Time ... and again

Recently I mentioned my love for "moral" ghost stories, and said that I was reading Russell Kirk's "Ancestral Shadows." One story, "Saviourgate," has a unique twist that got me to thinking. Ultimately, however, I don't think the story worked, but it's interesting to consider why it didn't. It wasn't Kirk's fault, really. I just don't think anyone can make this type of story work. What is it? Well, it's a speculation as to what the life to come, the afterlife, heaven, is like.

Among the silliest movies I've ever seen was Robin Williams' What Dreams May Come, giving Hollywood's impression of what life after death may be like. Don't bother checking it out with Scripture--it ain't there. The biggest problems with such stories is that they lack dramatic resolution. The resolution has already occurred as a result of the deaths of the persons involved. Anything thereafter is, quite literally, anticlimactic. This is true in Kirk's story as well, and even Kirk's twist can't rescue it.

For those of you who hate spoilers, better not read the rest of this post (although I won't give away the ending). The story's protagonist begins his tale with a memory of walking through a street of an English city that he vaguely recalls visiting before WWII. He then meets a man whom he again recalls slightly, but who insists on taking him into the smoking room of a local hotel (despite the midnight bus that the protagonist must catch to London). Well, the protagonist finds that everyone in the room has died and that they have the power, after death, to revisit any time and place from their lifetimes and to re-experience any event in their lives as often as they wish. They cannot, however, visit any place or any time outside the experiences of their mortal lives.

But it's significant that nothing really "happens" in the story, because the event they are re-experiencing is simply conversation in a sitting room (and, of course, it's not the original conversation, or we'd never learn that all the characters are dead). No event "re-experienced" would ever be the same, for we'd have the knowledge of how it turned out before it happened, thus changing the experience entirely. For there to be drama, there must be a perceived contingency. But in Kirk's assumed afterworld, that's impossible.

So nice try, but no cigar, Dr. Kirk. Yet I suspect most of us have wondered about whether our mortal life will be "reviewable" in the life to come. Scripture really only hints at that. We shall give an account "for every idle word," But shall we see our lives again? Will others (besides the Lord) see them with us? Perhaps we aren't told because, in our present state, we could not understand. Christian common sense suggests that we ought not to dwell on this, but it would seem that an occasional pause to consider the possibilities is not forbidden us.