Are there name-tags in Heaven? And other theological questions

My opening question was inspired by a well-intentioned idea on the part of the committee that organized my 50th high school reunion this past fall. The committee did an amazing job of tracking down long-scattered classmates (and for all of you who think that you can just Google folks, especially women who have married and taken their husband’s name, or maybe look them up in Facebook, try it and see how far you get). We had had a 25th reunion long ago but many of the attendees at the 50th had missed that, and many of the 25-ers missed this one. Fifty years at a single shot means a lot of changes.

For Friday night there was an open bar party at a local hotel, with name tags available for people to write in their names themselves. For the Saturday dinner party, however, they came up with the clever (and time-consuming) idea of Xeroxing everyone’s senior yearbook photo, shrinking it down, and putting it on the name tag, along with the person’s name. Great idea, but the only problem was that once the photo was in place so little space was left that the font size for the name was severely reduced. And at a 50th reunion, many of the guests need more than a little help with their distance reading.

So, pondering randomly, it occurred to me to wonder whether the folks in heaven wear name-tags for easy identification. After all (depending on how charitable your view of your fellow man’s chances of getting in), heaven should by now have quite a crowd, and even among those you actually knew in your own lifetime, putting names with faces can be a challenge. Perhaps, of course, like consummate politicians, residents of heaven are blessed with an almost supernatural name/face recall, and everyone can mingle freely without embarrassment.

These questions, of course, skip blithely past the more fundamental question of what we are like in heaven and what we do there.

Once, on a drive through rural North Carolina to pick up my younger daughter from summer camp, I heard a song on a Christian music station about how when we got to heaven we would all sit around and sing hymns of praise to the lord all day. Which I would assume would pretty much mean 24/7, for all eternity. I confess this did not sound all that enticing to me, but I’ve never had much of a singing voice.

Some people would, I suspect, say something to the effect that in heaven we don’t have the usual earthly bodies, and are something more like blobs of light and spiritual essence soaking up the radiance of the lord.

Nevertheless, there is a strong tradition that speaks to the idea that we will all be together in the sky bye and bye. And on the whole, the implication seems to be that we will be recognizable to ourselves and to others.

Again, I’m not sure about the details here. Do we end up looking the same age as when we died? Or some age at which we were in our prime? Do we repeat the things we didn’t like about our earthly selves – too fat, too thin, bald, unathletic, or maybe just not as good-looking as we would have liked? Or do we get some kind of divine plastic surgery, so that we emerge from our earthly cocoon as our true and resplendent selves, each of us perfect and beautiful in god’s love, and one another’s sight?

Even with all this, of course, there are obvious questions that other nitpickers have already raised – in particular, if one partner in a marriage dies before the other, and the survivor remarries, who gets dibs on whom in heaven?

This quandary leads, in fact, to a question with far more interesting implications. “‘Til death do us part” has always been an iconic part of the classic wedding vows. It speaks of our ideal of lifelong devotion, through good times and bad. But…is it perhaps short-sighted?

On earth, this clause in the contract serves a very practical function. Even the famously anti-divorce Catholic Church has no objection to a widow/widower remarrying in due course.

But…what about this whole heaven business? There are countless songs and poems that talk about the idea that “If I get to heaven first, I will wait for you,” “We’ll hold hands once again for all eternity,” etc.

Now if death truly does us part as far as earthly marriage goes, then what’s the protocol in heaven? After all, in heaven we presumably are at least free of many of the mundane limitations of our earthly lives, such as jealousy, and if you think a lifetime is a long time with one person, wait ‘til you face eternity.

Of course Mormons and others who practice polygyny would be a step ahead of the rest of us in this regard (at least from the man’s point of view). And as I understand it, Mormons do tend to have rather elaborate views of life in the hereafter, which may have spurred some of their zeal for polygyny in the first place.

As for Muslims, there is that whole 72 virgins business. But that seems woefully unimaginative to me. I mean 72 virgins sounds like a lot to the average Joe, but measured against all of eternity? Even spaced 1,000 years apart, you’d be flat out of virgins in the blink of a heavenly eye.

What’s that? People don’t have sex in heaven? Forever and ever and ever? Just singin’ hymns and praisin’ the lord? Oops.

Well, maybe we should look at instead at the death doing us part here on earth thing. In Egypt there was a huge outcry last week over the rumor that a bill had been introduced in the Egyptian legislature that would allow a bereaved spouse – of either sex, I should note – a window of six hours for “Farewell Intercourse” with the body of their beloved. (I’m not quite sure how that would work logistically for the women, but since occasions of even theoretical sexual equality are so rare in Islamist culture, I’ll take it.) (I wonder if the bill is known among male legislators as the “maybe now I can get anal” bill.)

The rumor was apparently a hoax (of course it was – who would believe such a thing?). Except that, it did not arise out of nothing:

The subject of a husband having sex with his dead wife reportedly arose in May 2011, when a Moroccan cleric, Zamzami Abdul Bari said marriage remains valid even after death, adding that women have the right to have sex with their dead husbands.

I’m not sure about where the six-hour window comes from, especially since according to Wikipedia that fond farewell might even make the inconvenience of rigor mortis set in even faster:

In humans, rigor mortis commences after about three to four hours after death, reaches maximum stiffness after 12 hours… Warm conditions and physically strenuous activity can speed up the process of rigor mortis.

Mostly, corpses don’t tend to engage in a lot of strenuous activity, but as with man/cow love, what’s the harm?

In this vale of tears, it is, as they say, temptingly easy to conclude that our too-brief life is but a cruel irony, a lingering death sentence with little consolation and no hope. Perhaps that’s why I find it so refreshing to see religion searching for new and better answers – from name tags to body bags – to man’s cruelest dilemma.

Peter A. Hempel

Princeton, NJ

04/30/12