Faith, Family, and Death

Startled awake I answer the phone. Groggily, I start to become coherent enough to recognize my mother's voice.

She sounds upset.

I ask the question knowing the answer before it was given, “Grandma is dead, isn't she?”

It wasn't very omniscient of me to draw that conclusion as she had been sick for quite some time fighting cancer and my mother was calling me so early in the morning...what else could it be?

Over the last two years my grandmother had fought off Hodgkin's lymphoma and shortly after, gone through heart bypass surgery, only to have her cancer come back with a vengeance.

At the funereal, I can remember hearing accounts repeated by family of how they found my grandmother sitting in her chair, a Bible in her lap, with a look of peace on her face. This seemed to bring comfort to most of them in their time of sorrow. They took solace in knowing that she was with Jesus and he was wiping the tears from her face as she enjoyed her eternal reward in heaven.

I was at a place in my life at this time where I was beginning to ask questions about my own faith. To some small extent I found immediate bliss in sharing the sentiment of others that she was somewhere better.

This copacetic feeling wasn't to last, though, as I began to process what had occurred and think more deeply on the reality of what her death would come to mean for me.

My grandmother was deeply religious, she was a pentecostal semi-charismatic Christian who believed in the power of God and his Holy Spirit. She spoke in tongues and spent hours in prayer seeking God's wisdom.

One of the things she believed with all her heart was that God had come to her and told her that she would live to see the day of Christ's return. She told this story often and more frequently closer to her death.

When placed in context with the story of how she was found with her Bible in her lap, my growing skepticism painted a much darker picture than the comforting idea of her going peacefully to meet her God. I instead began to see the effect of utter cruelty caused by faith on the minds of the devoted.

Let me be clear, my Grandmother honestly believed with all of her being that she would see the return of Jesus. She, like so many other Pentecostals truly believed that she could “hear” the voice of God. When I think of what that perceived promise meant to her and I picture her sitting in that chair clinging to her Bible as the cancer finished its job, I chill at the idea that she may have had a moment of clarity toward the end.

Because she believed that she would live to see the return of Christ she also had faith that God would cure her cancer. Of course, people made comments about how God took her home so she wouldn't have to suffer. This is, by the way, the same God who intelligently designed her human body to destroy itself in one of the most slow and painfully horrid ways imaginable. The same God that had given her the notion that she would live to see his return, granting her false hope. Despite all of this, God was still to be praised because he showed his mercy and now she was resting in the arms of her Lord and Savior.

At the time my Grandmother died, I numbed my intellect like everyone else with the notion that she was in a better place. Later, I would see how evil it was for the same faith which had robbed the joys of reality from my grandmother, deluding her into the palled security of false hope, to be adulated and celebrated upon her death.

My lingering faith had also robbed me of the opportunity to properly mourn my lost loved one. For, as Paul said in 1 Thessalonians 4:13, “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. “

Now that I have shed my superstitions, I feel an anger that faith stole from me the very human experience of mourning properly. I should have embraced my sadness. I had every right to be upset at losing her. In fact, the sorrow I would have properly felt is what would have given my relationship with her the most significant meaning. To cast aside the pain of loss is to belittle the meaning of life and the intrinsic value of the person who has died.

But its not really loss if you believe in an afterlife..its just saying goodbye for a while, isn't it?

This story is significant for me because looking back I think it is what shook my belief in God to the core. For a while I wasted time with some internal anger at a non-existent God. A while later I realized the futility in hating someone who wasn't there.

This entire experience left me with a deep understanding of how evil religious indoctrination can be. I am certain that if a person of faith is reading this they may be befuddled, indifferent, or perhaps offended, but in my eyes, a belief that would tell a good woman that the voices in her head are that of a supreme being and convince her that two bouts with cancer were part of some divine plan is only shadowed in incredulity by the disgusting image of her clinging to an ancient book with sordid aspirations even up to the moment of death, that there was some purpose behind all the deluded madness.

I see her death with an even greater sadness now that I have traveled farther down this path of human awakening. I see a precious mind taken from its infancy and filled with bronze age mythology, given as truth. I see the fact that she raised my mother with that same belief who, in turn, raised me up with likewise indoctrination. I see back in time to the past where the same was done to dozens of generations of innocent children who would continue that legacy blindly walking in the faith of their ancestors, never questioning, just believing.

With that pretext, I look at my two daughters and I see their beautiful creative minds learning and exploring and with a lighthearted sadness, I take a moment to hold back the tears of realization that I will give them a future all their own so that one day they can die knowing they have lived a long, fulfilling life, not huddled in a chair clinging to a Bible praying to an empty ceiling.