On the Gates Ajar

I have some mixed thoughts on this and I want to take a moment to talk about them. The premise is that a 24-year-old girl named Mary loses her brother in the American Civil War. She has a really difficult time with grief, and then her Aunt Winifred comes to visit and Winifred guides Mary towards new ways of thinking about the afterlife (namely, Heaven). While the first few chapters are a really realistic treatment of the process of grieving, questioning of religion and all—it fits my own experience really well, the book then evolves (or devolves?) into a discussion of Heaven: What is Heaven? What does the existence of Heaven mean for us?

Well, according to most theologians of the mid-19th century, Heaven is much like the hellish conclusion of a popular Japanese anime from the 1990s: Neon Genesis Evangelion.

In the conclusion of Neon Genesis Evangelion, a secret cabal tries to engineer what they call the “Third Impact,” wiping out all of humanity and combining their consciousness into a sort of divine, primordial soup. To us as viewers, we are supposed to be absolutely horrified by this turn of events, and I certainly was. In the end, the conclusion of the anime was so confusing that the director, Hideaki Anno, produced a movie showing that two of the main characters actively sought to escape this primordial soup.

I’m not sure where most theologians today stand on what Heaven “looks like,” but the mid-19th century consensus about Heaven actually sounds like my own personal Hell.

Throughout the book, Aunt Winifred pushes back against this vision of Heaven is symbolic, not literal. In fact, Aunt Winifred’s idea of Heaven—a peaceful place with streams, trees, and time for personal enjoyment—actually sounds more like the Islamic rendition of Paradise than the Christian one. I’m not sure what others imagine Heaven to look like, but I’ve always pictured it having the classic pearly gates, but also the surface of the ground being paved with polished marble for as far as the eye can see. I don’t know if I’m off-base here, but that’s certainly how I picture(d) it.

I—for all intents and purposes—left the Christian faith when I was in eighth grade, I was probably around 14 years old. I remember the moment explicitly because I was reading the Book of Revelation while listening to Linkin Park’s 2007 album Minutes to Midnight. While I was reading, it dawned on me that Heaven sounds really really boring. This would be fine if it was temporary, but “forever” and “eternity” is a really fuckin’ long time. I know some people become apostates because they disagree with the concept of Hell or the problems of evil generated by the Bible, or perhaps they find the miracles to be too unrealistic or the whole text being contradictory. The reason I abandoned the faith was because of Christianity’s conception of Heaven.

As a side note, this subject is actually handled really well in Michael Schur’s hit TV series, The Good Place.

Yet, I see myself in this text. The girls in Aunt Winifred’s Sunday school class have a lot of the same ideas of Heaven that I had, and Winifred reels them in and gives them something to look forward to. If that is what Heaven really is, I might be more willing to accept Christian doctrines. Yet, the problem of Hell still looms large for the same reasons of the problem of Heaven: Eternity. If there was an exit, a choice to be annihilated, that would be the only way I could accept the tenets of Christianity. All of this may sound silly to other readers who have not have this experience, but it’s the way I’ve thought through it all.

Lastly, I’m also concerned about Aunt Winifred’s conception of Heaven from the angle of materialism. As much as her perspective on Heaven can give us hope, Deacon Quirk and Dr. Bland (the minister), seem to be more correct from a strictly religious standpoint. Moreover, the text raises real questions about the cultural values of modern American Christianity (which were true as much in the 19th century as much as they are today). If the idea of blending into some Heavenly primordial soup is symbolic, it suggests that early Christians would have seen individualism as akin to Godlessness or sin, as the only things ostensibly excluded from Heaven would be sinful. Yet, the characters of the text—like me—recoil from sharing consciousness on the grounds that they want to uphold their individualism. If I take Aunt Winifred’s (and Phelps’s) words for the truth, it suggests that American Christianity—as a moral and cultural institution—is fundamentally at odds with what divine Christianity is actually about.

The book made me think a lot, and I’m still chewing on a lot of what is said here. I don’t think anyone who lacks personal intimacy with Christianity as a faith or has gone through life without major bouts of grieving will be able to “get” the book, but I found it quite valuable, even if I disagree with Phelps by the end of it.