Elaine Hasleton is a small, neat woman in her mid-fifties who runs the public relations office for the Family History Library, the five-story genealogy research center belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. She, like so many Americans, believes that after she dies she will see beloved family members in heaven. But when Hasleton says “family,” she doesn’t just mean the people who live in her house or the people she sometimes visits on Thanksgiving. She means twelve generations of relatives, living and dead, spread out across two continents, mostly in Norway and Minnesota. She means Norwegian musicians and house painters and farmers dating back to the 1500s. Since her graduation from Brigham Young University in 1972, she has been to Norway eleven times and has tracked down countless cousins—including a group who share a common ancestor back to 1793. She obsessively reads obituaries and recently found a cousin in Minneapolis who is related to her great-grandmother, Henrietta Krogstad, the wife of a Norwegian tailor. This was especially fortunate because the tailor, Ingebret Krogstad, is the only person whose portrait is missing from Hasleton’s illustrated five-generation family tree, and Hasleton thought this new cousin might lead her to one. She didn’t, but in any case Hasleton believes she will finally see Ingebret’s face in heaven. “I can’t wait,” she says.
Mormons believe that after death, the righteous will live in multigenerational clans: spouses together with children, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. Young men who died in war, before they ever had a chance to marry, will be wed in the spirit world—the stop before the resurrection, when everyone goes with their families to heaven. Women who died alone and childless through no fault of their own will have spouses and kin. Everyone will be bound together, as the Mormons themselves put it, in a “chain of generations.” The temples and other holy places of the Latter-day Saints are decorated with pictures of families in heaven; the “celestial room” in the Idaho Falls temple shows white-clad men and women lounging or standing in groups of four or five, as though picnicking on golden grass; purple mountains rise behind them. Devout Mormons passionately want this for themselves and their children, and it explains their seemingly obsessive search for ancestors.
But of course to get to the highest level of the Mormon heaven, you have to be a Mormon. You have to believe that the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, was a prophet of God and that the revelations given to him by an angel in upstate New York in the 1820s are true. This means that everyone born before Joseph Smith’s time—as well as everyone born afterward who doesn’t believe in Smith’s prophetic authenticity—needs to be inducted into heaven, as it were, by a living, card-carrying Mormon. It is for this reason that the LDS church in Salt Lake City holds the world’s largest collection of genealogical records—birth, death, and marriage records, as well as other documents from 110 countries, dating back hundreds of years. Living Mormons collect the names of dead souls to help them reach the celestial kingdom.
Unearthing names is just the first step. Mormons take the names to the temple and perform such sacred rituals as baptisms and marriages posthumously on behalf of the people attached to those names. In recent decades the Mormons’ zeal for ushering souls into heaven has extended not just to their own ancestors but to any soul ever born. In the 1990s, the LDS church came under fire for posthumously baptizing Jews who died in the Holocaust. On a recent visit to Salt Lake City, I initially resisted the urge to search for my own dead relatives: the idea that the Mormons might want to baptize them made me squeamish. Ultimately, though, my curiosity won out. Sitting at a terminal in the Family Research Library, I typed the name of my maternal grandfather, Marcel Goldmuntz, into an LDS computer. My grand father was born in Belgium in 1911, the eldest son of a prosperous Jewish family, and he died in August 2000, in his bed in New York City.
Punching at the keys, I first found his death certificate. Seconds later I found the passenger manifest of the Serpa Pinto, the ship that sailed from Lisbon to New York in March 1941, carrying my grandparents and my three-year-old mother. “Eyes: Brown,” the document said by my mother’s name, “Race: Hebrew.” After a year of driving, traveling, and hiding, they arrived safely in New York.
I have on countless occasions reflected on my grandfather’s pre-science and bravery, his willingness on that May morning in 1940 to leave everything he had (wedding silver, some beautiful rugs—and, my grandmother always remembered, a cute tennis outfit she had recently bought to celebrate the spring weather). He also left everyone he knew to save the lives of his family. There, in the basement of the LDS church, with two kindhearted Mormon women peering over my shoulder, I lost my composure.
Hasleton assured me later that LDS members would not use my search as an opportunity to seize my grandparents’ names and baptize them. (LDS officials add that the rites they perform on behalf of the dead are not binding: souls may still choose whether to enter the celestial realm.) She has enough work to do just gathering her own family together. Elaine Hasleton has done “temple work” for “just about all” of her dead relatives, “though there’s still more to do. It’s hard to find the time.”
