My dad is not in heaven.
I know that may seem like an awful thing to say, but since I
don’t believe in heaven, it follows that I can’t believe that he is there.
Yesterday was a beautiful (EARLY) spring day. The sky was
that robin’s egg blue that only spring seems to produce. There among the clouds,
a bald eagle was soaring above the river, riding the breeze, probably looking
for dinner. Almost immediately I smiled and whispered, “Hi Dad.”
Growing up I was fortunate to have a summer home on an island
in Puget Sound. When I was little, seeing bald eagles was a rare occurrence.
They were endangered and the island was one of the places they tended to nest.
We had a giant evergreen tree in the front yard that looked over the cliff and
down to the water. Eagles would come to perch on that tree to hunt. My dad
loved these creatures. Every time one would land nearby, we would go out with
binoculars ready to see these enormous birds. Since his death, every time I see
an eagle, I think of him.
In that moment yesterday, I saw my dad. He wasn’t a person
or a ghost or some apparition. He was a bald eagle. But he was also the trees starting
to bud around me. He was the river running alongside the road. He was the warm
sunlight coming through my window. He is everywhere and in everything and that
is so much more comforting to me than thinking that he is in some far-off
place, floating in the clouds, completely inaccessible.
When I was a Christian, I was living my life for what I believed
came next. I believed that I would have more time with the people I loved. I
believed that somehow when my work was done here, I would show up in heaven
and bounce around on the clouds with my family and friends. (There is sarcasm
here… but also truth). This belief in “next” has historically helped me push
away the guilt of working too much or doing housework and yard work instead of
people-work because I knew I’d have all the time of eternity to do the
people-work. Now, I believe that this is it – that we don’t get an Act II or an
afterparty. We are here for a blink of an eye on the cosmic scale. This one
short lifetime is all I have with the people I love. We are each here by a 1 in
400 trillion chance. Our lives are fragile and short. But THAT is what makes it
so beautiful. It is rare.
Atheism has shown me just how beautiful this universe is and
how fucking lucky any one of us is to be alive.
