Easter and the afterlife
Easter has replaced Christmas as my favorite religious holiday, now that I am older. I can’t recall the exact year when this happened. Part of the reason for this is Easter’s more serene and less manic aspect, the relative absence of commercial pressure. Part of it, too, is the mystery that Easter offers.
The Easter Sundays of my childhood were usually a big deal. It meant rising before dark for the sunrise service, followed by lunch at the beach and an afternoon spent swimming or reading, and a restorative nap on the drive back home from Danao or Mactan (except for my father, who did the driving). As the child of an interfaith marriage (Protestant father and Roman Catholic mother), I was exposed early to both Christian traditions but was unaware of the differences until later. By then both parents had joined a younger church, an evangelical one with roots in Presbyterian Canada, and in any case, I would probably still have been a bit difficult and annoyingly curious, regardless of which church we attended. I began to harbor questions.
Easter celebrates two of the biggest promises made to Christians: redemption through the sacrifice made by Christ and an eternal afterlife for those who believe. It’s in the details of securing a happy afterlife where one Christian tradition differs from the other. The main school of thought says that one goes to Heaven because of prayers and good deeds; the other states that all one needs to do is accept that Christ has already won one’s salvation. (This is an admittedly oversimplified version.)
Add science to the mix, and the whole conundrum becomes even more interesting.
People who favor science and reason over religion tend not to worry about what the afterlife is like or how one goes about winning an ecstatic version of it. For most of them, the afterlife simply does not exist. When the body dies, all the ideas, dreams and beliefs embodied in it, die with it.
No wonder then that religion still has such a powerful hold on most of us. The idea that no other life exists beyond this one is too depressing. No wonder, too, that science and religion can’t be reconciled neatly, and remain locked in an unwinnable debate over what happens to a human being once he or she has died. Many thinkers have tried to figure out if there was a way to reconcile these two institutions. One of those who stood out was the American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
Twenty years ago, Gould came up with the notion that science and religion grapple with different areas of human understanding. Science would try to help us understand how life began; religion would provide us guidance on how best to live it. Neither can offer absolute certainty. The principle that Gould coined for this was “non-overlapping magisteria” or NOMA. “No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium or domain of teaching authority, and these magisteria do not overlap.”
Many others have tried to discredit NOMA since then, but I find it comforting. “Everyone succumbs to finitude,” the neuroscientist Paul Kalanithi wrote. Learning to come to terms with it, preparing for it as best as we can, are the biggest errands Easter reminds us to embrace. I won’t pretend to have figured out how to do that just yet, but I am learning to live with the questions. One memory has helped: years after our Easter Sundays as a family, I sat on our porch a few weeks after my father’s death and suddenly, without knowing how it had happened, accepted that he was beyond pain’s reach, restored, at last, to the fullness of time.