Who do you see in heaven? The Mormons are hardly the only ones who conceive of heaven as a domestic place, like home but better: with no squabbling, no anxiety, no mortgage payments, divorce, or cancer. For many people, heaven is eternal togetherness, a recapturing of the family time that in life can feel so quickly and easily lost. In this vision, you can feel your child’s silky hair again; you can hear your husband laugh. The yearning to reunite with loved ones is primal and overpowering: Nearly half of Americans believe they’ll see family and friends in the next life, according to a 1982 Gallup poll. It is the thing we tell our children. It is boilerplate in Christian, Muslim, and Jewish funeral sermons. The late Senator Edward Kennedy, a devout Roman Catholic who had too much experience giving eulogies for his relatives, reflected his belief in a heaven of family happiness when in 1999 he spoke at his nephew John F. Kennedy Jr.’s funeral. “He and his bride have gone to be with his mother and father, where there will never be an end to love.”
Probably no further proof of the strength of this belief in contemporary America is needed, but here it is: Even Homer Simpson abandons his doofus persona for a split second in episode sixteen of the cartoon series The Simpsons to tell God that “heaven isn’t heaven without my family in it.” In Heaven, a book of essays edited by an Episcopal priest named Roger Ferlo and published in 2007, ten notable and unknown Christian writers describe their visions of the hereafter. The descriptions vary, but all convey a longing to see loved ones—and in some cases personal heroes—in the afterlife. “I want to lay my head on Grandma Lucy’s lap again,” wrote the Christian memoirist Barbara Brown Taylor. “I want to shell field peas with Fannie Belle and listen to Schubert with Earl.”
The tough-talking president Lyndon Johnson worried about seeing his parents again in heaven. In an anecdote in The Preacher and the Presidents, a biography of the evangelist Billy Graham by Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs, Johnson confesses his anxiety to the world’s most famous preacher. The president and Graham are driving around Johnson’s Texas ranch, and Johnson parks his car by the spot where his mother and father are buried beneath some shady oaks. He then turns to Graham and, after a pause filled with meaning, asks, “Billy, will I ever see my mother and father again?”
“Well, Mr. President,” Graham told him, “if you’re Christian and they were Christians then someday you’ll have a great homecoming.”
For believers, the certainty of ultimate reunions offers great solace. Some years ago, I visited Barbara and Warren Perry at their home in Kinston, North Carolina, not long after Warren had received a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer. The Perrys are evangelical Christian believers and friends of Anne Graham Lotz, Billy Graham’s daughter. While I was in North Carolina visiting Lotz, she suggested I call them; heaven, she said, would be much on the Perrys’ minds. I phoned from the road, and Barbara invited me right over. Sitting on their sun porch, while eating a lunch of turkey soup and melted cheese sandwiches, I asked them all—Warren, Barbara, their daughter Betty Blaine and granddaughter Whitley—what they thought about heaven, and they all began to cry. They would see Warren soon, they said, in heaven. After lunch, Warren went upstairs for a nap, and teenaged Whitley—a lovely blond girl with kohl lining her eyes—told me she was eager to go to heaven herself because, along with family members, she knew she’d see Saint Paul. “That will be so cool,” she said.
Warren died six months later, and Barbara vowed she would not remarry. “I know I will see Warren again,” Barbara told me later in a phone call. “I had such a wonderful, wonderful marriage, I don’t want to mar my reliance on that.”
So essential is the family reunion to modern conceptions of heaven that the reader may be surprised to learn that it is a recent development, widespread only in the last two centuries. In antiquity, people may have believed that they would inhabit the same heaven as their loved ones—but they emphatically did not believe that life in the next world would be anything like this one. Intimate, familiar relationships would cease to exist. “There will be no marriage in heaven,” Jesus said.
As we saw in the previous chapter, heaven has always been full of people. Christian visionaries saw saints, martyrs, and the biblical patriarchs as they ascended through the levels of the afterworld. The Virgin Mary inhabited heaven, of course, as did her son, Jesus, and the righteous expected to see them there. As if visualizing herself from the outside, the thirteenth-century German mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg described her meeting with Christ in heaven: “He took her into his divine arms, placed his paternal hands unto her breast and beheld her face. And in a kiss she was elevated above all the angelic choirs.” According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad on his Night Journey saw Moses, Enoch, and even Jesus as he traveled upward through the spheres.
Antique and medieval believers did imagine their own relatives in heaven. In the tenth century, Saadiah Gaon, a Jewish philosopher living in Baghdad, affirmed his belief that Jews would most certainly meet in the next world. “Should someone ask, again, whether members of their families and their kinsmen would recognize the resurrected and whether they would recognize each other, I might say that I have considered this matter and have arrived at an affirmative conclusion.” Saint Augustine in the Confessions begs readers to pray for his parents in heaven and, after he becomes Bishop of Hippo, he consoles a grieving widow in a letter with the promise of a new life.
