This brings us to the next of the ultimate questions, “What happens when we die?”
There is a great deal of speculation in the Christian tradition but very little in the way of specifics. The New Testament gives us the image of the risen Jesus. He is like the Jesus that his friends and disciples knew prior to the crucifixion but also very different. He is tangible; you can touch him, eat with him, speak with him. Yet, he can appear and disappear at will. Jesus tells the Sadducees that people don’t get married in the world to come. There is talk of a Last Judgment and a resurrection of the dead. There is talk of reward and punishment. All of this implies that there is something after our physical death. It also implies accountability for what we do with our lives. In recent decades “near death” studies have provided a bit more detail about the immediate transition from this world to the next, if one accepts the validity of such studies. However, outside of this basic framework, death is a mystery.
If you have been reading Along the Way you already know that my favorite TV show for the past four years is a comedy called, “The Good Place”. The series is set in the afterlife. It takes many of the traditional understandings that people have come up with over the millennia and acts them out.
It follows the adventures of a group of people who die and “wake” to find themselves in what they think is heaven. It is not heaven but an experimental section of hell in which psychological torture is used. For example, they have obvious faults and feel that a mistake has been made, but try to hide the mistake because they don’t want to be sent to the “bad place”. Yet, they are tortured by the feeling that they don’t deserve heaven. However, this group become friends and help each other to grow. By the end of the first season, they realize that they are not in heaven.
During the second season the demon in charge (played by Ted Danson) wipes the memories of this group of people and “reboots” then. However, they consistently find each other, become friends and through their friendship realize what is going on. Once that happens, they are rebooted. Strangely, each time they go through this process they grow a bit and become better persons. The demon, Michael, who is the architect for this experiment, is impressed by their growth, becomes friends with the group members and tries to help them as they encounter obstacles. In the process of helping the humans, Michael becomes more angelic than demonic.
During the third season they try to help other people become better, especially the people that they left behind when they died. They also realize that the system is rigged, and it is almost impossible to meet the criteria of perfection to enter heaven. Perfection is not the nature of human beings and life on Earth has become too confusing in recent centuries, so that even the best among us cannot achieve in one lifetime the perfection necessary for heaven. However, they realize that they have grown better through their adventures and their friendship and that there is hope. They bring this to the attention of the “Judge”, who allows them to prove that the system is defective. They are given one year in which to guide four other people to become better versions of themselves. This is the focus of the first half of the fourth season.
By the end of the experiment they convince the judge that the system is messed up. The judge decides that the only reasonable thing is to delete humanity from the universe and start over. The group comes up with an alternative, which is eventually agreed to by the judge. Interestingly, the alternative is to include a “purgatory” like level between heaven and hell that allows people, who are not hopelessly evil, to learn and grow into better people, so that eventually they can make it into heaven. As their reward for saving humanity and improving the afterlife, our heroes are allowed into heaven. Once in paradise they experience the fulfillment of every desire, but soon come to realize that eternal bliss can become incredibly boring. Too much of a good thing can be bad.
The leadership in paradise (sort of a city council) realizes that there is a problem but don’t know what to do about it. They make Michael the architect of paradise and then run off to let him solve the problem. Early in the series, as Michael is developing a closer relationship with the humans, he experiences depression when he learns that the thought of death is a constant in the minds of humans. It is explained that while a burden of being human is knowing that we are mortal and subject to death, that knowledge helps us to cherish each moment that we have. It is part of what gives meaning to our lives. It adds urgency to our need to embody love, so that we can make use of every opportunity. Michael realizes that the remedy for the problem of eternal boredom is to introduce death into paradise. People can live there in bliss eternally, if they desire; but when they have enough, they can walk through a door and depart paradise. What happens after that is unknown. They could cease to exist, move on to some different level of existence; who knows?