Some people don't like to introduce children to death too early. Asked where Flossy the Cat or Syntax Error the Goldfish has gone, they'll tell kids that they're now living at a lovely animals' home.
Of course, it's different with humans. There are many who believe in a future life. But even many of those who don't, still talk about Granny or Grandad having gone to heaven and looking down smiling as you flog off their porcelain collection.
Then there was the odd case of my uncle. They swore blind he was in a "happy place". Apparently in that place, he was incapable of communication with the real world - indeed had no real idea of how we that were left lived our lives, and sadly we could never hear from him. But he was at rest. "Sleeping", they used to say.
Turned out he'd been elevated to the House of Lords.
But in Milton Keynes we are made of sterner, more traditional stuff. We talk about a place where you always know that rewards are ahead of you, know there will ultimately be a way out - even if it is difficult to find. A place of yearning, of wandering, of hoping one day to see the brightness of final release.
Hence the old saying. Beaker Folk don't really die.
They just go to Ikea.
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| Lighting a tea light can get a Beaker Person 5 fewer days in Ikea. |
I've always wondered why nobody talked about the Deaf?
ReplyDeleteThan I realised that they were hard of hearing.
It has always puzzled me, the number of people who pour scorn on the concept of God, everlasting life and an immortal soul, yet somehow let slip that they believe that a dead loved one is just "in another room" (presumably PC-speak for heaven). How do they square the two?
ReplyDeleteI note that even the arch-tempter Richard Dawkins has hedged his bets, "there probably isn't a God". "Probably" is a real weasel word there. Does he secretly think St Peter will let him squeeze through the Pearly Gates because of it, taking no account of all the souls Dawkins has misdirected along the way?
I note also the shrillness of celebrity atheists, insisting that death is definitely the end, that's it. Why keep on about it, as they do, if they really believe that? Why triumphantly cite physiological studies about resuscitation experiences as if that proved anything more than the fact, that should be blindingly obvious, that death itself is a mystery?
Honestly, reading the Cif pages of Guardian online when religion is mentioned, is like being stuck in Groundhog Day taking place in the back row of the Fourth Form circa 1955.
I still mourn that Bourne from which no Hollingsworth returns.
ReplyDelete