But, Augustine insists, people in heaven will not be focused on one another. They will be focused on God. Happy reunions and the respite of individual loneliness and grief are precisely not the point. “After death shall come the true life,” Augustine wrote to the widow, “and after desolation the true consolation.” Heaven—in the ancient Christian perspective, at least—is the place (or time) for all believers to collectively and eternally rejoice in the divine glory. Thomas Aquinas wrote that even if heaven were occupied by one single soul, “it would be happy, though having no neighbor to love.”
Dante’s Paradiso has long been seen as the prime example of what scholars call “theocentricism.” While peopled with saints and martyrs, with individuals the poet knew as a boy (including a great-great-grandfather), and with historical figures, human relationships are irrelevant. In Canto 32 of the Paradiso, Dante describes heaven as a sort of crowded stadium. Souls are arranged in rows; the holiest souls get the best seats, closest to the light, while the least worthy sit farthest away. No matter their rank, all are perfectly content—for all are engaged in the activity of heaven, which is gazing upon God.
Peter Hawkins, who is a professor of religion and literature at the Yale Divinity School, argues, however, that in this scene Dante opens the door a tiny crack to the kind of intimate heaven we imagine today. I met Peter at his Boston condominium one late afternoon and we sat together drinking wine as the sun set over his balcony and the Public Garden nearby. Everyone in Canto 32 of Paradiso is looking at God, Hawkins agrees, with one exception. He points me to this verse:
Look at Anna, where she sits across from Peter
So content merely to gaze upon her daughter
She does not move her eyes as she sings hosanna.
Anna, Hawkins explains with excitement, is not looking at God at all. The mother of Mary can’t keep her eyes off her own beloved daughter. “She’s looking at her girl chick!” Hawkins exclaims. “She’s looking at her kid!” At least one person in Dante’s heaven puts a personal relationship above the adoration of God. It surprises me not at all that this person is a mother.
After Dante, depictions of heaven became more like human society: hierarchical, to be sure, but also full of all kinds of people—nobles, clerics, merchants, and professionals all intermingled. In paintings, the Virgin Mary—once a formal, queenly presence in heaven—became during the Renaissance more tender and human. In deference to their classical forebears, Renaissance painters endeavored to make people, even people in heaven, look like themselves, and real. In Raphael’s 1505 Madonna of the Meadows, the Virgin looks like a fair-haired and earthy Italian matron; she wears simple garb as she tends to two naked babes—Jesus and John the Baptist—playing in a golden-hued field. Mist rises from a lake in the background; a church spire penetrates an azure sky. In other imaginative renderings, such as Giovanni di Paolo’s Paradise, painted around 1445, saints, angels, and regular people meet and mingle in a flowering garden. “Irrespective of spiritual merit and state, the blessed…mix freely in the relaxed atmosphere of a garden,” Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang write in their book Heaven: A History. “The artists depicted a single paradise where the ordinary person…might live.” In these pictures, heaven mirrors human society—not yet family reunions or domestic bliss—but a vision of the world to come that resembles life on earth.
But with the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, heavenly society withdrew once more. The reformers “purified heaven,” explains Alister McGrath, a theologian at King’s College London, whom I reached one afternoon by phone. In the Reformers’ heaven, “there is nothing except the believers contemplating God,” says McGrath.
In Puritan New England, a heaven that looked like a society ball or even a church dinner would have been unimaginable. The social life of each town did revolve around its church, but the message people heard on Sundays was dire. Life was a matter of endless toil and continual struggle against the forces of sin and temptation. Heaven was something to look forward to, but it was more abstract—utterly unlike earth and far off in the future. It was not primarily a comfort but rather a way to impose discipline in this life. David D. Hall, a historian of American religion at Harvard, described the Puritan mind-set to me this way. “You’re trudging along, trudging along, trudging along. You look upwards, and you’re aware of great rewards that are ahead, but they are remote.” In a sermon preached at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and published in 1677, the Puritan minister Jonathan Mitchell painted this grim picture to great effect: heaven has “none of that Confusion, Disorder or Discomfort that results from sin and temptation, and makes this Earth a miserable place; Heaven is an Holy and so an Happy place.” No further specificity is necessary. To these New Englanders, a heaven peopled with good friends and blazing hearths was more remote than a vacation to Fiji.
The First Great Awakening, in the middle of the eighteenth century, was a wave of heightened religious fervor that moved across the Atlantic from Britain to New England. It was triggered by such itinerant preachers as the Englishman George Whitefield, who taught that anyone could have a personal relationship with Jesus and that scriptural truth was accessible to anyone who could read or listen to the word; at revivals, preachers stressed conversion—their prayers for salvation were greeted with an emotional, enthusiastic response. In keeping with this populist message, heaven grew nearer. Preachers began to speak of an ever-after of sweet reunions, where, in the words of the New England Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards—better known for such harsh sermons as “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—“there is the enjoyment of persons loved, without ever parting. Where those persons, who appear so lovely in this world, will really be inexpressibly more lovely and full of love to us.”
