Wanda's Ramblings

When I Die

When I Die

What happens when my physical body ceases to function? A great number of theologians, philosophers, and other social thinkers have dedicated countless energies to solving this riddle so I’m not going to tackle it in the global sense. I do though plan to talk about what it means to me because I have my own thoughts, hopes, as well as fears about the subject.

I guess I never thought about it until the church, the Southern Baptists to be precise, suggested to me that I have an immortal soul, that it was in danger of burning forever, and they had a solution. My earliest formative years were spent, from birth through 5 years old, with my mother and I living with her parents, and no one ever brought up church, God, or even death that I remember. After my dad came back and started beating the shit out of us regularly my mother, I’m sure to try to make sense of it all, sought refuge in the church. I learned all of the Bible stories and all about Jesus and they told me if I professed my belief in him my soul would be guaranteed a free pass into heaven.

So, at the ripe old age of 8, I was baptized into the Southern Baptist church. Shortly after that my father left, my mother went off the rails, and she became my new abuser. It’s funny that in hindsight my faith, or what I knew of faith, never wavered. I have heard story after story of people losing their faith after their parents or whoever introduced them to faith turned on them. I guess if it had been my father and he then continued to beat me it might have been different. I did kind of put my faith on a back burner though since my mother stopped taking us to church.

I would go on for many, many years with what I call “back pocket faith”. By that, I mean that I had this fervent belief that my statement of faith that I made when I was baptized made me bulletproof, and kept that in my back pocket knowing I was going to be ok in the end. In the meantime, I figured I was just supposed to have this horrible life full of abuse, delinquency, and abandonment and then go to paradise. It falls a little flat when I get it down on paper, but I ran with that for a long, long time.

I guess I stuck with it so long out of laziness, and it gave me a sense of hope. As the years went by though it became more and more threadbare, but I was afraid to think otherwise for fear of losing what little hope I had left. For many of those years, I was doing some pretty messed up stuff and I wonder if my blind faith gave me a morality I would not otherwise have had and kept me from crossing certain lines thereby saving my life or at least freedom. My religion had me believing that even thinking about any alternating was blasphemous and could result in damnation.

So, I ran with that and tried to wrest some actual solution and guidance from my beliefs, but it never came. It wasn’t until getting sober and being introduced to the 12 steps that I let go of my boxed-in, regimented version of a higher power and started thinking outside the box, the box I had put myself and my God into that is. And it was only through seeing other people getting the peace and serenity I so wanted and knowing they were not using the same concept of God that I was. One of the hardest things I’ve done is to let go of that belief and think for myself again because I still had a vague notion something bad would happen. But I wanted sobriety and what I saw these people with, end the life in their eyes, bad enough that I no longer cared and dared to think about a God personal to me of my understanding and giving it the characteristics I wanted in a God.

Once that momentous task was complete the rest was easy as the saying goes. Not really easy I guess but much easier than trying to hold onto and justify my old beliefs. For the next few years, I worked on a faith that was personal to me and worked for me. The higher power concept I had held onto for most of my life hadn’t served me well and I was immoral, delinquent, and uncaring. Today I feel that the concept of a higher power I have is working, persists, and my being sober for 9 years proves to me it is real.

So that brings me back around to my original topic of whether I have an immortal soul, what happens to it, and whether it can be destroyed or damaged. Today when it comes to a higher power, I conceptualize it more in terms of energy than a being. I believe that whatever animates my physical body and brain with consciousness, life, and personality is an intelligent and powerful energy. I also believe that energy cannot be destroyed and that one of our fundamental laws states that fact. The God concept still works because it gives me something to wrap my head around, but I don’t believe in it the same way I did.

I further believe that my uniqueness makes me separate from the source of this energy or we would all be cookie-cutter facsimiles of the whole. I also think that my energy, or soul if you will, is bound to this body by space and time as we know it. Now, whether I was forced into this position, volunteered for it, or whatever I cannot possibly know. Just as I can’t think about time or space outside my human means I can’t think about my soul either. In other words, I think that I am too complex, powerful, and wonderful to think about my true self with this current version of myself. So that is my declaration that I believe I have a soul, is it endearing or not immortal, and part of some kind of collective.

The reason I believe we are a part of a whole or collective is the intensity of our connections to each other. I don’t believe that would be possible without energy beyond our understanding. I can toy around with this and conceptualize it as simply us being bored and creating this playground, or maybe it is a game with real consequences. I don’t know the answers, but I do think that we get something out of it like maybe we can do, feel, and experience things we cannot on a different plane. I have the vague notion that I have a lot more to do with my existence than my human mind can fathom.

Either way, my current belief system tells me that something happens to this energy, and I don’t just extinguish. I can have fantasies, wishes, and fears surrounding what that looks like but since I can’t understand it, I don’t spend too much time on it. I also know that my life energy feels like it is bigger than me and that it is waiting for something. I know that no matter how hard I try my beliefs will always be wrapped around some concept that includes an energy state after this one. That is the human in me, or I guess the human I am in, needing and wanting that hope.

Today though instead of depending on that “back pocket faith” to save me and being an asshole in the meantime my spirituality guides me to help others and be kind when I can. It is still all a work in progress, but I know I’m on the right, or at least better, path. If nothing else my sobriety proves to me that I’m doing the right things.

As to what happens when I die, I am no longer in fear and that is enough for me.