The Faith Component

I have trouble talking to other people about my thoughts and feelings about death for the same reason I have trouble talking about sexual expression and abortion and a lot of the other hot topics in society: my perspective is intricately interwoven with my faith and understanding of it.  

This is complicated for a lot of reasons: first, having opinions informed by Catholicism does not, at least in my case, mean that I agree 100% with all the Church’s teachings (spoiler: I don’t). But I wouldn’t be a practicing Catholic by now if I didn’t get a lot more good than bad out of what the Catholic Church teaches and how that affects how I live my life. But whenever I try to explain to anyone an opinion that’s remotely faith-based – especially in an industry like theatre that’s largely unreligious and heavily liberal – I’m constantly concerned that my mindset will be immediately discredited (whether consciously or not) for someone who’s not a Christian, despite the fact that I’ve put a huge amount of independent thought into forming my opinions and have not blindly followed doctrine without asking myself the hard questions (at least, I like to think so). Yet at the same time, I have a constant fear of backpedaling too far, of being so concerned that speaking in the context of my religion will alienate people that I neglect that influence entirely – and that’s not fair or correct either.

All that being said, my understanding of what it means to die and of life after death is profoundly Catholic in nature. I believe that when we die, our bodies remain behind (“from dust we were born, and to dust we shall return”) and our souls go on, for most people to purgatory and eventually to heaven, or occasionally to hell or straight to heaven. This, of course, is something that I can’t really develop an opinion on based on in-world experience, because nobody really knows. But it is something that has always connected with me and that I am content to embrace as a tenet of my faith.

Now, I don’t agree with everything the Church teaches about what gets you to heaven or hell (one of the most important instances being that I don’t think you have to be Catholic to go to heaven, even if you have the opportunity to be/exposure to it). But in essence, I believe that if I do my best to live a good life as Jesus taught us, and if I repent and ask for forgiveness when I inevitably screw up, then I will eventually make it to heaven and eternal paradise.

Essentially, what that means is that I’m not afraid of death. Now, I can’t always maintain this healthy macro-level confidence/serenity, especially when it comes to the deaths of people I love or of very young people, and it doesn’t make senseless asks of violence/killing forgivable just because there’s somewhere you get to go on to. But it does mean that I don’t feel like I have to struggle to hold on or like this is the only chance I get to live, because I know it’s not. And I know/sense/believe/whatever you want to call it, that unless I end up really royally evil, what’s next will be infinitely better than anything I can imagine.

Sometimes people ask me how our lives on Earth can possibly be significant if I believe we go on to live elsewhere in eternity, and this is barely a blip on that radar. The answer is easy enough for me: we’re here now, and how could anyone bear to go through life if they spend all their time feeling like they don’t matter? (With extreme difficulty – given that this is one of the biggest struggles for those with depression.)

I clicked through a great interactive site the other day (I’ll post the link if I can find it again) that demonstrated why time seems to pass so much slower when you’re younger; when you’re four, a year has been a whole quarter of your life and therefore seems enormous. But by the time you’re twenty, a single year is only 1/20^thof your life, a significantly smaller number – so imagine how short a year feels fractionally by the time you’re 65 or 100. Our lives in comparison to eternity are a little like that – sure, eternity seems enormous (and is), but we can’t fully grasp what that means; we can only live in and comprehend the amount of time we’re faced with today. And to us, living for a hundred years IS a lot, so of course it matters what we do, how we spend it, who we love, how we treat those around us. And sure, that’s a “faith-based” opinion in-so-far as living a good life helps you get to heaven, but I like to think for most people, being a good person is a, if not THE, goal, regardless of spiritual understanding or upbringing.