THE SWEDISH VISIONARY
In Heaven: A History, Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang argue that some of the roots of the modern-day heaven, in which people imagine themselves living in domestic bliss with deceased relatives and friends, can be found in the writings of the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Their position is controversial in the academy. Harvard’s David Hall, for one, believes that modern-day ideas about heaven mostly have other roots, especially in an urge among Americans as the country matured to cast off the rigid austerity of Puritan values. It is fair enough to say, though, that Swedenborg was an important influence on some important Americans—and that his vividly embroidered heaven marks an early articulation of a view you hear a lot today. Stephen Prothero, a religion professor at Boston University, told me that Swedenborg was the eighteenth century’s Oprah. He opened the door to what we would call New Age thinking and to the belief that heaven is just like this world, only better.
Jonathan Rose is a seventh-generation Swedenborgian, which means his ancestors were among America’s first converts to the religion in the early part of the nineteenth century. He grew up in small, insular enclaves of Swedenborgians in the United Kingdom, Canada, and, finally, the woods and dales of Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, at a time when not taking another Swedenborgian to the school dance meant getting detention. He still lives in Bryn Athyn. Tall and rail thin, with a face you might call “sensitive,” Rose is one of perhaps twenty thousand Swedenborgians in the world, five thousand of them in the United States. He is a minister and a scholar, who sometimes preaches in Bryn Athyn’s Swedenborgian cathedral on Sundays and has devoted his life to translating Swedenborg’s voluminous works from Latin into readable English. Rose can see how odd it is to be committed to promoting the religious vision of a person few have ever heard of—he understands that he lives in a bubble. Rose also knows that he is a lucky man. The Scottish-born American industrialist John Pitcairn (1841–1916), a devoted Swedenborgian, left a fortune to his church. Until 2001, Rose was a professor of religion at Bryn Athyn College, a tiny Swedenborgian school with 150 students and an endowment of $200 million. Today, as the editor of a new translation of the complete works of Swedenborg, he works out of a grand, Elizabethan-style stone-and-wood-beam office in a mansion that one of the Pitcairn sons formerly called home.
Emanuel Swedenborg was born in 1688, in Stockholm, into a wealthy family; his father was a Lutheran bishop. Swedenborg himself became a scientist and an engineer, and had little interest in religion until he was nearly sixty, when he began to have visions and hear the voices of angels—voices that didn’t stop until he died, twenty-seven years later. His first waking visionary experience occurred in 1745. He was dining alone in London, he said, when he saw in a corner a shadowy figure who he soon realized was Jesus. “Eat not so much,” the Savior said. After that initial vision, Swedenborg heard the angels all the time: while sleeping, while awake, while attending dinner parties at people’s houses. And the angels took him to heaven and showed him around. Swedenborg believed that in heaven, people became angels—not physical in themselves but capable of enjoying physical pleasure, including food and sex. “Heaven is indistinguishable from this world to the degree that people don’t realize they’ve died,” says Rose. In heaven, Swedenborg informs us, angels had homes, “like the dwellings on earth which we call homes, except that they are more beautiful. They have rooms, suites, and bedrooms, all in abundance. They have courtyards, and are surrounded by gardens, flower beds, and lawns.”
Swedenborg’s heaven is a place of diverse characters, architecture, sights, and sounds. “It sounds like Manhattan,” says Rose. It’s “a work-and use-oriented culture.” Angels are “all everywhere, everyone’s mixing together.”
Before arriving in heaven, people are sorted according to their likes and dislikes in what Rose calls “a melting-pot area.” Swedenborg recounts meeting Martin Luther there, where they argue over Luther’s ideas—and Luther revises and repudiates his Reformation theology. In heaven, Swedenborg meets Cicero, who wrote that good Roman citizens would, after death, ascend to heaven where they’d meet other citizens, as well as loved ones. The whole time he and the great man are talking, Rose says, laughing, “they’re being hassled by these Christian spirits.” Swedenborg was frustrated and embarrassed by the Christians, “the way I would feel,” explains Rose, “being in France and being embarrassed by other American tourists.”
Swedenborg believed that marriages continued in heaven, that the spirits of the dead existed near the living in a kind of parallel universe. Rose lost his first wife to cancer when he was thirty-eight years old, and was gravely disappointed when he did not feel her presence as often or as strongly as his religion led him to expect that he would. “Swedenborg says where there’s true love, the sense of communion is not broken by the death of one,” says Rose. And yet when Anne died, “she kind of disappeared. That was a shock to me.” Her vanishing from his life didn’t lead Rose to question his faith or his love for her, but he did occasionally worry that “we must not have been that close or I would have had that experience.” Finally, years after her death, he had a dream of playing music with Anne—something they did together in life—that gave him great comfort and relief. And as he continued to study Swedenborg’s works, he realized that he had made a mistake: Swedenborg, he now believes, never says or implies that a lack of contact between the living and the dead bears any relation to the quality of a marriage. Rose has since happily remarried and is, for the time being, holding questions of true compatibility in abeyance. “I’ve left who ends up with whom in the Lord’s hands.”
