The New Eden

The other day I accepted a tract from an old lady who was sitting on the low stone wall of the glass-fronted residential tower near our home.  "Life in a Peaceful New World" was its title, printed over a picture of an autumn landscape with a blue lake dotted with villas in the middle distance and snow-capped mountains at the horizon.  The scene is populated by smiling workers harvesting the fruits of the season, a couple whose daughter is petting a lion, while two deer walk by, a mother and daughter, who are both stroking the head of a brown bear, and a young couple walking hand in hand towards the lake. But then everyone is young in this picture, young and beautiful.  It ‘s the artist’s vision of a modern Garden of Eden, with not a serpent in sight.

“When you look at the scene on this tract,” the text begins…does not your heart yearn for the peace, happiness, and prosperity seen there?”  It’s not a dream, not a fantasy, the text continues, in spite of the realities of today’s world: “war, crime, sickness, aging – to mention a few.”  All can be banished if we “learn God’s will and then do it,“ when, according to Psalm 37:29 “the righteous themselves will possess the earth, and they will reside forever upon it.”

I was amused by the idea of God’s kingdom abolishing aging, since He has also commanded us to be fruitful and multiply.  As it is, the source of some of the world’s ills is overcrowding.  The prospect of never growing old, of one’s children catching up to us in age and then never changing, of living forever, with nothing to make us appreciate the gift of being alive, is not my idea of Heaven on Earth.

Perhaps it will be possible to banish hunger and not impossible if even less likely to eliminate war, but to erase crime, sickness, and aging is to alter the human condition, to make us like the angels, to make us, in other words, unreal.  

I’m reminded of a scene in Woody Allen’s "The Purple Rose of Cairo" when an actor steps out of the screen into the audience and talks to the character played by Mia Farrow.  "But you're not real," she tells him.  “But I can learn to be real,” he says.  I’m already real and glad of it.