I believe in heaven by Canon Hugh Wright - 21 May 2023
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky.
As I draw closer to my retirement from stipendiary ministry I find myself looking back. (Fatal- Lot’s wife?) A child of the fifties, brought up in the sixties, I grew up breathing the air of the Beatles, well before appreciating their songs with my mind. In December 1980 I was a student teacher, getting ready for the day, when I heard the news of John Lennon’s death. Over the next 5 years, as I pursued my short teaching career I was haunted by this song ‘Imagine’, studying it, teaching it, reflecting on it, learning to play and sing it on the piano, which I still do occasionally. On my last day of teaching in July 1985 I was allowed to sing it in Assembly. My nickname, following the boys’ triumphant discovery of my first name, was ‘Hughie’ and how they roared with laughter when I got to that part of the song: ‘yoo hoo…you may say I’m a dreamer…’
John Lennon was a dreamer and a little lazy, certainly not a philosopher or theologian. His song shows this. Not many thoughtful Christians, even back then, thought heaven to be a place above the sky. And yet, of all the Beatles, he was most involved in the local church, through Sunday School, Choir, Youth Club and Confirmation, and it was at Woolton Church Fete that he first met Paul McCartney, yet he never really understood the essence of faith. For John, the church was a powerful social institution (To be made fun of, like all others), whose influence was on the wane in the mid-60s. When he said in an interview that ‘We (The Beatles) are bigger than Jesus now – words that came back to bite him in America where they did take these things seriously- he wasn’t making a theological point but a wry observation about the mass hysteria of Beatlemania and its fickleness compared to the dull stability of religion.
It’s the same with ‘Imagine’. It’s not an atheist’s charter, but an invitation to imagine, and, as such, a song of pure genius, and of wistful longing. John is saying that if you imagine something, you’re halfway to your goal: ‘living for today’, living lives in peace’, ‘sharing in all the world’. So I want to turn this song on its head- ‘Imagine there is a heaven’- and see if we don’t arrive at a similar place to John. It’s easy if you try.
It's a widely held view that if something is comforting and diametrically the opposite to what we experience every day it must be false. So if you are surrounded by crime and someone comes along who speaks about love and trust and peace and lives it out, then he must be a charlatan, looking to cheat you out of something or dull your mind to the grim realities of life. That was pretty much the view of Karl Marx, late of our parish (Yes Karl Marx visited the proletariat of Bonchurch) who wrote ‘Religion is the opium of the people’ widely misunderstood to mean ‘Fed to the masses by the church.’ What he actually said was "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." But imagine if the world, the ‘universe’ was meant to have a soul, or a heart at its core, and that what we see around us everywhere is an aberration? What if heaven was the reality?
It’s strange that John Lennon who took so much from American soul and R & B in his music, should have so completely ignored the Gospel tradition which formed the likes of James Brown, Ray Charles and Little Richard. That, in its turn, originates from the Spiritual tradition where black slaves sang their way to freedom. A song like ‘Swing low sweet chariot’ was about heaven, certainly, but it was also, in the mid 19th C about the Underground Railway, that network of safe houses which enabled slaves to escape from the South to freedom in the North, following the Act of Emancipation 1863. In other words, heaven, far from being an opioid, was an enlivener: an imaginative springboard to freedom. You can see that, 100 years on, in ML King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech where biblical language about heaven is used to inspire people looking for a better life on earth.
In the meantime music of all kinds can provide a glimpse of a better world which can lift us out of our daily struggles. We were not made to trudge our way grimly through life’s realities, but to fix our eyes upon a city of peace and community and harmony. That is why music sung in places such as this and elsewhere is so important. It is also very important to our mental wellbeing, crucial to remember in this MH Awareness week.
Now I am not saying that heaven is all about imagination. We do base our hope on solid realities in which we can trust, such as the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and words of St Paul who speaks of ‘now seeing in a glass darkly but then face to face’ and also us that ‘our citizenship in in heaven’’ Believing that helps us to see all people as our brothers and sisters.
So, what about us? Faith in heaven for you and me in the coming week can lift us beyond the present dominated by news of war, disease, decay, division and the mistaken view that ultimate reality is grim. Jesus Christ by his resurrection and Ascension has triumphed over death and made sure it doesn’t have the last word.
So, back to the song. Imagining there’s a heaven means imagining there are no different countries, but one country and no different people, but maybe one brotherhood, one sisterhood. That is a great thing to remember at the end of this Christian Aid Week. By helping our suffering brothers and sisters in need, we are helping cement that reality.
Living for today, living lives in peace, sharing in all the world: all these laudable aims are strengthened, not weakened by fixing our eyes on our heavenly home, the Eternal Now and the City of Peace.
You may say I’m a dreamer……and the world will live as one.