Swedenborg believed, as the Mormons do, that people in heaven live together in large communities in a place that resembles a better earth. But unlike the Latter-day Saints, the Swedish visionary believed that the ties that bind are not those of blood but of like-mindedness. (Rose regards the Internet, which organizes the world according to intersecting interests, as something like a Swedenborgian heaven-on-earth.) Discussing Swedenborg’s celestial affinity groups in his office, Rose’s voice becomes thick with emotion. “He talks about people being able to recognize each other, like a spiritual family resemblance,” Rose says. “The people you see there, it’s beautiful—it’s like people you’ve known all your life, best friends forever.” In our earthly lives, he adds, we spend so much time with people who are unlike us that we continually have to be on our guard; just imagine a life of perfect comfort and safety, in which we completely love and trust all those around us.
The Swedenborgians claim that their founder’s influence is far-reaching. The theologian Henry James Sr., the father of William and Henry James, they note, was an avid Swedenborgian. Helen Keller, who wrote glowingly of Swedenborgism in her 1927 book My Religion, once reportedly declared: “Swedenborg does such good to me that I long to scatter his teachings to men and women wherever I go.” In an essay published in 1850, Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Swedish mystic a “sublime genius.” Religious crazes come and go in America. I decline to decide which one is the craziest; longevity and numbers of adherents do not seem to me adequate measures of the truth of a religious movement. In that light, the way in which Rose clings to his tradition—as if he were the last Gullah speaker in Georgia—seems to me both admirable and bittersweet.
By the early 1800s, then, Americans were ready for a heaven that was “closer” to the earth, more intimate and more consoling. This “humanizing” of heaven, says Harvard’s Hall, went hand in hand with the Second Great Awakening—an evangelistic fervor that gripped the nation—and other civil rights ambitions of the period: a loathing of public floggings and executions, of corporal punishment in schools, and, of course, of slavery. Reformers such as Lyman Beecher and Charles Grandison Finney preached particularly against Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. They assured Christians that their efforts on behalf of their fellow creatures mattered to God in heaven. Women, to whom the Awakening provided new opportunities for missionary work and evangelization, railed in particular that a grieving mother might have to consign a beloved and innocent child to a cold, impersonal, and terrifying heaven.
In 1832, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “The Reaper and the Flowers,” a poem meant to relieve a mother’s grief. In it, a reaper comes to earth and with tears in his eyes picks the most beautiful flowers and carries them away. The reaper is, in fact, an angel; the flowers are the souls of dead children; the bouquet is, of course, for Jesus. “And the mother gave, in tears and pain, / The flowers she most did love; / She knew she should find them all again / In the fields of light above.”
Over the next few decades, the idea of heaven as a place for family reunions blossomed. Joseph Smith, the founder of the LDS church, believed that at death people were ushered into heaven not by an angel but by their family who had arrived before them. “I actually saw men,” said Smith in 1842 in a funeral sermon, “I actually saw men, before they had ascended from the tomb, as though they were getting up slowly. They took each other by the hand and said to each other, ‘My father, my son, my mother, my daughter, my brother, my sister.’ And when the voice calls for the dead to arise, suppose I am laid by the side of my father, what would be the first joy of my heart? To meet my father, my mother, my brother, my sister; and when they are by my side, I embrace them and them me.” When Jesus comes again, Smith preached in a sermon the following year, people will rise with their physical bodies—and with their social relationships. “The same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory.”
HEAVEN DRAWS NEAR
Six hundred and twenty thousand young men died in the Civil War—2 percent of the American population at the time. These statistics reflect many multiples of grief. Wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and sweethearts mourned over the devastation of their futures, and the heaven being offered from most pulpits—austere, brilliantly lit, full of God but devoid of humanity—offered no comfort. It was then, Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang argue in Heaven: A History, that the idea of a domesticated heaven really took hold in the popular imagination. In 1868, the twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Stuart Phelps published The Gates Ajar, a novel that became the Da Vinci Code of its time, denounced as heresy by some and heralded as revelation in others. It tells of a young woman who is left alone in the world by the death of her brother Roy in the war. “Shot dead,” the telegram read. The heroine, Mary, descends into a hell of grief. She won’t see people, she feels shut off from God. The dour old village pastor chides her but offers no consolation.
