"And here's ours. Ten cents for me, ten cents for Mr. Nolan, a nickel for each of the children."

"And you'll never regret it, Mrs. Nolan. A fine funeral for every member of the family, heaven forbid."

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

The president of Harvard University was on Fresh Air yesterday afternoon talking about how the causalities of the Civil War affected American (Protestant) Christianity, especially beliefs about resurrection and the afterlife.

The expert's intellectual detachment from the material was a little difficult to abide, but I tried to disregard it as an unavoidable feature of her professional position and academic credibility:

Americans in the Civil War period were very interested in heaven ... because ... many of their loved ones were gone and ... they hoped, were in this other realm called heaven.

So what was heaven actually like?

Heaven became a different sort of place in the course of the 19^th century. ... some writing about heaven in the 18^th century ... make it less severe, less a God-centered place, more a place that seemed welcoming to individuals ...

... you would be reunited with all your family, and in some writings about heaven, it was a place that was even better than earth in that, not only did you have all your books and your piano, but your hair didn't turn gray ...

And so it was very idealized, and the consistency between your own life and the life in heaven, I think, evolved from people's strong desire to feel that loss was not so overwhelming, that the person who had departed had not given up everything ...

In fact, that person was simply around a corner, behind the veil, living a life very much like those of his brothers and sisters and comrades and so forth back on earth.

There's nothing wrong with understanding heaven in terms of this world, Revelation does just that. But I've never been comfortable with an emphasis on "reunion"¹, especially at the expense of the centrality of "the throne of God and of the Lamb." (Rev. 22:1,4)

In giving their view of heaven, she leaves one with the impression that Victorian era people were shallow, even vain. And maybe they were, more so than people before or after. But, having read a few authors from the period over the years, American and British, they didn't seem shallow to me, for the most part.

I knew that spiritualism was popular in 19^th century America but I had no idea it was based on anything scientific! A means of proving supernaturalism despite it being forbidden? (Lev. 19:31) We all know that final scene in The Others!

I think this [spiritualism] grew out of the rising prominence and status of science in the mid-19^th century, that it seemed to some Americans that if heaven existed then we ought to prove it. There ought to be some foundation to establish the reality of heaven and spiritualism spoke to that need because it showed that individuals who were dead were communicating with live people and making tables rise and wrapping on the wood and in other ways showing their reality.

And spiritualism became a real comfort for many Americans ... There were spritiualists newspapers, seances, there were even seances in the White House. Mary Todd Lincoln was very interested in spiritualism. And it's said that Lincoln himself attended some of these seances where Mary Todd Lincoln was trying to communicate with her dead children.

And there was a spiritualist newspaper published in Boston that in every edition had lengthly communications from dead soldiers often describing their own good deaths, describing what heaven was like, describing their reunification with their lost limbs and so forth. So it was a way of connecting death and life and making that separation seem less frightening.

She talks about "a good death" being a distinction of American Protestant Christianity: at home, in bed, with family around to hear final wishes and to verify that, indeed, the beloved died "at peace with God," that loved ones could be assured of the deceased's place in heaven. Here's a very public example; there are many others. It occurred to me, listening to her description of the Protestant ideal, that economic class had a significant bearing on whether a person enjoyed such luxury.

Terry reads from the author's book as she quotes a Presbyterian tract published during the Civil War era:

Death is not to be regarded as a mere event in our history. Death fixes our state. Here on earth, everything is changing and unsettled; beyond the grave, our condition is unchangeable. What you are when you die, the same will you reappear in the great day of eternity. The features of character with which you leave the world will be seen in you when you rise from the dead.

But "a good death" isn't only a Protestant ideal. The movie A Tree Grows in Brooklyn depicts a poor, devout Irish mother paying her tithe to the insurance man for family funerals. There's Cardinal Newman's Prayer for a Happy Death, a prayer that in Catholic circles could be prayed, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, on behalf of another! (Catholic humor, Romans 12:20). Or the final line of the Ave Maria, "in hora mortis nostrae."

Do we still associate a good death on earth to eternal favor with God? It strikes me as superstitious to do so. Shouldn't the martyr's ideal turn that tidy expectation on its head? I don't think I'll read the book. I had thought all this transformation took place after WWI, that "lost generation", but apparently it occurred earlier ... and closer to home.

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¹ C. S. Lewis: "My grandfather, I'm told, used to say that he 'looked forward to having some very interesting conversations with St. Paul when he got to heaven.' Two clerical gentlemen talking at ease in a club! It never seemed to cross his mind that an encounter with St. Paul might be rather an overwhelming experience even for an Evangelical clergyman of good family. But when Dante saw the great apostles in heaven they affected him like mountains."