The city and the cell. The seashore and the eschaton

Is belief in heaven a form of escapism?

I once had an atheist friend ask me, ‘isn’t a belief in heaven just escapism?’ This got me thinking. Could it be? (It would be prudent to explore what we mean by heaven, the eschaton and the Kingdom of God, but that would make this too long, so we will leave heaven where it is for the time being.) Now, as for the nature of escape.

If I were to imagine that I worked and lived in an incredibly dirty, dingy, and smoggy city, I would probably dream of going somewhere like the seashore. I would want to ‘escape the city’ so to speak. Now, it seems as though there are two ways to do this. I could travel with my car to the shore and spend my time there, or, I could instead find a postcard or image on the internet of the coast and temporarily imagine myself there. The decision might come down to something like the cost involved.

Now of course the first option would be the real option for escape from the city whereas the second option would be something like the less real option: escapism—an imaginary diversion. We might be inclined to think that belief in heaven is like the first option (if we are Christians), of going somewhere. But we might still be leaving something out. Let’s go further.

There are various ways to ‘go somewhere.’ I have known friends who will pack almost everything they own to take with them as they travel, or perhaps, take a cruise ship to travel to different countries. Now for a vacation, neither method is necessarily a bad way to travel, but they are impositions. In other words, with this way of traveling, the traveler imposes their way of living and comforts onto a place that is not their own, is foreign, and perhaps mysterious. It is the want of familairity: I want my own way of being, around me.

So in a way, even though they are traveling from their context, the traveler has failed to leave their context. And so perhaps we shouldn’t call this absolute escape either, but a quasi version of it, akin to going to the shore but only thinking of work all the day long, meanwhile missing everything you went there for. It is not too far from the idea of a postcard. One involves no movement while the other doesn’t involve enough. Sort of like failing to see what there is beyond that which is captivating us. Sic volo, sic iubeo.

There is a final kind of traveler (let’s call them The Peregrine Traveler). This is the kind that attempts to enter the wild and uncertain hinterland that exists past native context, beyond its safety, to encounter—perhaps to understand what is there. If the destination they were headed to was in a new country, they might attempt to learn some of the language, grasp some of the customs, and realize a new pattern of living. However the point is this: they must be present to be presently changed, they cannot do it with fantasy, with daydream, they have to engage, body and soul.

If I were to consider what Christianity is of the options here, I would imagine it would be like the last kind of traveler. The Peregrine Traveler diverts their way of being in order to see something they’ve not beheld, the Postcard Traveler only diverts attention while staying within their own reverie.

It is this idea of an engagement with a hinterland stage that may call to mind instances such as Jesus beckoning to Peter and Andrew to follow, the Exodus people leaving Egypt, Christ instructing his disciples to leave those things behind that would stifle them on the road, or the calling to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”¹

It seems that in the case of God and humans, the less we trust the trappings of our own safety nets, the more we incline our ear to hearing an unexpected knock.² So, vacations, cities, and beaches. I’m afraid the stakes are higher than those things as we consider heaven. In reality, more than a vacationer going off to bliss, perhaps we are far more like prisoners in a cell. Let’s consider it one final way.

But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.

C. S. Lewis

Why the need for the word escape at all, why not ditch both escapism and escape? This idea of escape might be explained in a different way with the example of a good book. The kind of book that takes you on a journey, a great big journey, and after it is done leaves you with the feeling that you are not quite the same anymore. You have learned something, taken part in something that draws a line between who you were, from who you now are. It is the same you, after all, but as you look back to the beginning, there is an understanding that what was left behind was only something smaller. Yet at the time there wasn’t even awareness in us that we were missing anything. Awareness.

Now, we might finally apply this whole conversation to our eschatologies. It seems to me that in the final analysis, if we give the story of God and humanity a hard look, the story is keenly interested in the theme of God setting creatures free, but the first stage was alerting them to their own imprisonment. It goes father, saying that those creatures were aware of the disjointedness of things, but had forgotten what had started the whole mess. Their desire for escapism was precisely the issue. They wanted dreams of their own fashioning to become impositions. But in the end they had just created little cells.   

They, or should I say we, were drowsy prisoners content with the world of our cell, the world we thought was everything. Trapped.³ And the aim of any discontented prisoner is to leave behind the small cell to be borne into a bigger world, not the dream of it—that may keep them going for a while—but the actual thing. But first, before any of that, they had to be aware of the bigger world. But it seems our little rooms dulled not only our desires, but our very senses that led to them, “the rabbis said that "all the prophets saw through a dark mirror, but Moses through a bright one." St. Paul says that no human eye can see God at all except as an image seen as it were behind the mirror.”⁴

So it seems God has been waking us up from our daydream. Escapism capitalizes on the pain we feel, meeting it with the offer of disconnection, encouraging its addiction. We only need peek at the endless commercials on tv or the internet to see the modes from which we can retreat into ourselves, or from ourselves—not to health, but to placation—brought not to wholeness, but converted into addicts, becoming the only thing they need: the consumer.

Yet it might be the case that when the big story does close, when Thy Kingdom Come is consummated on that bright and shining morning, that we will see our small smoky city was nothing more than a pitiful jail cell, and the seashore was the scent of a wide world hazily forgotten, a breeze echoing off of Eden. We might see on that day that when we sought escapism, we were neglecting escape—escape from very real chains. And the first step of it was remembrance. That we were always meant to be sons of Adam, daughters of Eve, the creatures who were made to walk with God.

We are shadowfolk in a shadowland. Escapism would seek to sell pain-differed as a course of treatment. Yet it seems a more profound, more real treatment is needed. If the soul is a created thing, then its creator would have the best chance at being its re-creator, the remedy needed for the paints that cut through the soul to its very depths, and to its very limits. A key for the prisoners, and a wide world for the peregrines.

1. Genesis 12.1

2. Revelation 3:20

3. Proverbs 5.22-23

4. Pulpit Commentary on 1 Corinthians 13.12