And then she receives a visit from an aunt, whom she had not seen since she was a girl. Aunt Winifred turns out to be like a fairy godmother or, more exactly, an angel. Winifred is learned in the Bible and devotional literature but she is also an expert in grief, having lost her husband prematurely to illness. Together with her young daughter, Faith, she brings Mary a Christian vision of heaven full of earthly delights and human company. Heaven, she teaches, is full of mountains “as we see them at sunset,” trees “as they look when the wind coos through them on a June afternoon,” pretty homes full of flowers and friends. Quoting the British romantic poet Charles Lamb, Winifred tells Mary that in heaven shall be “summer holidays, and the greenness of fields and the delicious juices of meats and fish, and society…and candle-light and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities.”
Roy, Winifred tells her niece, is nearby all the time, “trying to speak to you through the blessed sunshine and the flowers, trying to help you and sure to love you.” When the time comes for Mary finally to join Roy in heaven, she will listen to his jokes, “see the sparkle in his eye, and listen to his laughing voice.” She will be able to touch him and kiss him. When Mary hesitates, as she does from time to time, to ask if Winifred’s teachings are heresy, Winifred simply laughs. The Gates Ajar sold eighty thousand copies in the United States by the end of the century, surpassed in sales only by the Bible and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
As heaven grew “near,” Americans began to look beyond the boundaries of conventional Christianity for assurance that they would see their loved ones again. Some became Universalists—so called because they believe that everyone attains heaven in the end. Universalism started in Europe also in opposition to Calvin’s doctrine of predestination and flourished in the mid-1800s. While its adherents were aligned with the reforming social goals of Finney, Beecher, and other leaders of the Second Great Awakening, they rejected the notion preached at so many revivals that salvation was for Christians only. By their own definition, Universalists are Christians who “don’t believe a loving God could condemn anyone to hell for eternity.” In 1961, the Universalists formally joined forces with Unitarians (who don’t believe in a Trinitarian God), creating the Unitarian-Universalist denomination.
Others—many of whom were also Universalists—began to talk to the dead. Spiritualism started as a vogue around 1850 and peaked during the Civil War, despite continued disapproval from religious authorities. Among the earliest and most famous Spiritualists were Margaret and Kate Fox, two young sisters from Rochester, New York, who claimed the dead spoke to them through a series of knocks, raps, and taps. Their gift was discovered one evening when their mother heard a strange tapping on the walls of their small cottage and wondered aloud if the house was haunted. When the tapping continued, the girls began to ask questions of the spirit and soon it told them—through more taps—that it was the ghost of a Jewish peddler who had been murdered, beheaded, and buried under the house. The Foxes told their neighbors, who arrived in throngs, and the sisters became instantly famous. One night, according to contemporary reports, hundreds of people crowded into their cottage to talk to the dead.
Soon the girls took their show on the road, contacting spirits in theaters and holding séances in private homes. In New York City, Representative Horace Greeley expressed his conviction that the Fox sisters’ gifts were genuine. “It would be the basest cowardice not to say that we are convinced beyond a doubt of their perfect integrity and good faith,” he said. On his deathbed, the writer James Fenimore Cooper reportedly said, “Tell the Fox girls they have prepared me for this very hour.” For thirty years, the Fox sisters traveled America and Europe, charging admission to people interested in talking to spirits and inspiring generations of imitators. Spiritualists, whom today we would call “channelers,” rejected conventional ideas of heaven and hell, and believed that everyone in the end would be saved.
One astonishing night in 1888, however, Margaret Fox repudiated Spiritualism altogether. Before a crowded hall at the Academy of Music in New York City, she vowed to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Then, according to a New York Tribune account of the event, she put her stocking feet on a sounding board—a wooden plank that amplifies sounds—and she popped the knuckles in her toes. “The audience heard a series of raps, ‘rat-tat-tat-ta-tat-,’ increasing in sound from faint to loud, and apparently traveling up the wall and along the roof of the Academy.” Avowed Spiritualists, undeterred, said the Academy of Music performance should be discredited, but ultimately the sisters became a punch line. According to her 1893 New York Times obituary, Margaret died “in poverty and obscurity.”
Especially during the Civil War period, interest in Spiritualism was intense and widespread. Mary Todd Lincoln became obsessed with Spiritualism, and held séances at the White House at least eight times, eager to see her sons Eddie and Willie, who had died from childhood illnesses. (It is uncertain how often President Lincoln attended or how seriously he took them.) Mrs. Lincoln, who was able to get into trances herself, once declared to her half sister: “Willie lives. He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same adorable smile he always has had. Little Eddie is sometimes with him.” Planchettes, the triangular pieces that move across Ouija boards, went into mass production during the war and the first national Spiritualist convention was held in 1864.
