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| The Five People You Meet on Earth In an op-ed piece in The New York Times several weeks ago, David Brooks wonders whether we should be more nervous about the passion of Mel Gibson or the psychology of Mitch Albom. The former is a religious dogmatist, the latter a cultural narcissist. Mel gives him pause, but watch out for that Mitch guy, he says. In Albom’s best-selling novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, an 83-year -old man, Eddie, runs into five people who help explain why what happened to him on earth — happened. In this version of what Brooks calls “heaven lite,” Eddie’s “hurts are washed away,” not his sins, he is reconciled to his father, and if God is present at all, he’s more like a Dr. Phil trying to bring people together, because in this heaven, it’s still all about you — not about God. How wonderful! Back here in the real world where, as someone — I honestly can’t remember — said Oprah is responsible for all that’s wrong with this country, we still muddle along, wishing we could meet five people on earth who would explain to us what is going on and why. Albom’s book, which has been on The New York Times best seller list for weeks, is another installment, along with Alice Sebold’s, The Lovely Bones, in the New Apocalypticism that evokes a vague sense that, in the words of Drivin’ and Cryin,’ “Everything’s gonna be all right.” The Old Apocalypticism, represented by LeHaye et al., is far more uncompromising. We’ll all be left behind if we don’t shape up. Tribulation, wars, famine and disease are coming, and you better get ready. It’s bumper sticker eschatology at its worst: “Jesus is coming, and boy, is he p****d.” This is the only eschatological view we’ve had, except for the postmillennial vision of Rauchenbusch and the Social Gospelers who now can’t get the time of day from anybody except the most misguided of souls still clinging to their illusions, like those benighted and affable souls in the county hospital with a Christ complex and one wafer short of a communion; souls, by the way, whom Reinhold Niebuhr — he who pounded the last nail into the postmillennial coffin — said the world still desperately needed. Actor Jeremy Irons and Orlando Bloom are now working on a film due out next year that’s set during the Crusades. Called The Kingdom of Heaven, it’s a romantic saga set in 12th-century Europe and the Middle East, in which a peasant becomes a knight, saves a kingdom and falls in love with a princess. The First Crusade, A.D. 1096-99, was an event that inaugurated more than 200 years of intense apocalyptic fever brought on, in part, by Pope Urban II’s plenary indulgence for each person who went on the crusade as a pilgrim with a sword in his hand. The attraction was that death on the battlefield in a war to liberate the holy places from the infidel (read: Muslim) and the antichrist in Jerusalem would mean an instant ticket to paradise, indulgence in hand. And — if you could kill a few Jews in Europe on the way to Constantinople and Jerusalem, so much the better. The cool thing for these pilgrim/soldiers was that for the first time in history, they could themselves be the agents of apocalypse foretold in Scripture. They could be actors in the final scene of the last act of the human story and could themselves, bring down the curtain on this fallen world and usher in a new millennium of magnificence and glory! Well, there’s no more of that any more, except for Tim LeHaye, Pat Robertson and Hal Lindsey and others with self-inflating egos who still peddle medieval apocalyptic theories and make a living doing it, while it is Islamic radicals who’ve embraced an apocalyptic vision in which Americans are the infidels and who understand that, with their finger on a bomb button, paradise is only a martyrdom away. Anyway, as I was saying, today, thanks to Albom, Sebold, Oprah and the cults of angels, the route to heaven is much less perilous, and therefore death itself is much less to be feared. Witness what goes on at funerals where, more than any other religious service, preachers act like New Age Wallendas, tumbling into egregious, if not spectacular, theological buffoonery and shenanigans and put them on full and unembarrassed display. The popular funerary custom of modifying heaven to fit the lifetime profile of the deceased is a case in point. If the departed was a golfer, he’s teeing it up with his grip it and rip it golfing buddies, all biblical figures, to be sure. If she loved flowers, she’s sitting in a garden of posies and chrysanthemums. And so on. I don’t know much about heaven, except for a few odd references in Scripture. So I don’t speculate on it much. I’m not even sure I’ll meet five people in heaven, let alone five people I’d want to meet — although I can think of a few I’d rather not meet. And — will I know their names if I meet them in heaven? Ask Eric Clapton. I don’t know. It’s the five people on earth who fascinate me. If I could see dead people, I’d like to meet: Thomas Hardy, the 19th-century British novelist and poet and talk to him about Jude the Obscure; Adeodatus and his African mother, and chat a bit about Augustine, the father and lover; Fulcher of Chartres, a chronicler of the First Crusade; Ezra Pound; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Limited to people who are alive, I’d like to meet: the guy whose voice I hear on movie trailers; Jacques Derrida; the local philosophy professor who could deconstruct what Derrida is saying in plain English; Jim Carrey; and finally, Pope John Paul II. Okay, not Pope John Paul II. Jessica Simpson. But the people I am going to meet today are: the truant officer at the high school to talk about how I called in my child sick while I was in New York City; my mother-in-law; my dentist, who will fill some cavities and lecture me about something; my colleague in ministry; and a friend whose wife is dying of cancer. Tomorrow, it will be a different five, or eight, people I will meet on this earth. And when I do, I want to be fully present, in the moment, eye to eye, heart to heart. No apocalyptic theories. No tomorrow. Don’t care about five people in heaven. I just want to do okay with the five people I meet today.
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