Longing for a sense of the eternal

LAST Sunday we went to church for the first time in years. It was for the reading of daughter Chloe’s wedding banns (more on that from Judy here). As required, the vicar asked “if anyone here present” knew of any reason the marriage couldn’t go ahead, adding that as Chloe’s fiancé – rugby international James Haskell – was in the congregation, he wasn’t expecting anyone to give any trouble. It was a good joke and everyone laughed before settling down to the next prayer.

Later, as we left the charming medieval church that nestles deep in the Berkshire countryside, I was conscious of a very un-Christian emotion. Envy. I envied the faith that all those other worshippers obviously had: faith in Jesus, God and the afterlife. What a comfort it must be to believe that death is not the end but a gateway.

My mother had a simple, robust faith and it served her well on the day she died. As I’ve written here before, a few hours before passing she suddenly asked me to describe her own mother. When I asked why she said: “Because I can remember what everyone else looked like – my father, brothers” (all long dead) “but I can’t remember mother and it will be so embarrassing when I meet everyone again if I don’t recognise her.”

I marvelled at her certainty that a family reception committee was standing by to welcome her to Paradise and when I described her mother she smiled and said: “I remember. It will be fine now.”

This week it emerged that shortly before he died in March, THE SUSPECT: Shane O’Brien is still on the run Professor Stephen Hawking came to “the profound realisation that there is no God or afterlife”. In A Brief History Of Time written 30 years ago he was equivocal on the possibility of a creator but in his final book, published posthumously on Monday, he is clear: belief in a supreme being is “just wishful thinking”.

“There is no reliable evidence for it,” he writes, “and it flies in the face of everything we know about science. We are each free to believe what we want and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate.”

The only way in which we live on after death, Hawking believed, is in our influence and in the genes we pass on to our children. (Not much comfort to a childless person who’s lived an obscure life.) And I completely agree with him. Organised religions promising eternal life offer a fantasy, one allowing us to deny the harsh reality that not only are we here once, we’re only here, full stop. We are the sole species that knows it is doomed to die and human self-awareness combines with animal survival instinct to create the comforting illusion that we are “special”. Yea, only have faith and eternity awaits.

I’m not an unhappy person and I’m not morbidly afraid of death. But I know I’d be measurably happier and entirely free from fear of mortality if I could be like my mum and those people in church last Sunday. Which is where I came in. I envy them.