But by the beginning of the twentieth century, the pendulum swung back again—and a new religious elite, influenced by Darwin, Marx, and Freud, impatient with a religiosity they saw as too naive and unsophisticated, once again emptied heaven of its people, its villages, its rooms and gardens. In exchange they offered an idea of the after life that was intellectually demanding and emotionally void. The twentieth-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965) called the reliance on “real” images of heaven a “literalistic distortion” with “neurotic consequences.” And so across the country, mainline pastors talked about heaven only when they had to—and without making it seem too real. “I’m not interested in speculating on the architecture or the geography” of heaven, the Methodist minister J. Philip Wogman told Time magazine in 1997. “We dig a lot deeper. I preach on trust in God.”
But the fundamental human longing to be with the ones you love, especially family members, defies Tillich’s derision and strict rationality, and online the idea that people will see lost loved ones has launched a cottage industry. Dozens of small companies help the bereaved to set up memorial sites, like Facebook pages, where friends and relatives can post their memories and condolences. Sammy Hicks, a retired electrician from Disputana, Virginia, died in February 2009 and his children put up a page on ChristianMemorials.com. “You were a great man daddy, and you will be missed so much. We will keep your memory alive through Joshua, he loved his Papaw so much. I’ll see you in heaven.” Johnnie Lane Parker Sr. died of congestive heart failure that same month in Hughesville, Maryland. On the site ValleyOfLife.com, his friend Tony Jr. wrote, “JP will be greatly missed, but his spirit will live on. We will see him again. Believe it.” A smiley face punctuated that message.
Anne Foerst, a German-born believing Lutheran, is also a professor of computer science and theology at St. Bonaventure University in western New York. For years she ran the “God and Computers” project at MIT. She is interested in the way computers reflect and change our ideas about religious faith. Foerst believes that the ubiquity of online memorials reflects a failure on the part of mainline Protestant churches to give people a meaningful heaven. “Here come the intellectual Protestants and try to make theology something that is rational,” she said to me one morning in one of our regular phone conversations. From the time we are about three years old, she explains, we have an understanding of being unlike other people, and we live our lives with an overwhelming yearning to overcome that primal estrangement. We strive constantly—in marriage, in work, in friendship—to close the gaps between ourselves and other people. Heaven as a place of happy reunions, especially with family members, is an imaginative way of resolving loneliness and the inevitable schisms between ourselves and the people we love. “We are close to our family, we are alike, but at the same time there’s so much passion—even negative passion. Even if you fight with your siblings, a family member is someone you cannot lose.” The Internet, says Foerst, finally creates for people “a space of unestranged togetherness.” The memorials themselves may be kitschy or saccharine, but the longing that produces them is not.
Online, the question of whether people will enjoy the company of pets in heaven triggers explosions of sentiment. For a 2001 poll conducted by ABC News and BeliefNet.com, a website for adherents of all religious faiths and spiritual inclinations, 43 percent of people answered the question “Will we see our pets in heaven?” in the affirmative. Among pet owners, that number was 47 percent. And at Critters.com, pet owners who memorialize their dogs or cats or parrots often express the certainty that they’ll meet again. To comfort bereaved pet owners, the site’s Webmasters have posted a little prose-poem called “The Rainbow Bridge.” This bridge is where deceased pets wait, restored to their former vigor and health, for their owners to come get them. They play happily together, in warmth and comfort until “the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance…. His eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster. You have been spotted…. You cling together in joyous reunion.” The poem seems to have struck a chord: the site currently indexes hundreds of customized pages mourning lost dogs and cats, or paying poignant tribute to departed ponies, iguanas, and parrots.
Americans continue to believe that their dead wait for them nearby—on a rainbow bridge, if you will. Twenty-one percent of people believe you can talk to the dead, according to a 2005 Gallup poll. On a sleeting, gray evening, I called on Glenn Klausner. He is a medium with a good reputation, who came recommended by a friend. Klausner is in his mid-thirties and grew up in Brooklyn. His apartment is on an upscale block of town houses and apartment buildings on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, but his own building is modest and a little in need of repair.
He works out of his small apartment, talking to the dead in his living room, notable for its lack of any personal detail. It has a leather couch, a couple of houseplants, and a sleek black table. Klausner’s physical appearance is similarly neutral. Aside from a bushy head of glossy dark hair, cut to emulate a young Paul McCartney, he transmits no obvious sexuality, no idiosyncrasies. He is thin and pale, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. He has a tiny silver earring in his left ear.
Klausner has been talking to the spirits of the dead since he was a child—and he adds that he always knew who was on the phone before his mother answered it. He has been a professional medium since 1995. He works four days a week, and sees about forty clients a month, by phone and in person. Most of those who contact him have recently lost a loved one. He charges $350 an hour.
