  The Catholic cathedral is a stone and glass monument to God.  None of that modern day, non-denominational Christian “is it a Church, is it a conference center” kind of ambivalence exists in a catholic palace of worship.  The purpose of the church is obvious; stained glass windows, hard wooden pews, a solemn statue of the Virgin Mary staring at you, and a twelve foot tall crucifix with Jesus hanging from the cross to remind you that you are destined for Hell if you don’t change your ways.  If participating in rituals can get you into Heaven, the Catholics will be at the front of the line.  The Catholics are dead certain that they know how to get to Heaven.  Go to Church, confess your sins, feel guilty about everything and BOOM – eternal paradise. 

When I started looking around at the various (Christian based) religions, I realized that they all have the same answer to the one question I needed them to answer – what happens to the soul when you die?  No matter what creed they subscribe to, the answer remains unchanged.  You go to Heaven or you go to Hell – forever.  And the more I thought about this, the more questions I had.

Wherever you go, you will be there for ETERNITY.  When compared to forever, the span of a human life is the briefest of moments.  If a person lives to 100 years old before they die, whether they were a good person or a sinner (according to the specific rules of each denomination), they will spend eternity in either Heaven or Hell. Die at 75 – eternal paradise or eternal suffering. Died at 23, or 12, or 2 days old?  Eternity.  That is the equivalent of having your entire life decided for you based on the type of baby you are in the first hours, days, weeks of your life.  You were a good baby, didn’t cry much, slept through the night – Congratulations!  You get a life of peace and joy and love.  Colicky baby, screamed your head off, never slept more than two consecutive hours – sorry, it’s a life of toiling and suffering for you.  (I realize that analogy is over simplified, but I think you get my point.) 

What of the contradiction between this concept of Eternity and the way this world works?   Everywhere around us, we see the natural foundation this world is built on – the constancy of the seasons every year: Spring into summer, into autumn, into winter.  Nature is a steady phasing of birth into growth into hibernation, followed by rebirth.  You can follow this cycle across decades and sometimes centuries in the growth of a tree.  Sprouted from a seedling, new leaves burst forth, growing taller and stronger, shedding those leaves to hibernate, to begin again next year with new leaves and new growth.  When you cut down a tree you can track the path of its life across the growth rings at its core.  You can tell the wet years from the dry, the places it was scarred and healed, the entirety of its existence laid bare in the cross section of its trunk.  Why did God give us a planet that has shifted and changed over eons, while the human soul gets a couple of decades, then done?  It always seemed so wasteful to me – this never ending creation of brand new souls while all the previously made, barely broken in souls are piling up in eternity.

And then there is science.  The first law of thermodynamics has measured the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable, and consistent across space and time.  Scientists agree.  Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another.   Back in 2005, commentator Aaron Freeman suggested having a physicist speak at your funeral, and he very eloquently explained how the science of the Universe interacts with the human condition.  You can read his words here.  Based on the science, I have to believe that the human soul is pure energy.

One day I came across the concept of reincarnation, and this idea resonated with me. This idea that your soul is born and reborn, over and over until you learn all of the lessons, only then do you get your admission pass to Eternity.  For me, this explains a lot of things.  Déjà vu – that is your soul saying “I think I’ve done this before.”  Meeting someone and instantly disliking them – that is your soul saying “That soul was a douche in the last go around.”  Meeting someone new and instantly feeling like you have been friends forever – maybe you have.  It also explains why bad things happen to good people, or good things happen to bad people.  What if God created this entire universe so that the human soul could figure a few things out?  This makes sense to me.  Every soul is working through an individual lesson plan.  Maybe that good person was working on learning resilience this go around, so the Universe set them smack dab in the middle of a cosmic level American Ninja style obstacle course.  Maybe that bad person was working on learning about grace so the Universe kept giving them another chance, and another, and another.  Maybe people like Ghandi and Mother Theresa were further along the learning curve than me, and I can hope that I will someday be capable of that level of peace and compassion.  Maybe there are no good people and bad people, just a Universal classroom offering tailored instruction to every soul on the planet, to prepare us for eternity.

My father died in 2006.  My mother died in 2009.  It brings me peace to believe that their energy still exists in this world.  Maybe right now, that energy is part of a hurricane wreaking havoc on a tropical island.  Maybe a piece of them is falling as rain on a drought stricken crop, blessing a farmer and saving his family from financial ruin.  Maybe their soul rides on the warm breeze that blows across my neck on a cold day.  Perhaps the pieces of their souls have already been gathered back together and stitched into a new lifetime.  Even now they could be learning to take their first steps or tie their shoes or ride a bike.  Maybe at this moment, they are taking their very first breath in a brand new adventure.  I don’t know where their souls are now, but I like the thought that we are still together, in the same Universe, and some day we will get to meet again and share the adventures of many lifetimes.  But I’m going to keep feeling guilty about everything – just in case I’m wrong.