“Heaven,” he says after we sit down at the black table and he hands me a glass of water, “actually is not above us or below us, but all around us. When I’ve asked spirits what it’s like to transition out of the body, they say it’s nothing—like walking from the kitchen to the bathroom.” Spirits design their own personal heavens, he says, according to their own desires. Some live in mansions, some in high-rise apartments, some in country houses. They travel easily between one another’s dwellings because they can circumnavigate the world in an instant: one spirit recently told Klausner that he had been to the Galápagos Islands; he was helping his granddaughter on earth plan a vacation.
I ask Klausner whether it’s true that in heaven there is no sickness, anger, or jealousy, and he says yes. “There are no health care issues, no monetary issues—if someone had stage four cancer they don’t take that with them.” I ask what kind of bodies the spirits have, and Klausner answers this way: “They have what’s called an astral body. Let’s say you had an uncle who looked like Dick Van Dyke—I can see that. [I don’t.] The spirits that I deal with, it’s really their personality that comes through, though a lot of spirits go back to looking like their best. They’ll come back looking like they did when they were thirty.”
I can’t help myself. I ask him if he can channel someone for me. But Klausner refuses to channel spirits by name. He simply contacts the spirit world and talks to whoever comes. I am hoping that he’ll find my grandmother, Rita, with whom I found so much comfort as a child—and well into my thirties. She and my grandfather put me up in their extra bedroom when I first moved to New York, broke and ambitious, and over the years she took care of me in small, important ways. She took me with her on the express bus to Loehmann’s discount clothing store in the Bronx. She cooked for me, she stroked my hair as I rested on her couch. We drank scotch together, and watched tennis on television. I miss her all the time, but especially around the High Holy Days—not because she was religious; we never went to temple together—but because she was such a skilled cook. For more than a decade, I spent Rosh Hashanah sitting at her little round dining table, just the three of us: my grandmother on my left, my grandfather across from me, and me, the oldest grandchild, holding forth or sullen, but always knowing how cherished I was. Flowered napkins were rolled into napkin rings and a silver tray always held matzo and crackers. My grandmother served gefilte fish and soup, brisket and couscous, salad with inimitable dressing—creamy, with shallots and fresh-cut dill—and poached plums for dessert. I have been telling my daughter how beautiful Rita was in the photographs of her as a girl, with long auburn braids down to her bottom and tied with ribbon. I would really love to see her.
The person Klausner finds on the other side is, unfortunately, unrecognizable. He’s bald, Klausner reports, with fringes of hair on the sides of his head. He’s a father figure, and he looks like Ed Asner. I don’t know who that is, I say. My own father is, thankfully, alive—and he doesn’t look like Ed Asner. My father-in-law? Klausner asks. Perhaps, I say. I never met my father-in-law, who died the summer before I met my husband, but based on the pictures I’ve seen, this doesn’t sound like him. Klausner reassures me; sometimes, he says, spirits appear in forms different from the ones they inhabited in life. He listens to the spirit. My father-in-law is a brusque person, Klausner says; he has a temper. Klausner reports that the Ed Asner figure wants to apologize to my husband, Charlie, for not being a better father, for not listening to him. And though I’m fully aware that such an apology is emotional boilerplate—it could apply to any parent-child relationship—tears spring to my eyes anyway.
And then the trail goes cold. Klausner reports that my father-in-law was involved in some illegal activities: he hid money in his house. (My father-in-law was no criminal.) He reports that my father-in-law was a drinker of clear liquor. Wrong again: Laverne loved bourbon. He sends greetings from the afterworld from Alice, Roslyn, Dorothy, and Ruth. I don’t recognize the names, and when I ask Charlie later, he confirms that they’re no one he knows. At this point, I begin earnestly to try to bring Klausner back to his little apartment, but he’s too far gone. The Ed Asner character wants to tell his wife that she’s taking too much Valium. That’s when the rest of my credulity vanishes. My mother-in-law is eighty-six years old. She’s a little bit forgetful and not quite as quick on her feet as she used to be, but she doesn’t take Valium and is as hale as a horse.
I will not rule out the possibility of an afterlife, but I do rule out the idea that my father-in-law, a man I never knew in life, is watching over me, disguised as Ed Asner, on some astral plane—and that Glenn Klausner has access to him. Klausner seems like a perfectly nice person and he probably believes his own stories. But I remain doubtful. In a phone call later, Klausner rejected any question about the authenticity of his gifts or the solace he has given to so many. “I have years of track record,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of tremendous work. Not every reading is dead on. I’ll be honest, I work with a person who’s paying me, and if the reading’s a bomb, I don’t take a dime…. That shows integrity of character in me.” For my part, I believe Klausner traffics in grief. If he really has this gift, he should always give it for free.