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So Osama bin Laden dies and goes to heaven.

He's pretty excited about this. After all, from his perspective he's led a righteous life, has sacrificed himself to the glory of Allah, and so he's really looking forward to all the pleasures that have been promised him in the afterlife.

He arrives at the Pearly Gates, there, and just as he is about to scamper through, who should come towards him but George Washington! And George Washington takes one look at Osama, screams "YOU INJURED MY COUNTRY!" and starts hitting him and kicking him.

"Ow, ow, ow!" says Osama. "What's all this?"

But before George can answer, who should appear but Dolly Madison, and she starts whacking Osama up side the head with a stick.

And then George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemmings and Robert E. Lee pile on, along with a whole bunch of other people Osama has never seen before, and they're all whacking and kicking him, and Osama sticks his head up out of the pile and says "Hey! St. Peter! What's up with this? I was supposed to have date palms, rivers of wine and seventy four virgins!"

"Oh dear," says St. Peter. "You misunderstood. It's seventy four Virginians."

By definition, a factual description of the afterlife is something no one living is qualified to offer. And still, as religious beings, we feel compelled to speak of that which is beyond words. To get at the truths that lie beyond fact, we have to create myths. I don't mean that we have to tell lies. The story we tell can be wholly fictional, or the story can be factually correct, and still be a myth in the scholarly sense. A myth is a story that illustrates the organizing principles by which we are to understand and live in the world.

How do we understand this, for example: That we live, you and I. That we have this sense of "I am," of being, that we are conscious of ourselves, that we know, create, anticipate, have relationships and ideas, memories and ambitions...and then we die. Our bodies will someday stop moving, grow cold, decay, apparently abandoned by the "I am" both felt and recognized within; what happens to that "I am?"

There are really only three possibilities.

The first is pretty simple: if the soul is contiguous with the body, or indeed, is just an activity of the body, then it also dies. Perhaps we can imagine elements of energy and light released for recycling, just as the proteins, calcium and iron, the matter of our bodies are released through decay. But otherwise, death is death. Finito. The end. For the most part, when Jewish scripture bothers to discuss what happens after death, this is the idea they are most apt to affirm.

The second possibility is reincarnation, in which the still-dynamic soul abandons the defunct body and resumes life in a new one. This possibility is actually present in the New Testament. One of the answers given to the question "Who is Jesus?" is "Jesus is the prophet Elijah, come back to life." But reincarnation may be more familiar to us from Hinduism and Buddhism. We should remind ourselves, however, that for Hindus and Buddhists, reincarnation is not really a good thing. With sufficient dedication and discipline, a seeker achieves enlightenment and her reward is that she breaks free of the cycle of birth and rebirth, stops "coming back to life," and is finally and permanently dead, beyond suffering.

Then there is the third possibility, namely that a human soul has, or will someday have, a continued, conscious, individual existence in an afterlife---heaven or hell---which either does not require a body, or which resurrects or recreates the body in some invulnerable, eternal form.

That third possibility---eternal life---is the one Christianity seized upon. Christianity began with a Jewish prophet and retained the Jewish scriptures, but the early Christians notions of the afterlife were heavily influenced by the Greek-speaking, Hellenistic world in which the Christian movement took shape.

800 years later, the prophet Mohammad and his followers were very much influenced by the ideas of local Christians---remember that, in the first millennium, Christianity was thriving in the Middle East---so Muslims developed a quite Christian, rather un-Jewish emphasis on the post-mortem disposition of the believer's soul. And Mohammad, unlike Jesus, didn't fiddle around with a lot of obscure metaphors for heaven; Mohammad laid it right out. Muslims who take Muslim scripture literally, therefore, will indeed expect Heaven to offer date palms, rivers of wine and seventy-four nubile young women to serve them -- and here it becomes pretty clear that the Koran was describing heaven more or less exclusively for men, doesn't it? Perhaps I'm wrong on that. After all, I don't read Arabic, and for all I know, the word "virgin" is a gender-neutral noun. Maybe, upon arrival in the afterlife, a heterosexual woman can expect to be greeted by seventy-four adolescent males? But that sounds like hell to me, date palms or no date palms.

Which brings us to the heart of the problem with heaven: What would a place of perfect and perpetual bliss look like? Smell like? Sound like? And isn't it different for each of us? Funny; we have no trouble agreeing on a common vision of Hell. The book of Revelation describes the misery in sulfurous detail. Medieval artists got a lot of visual mileage out of scenes of Lucifer and his minions camping out by the lake of fire, stewing thieves in a cookpot and tearing caterwauling adulterers limb-from-limb. By comparison, poems and paintings of heaven tend to be static, banal and, perhaps therefore, rather uncommon.

Infinite torment was not hard to imagine for a medieval population afflicted by chronic starvation, conflict and epidemic disease. And eternal misery is not a difficult concept for the modern with a migraine, either, nor for those suffering from arthritis, cancer, clinical depression, mourning. there are so many painful experiences with real staying power.

I can't think of any pleasurable experiences in life that similarly maintain their intensity, undiminished, over time. Children can sustain rapture for quite a while by adult standards, but even they can't make it last indefinitely.

My daughter Woolie, for example, looked forward to Hallowe'en for weeks. To her, it sounded like an occasion of limitless rapture. Imagine! All the candy you could possibly want! Talk about heaven.she counted down the days!

The magic moment finally arrived. Woolie went out into the night and returned, her cheeks pink with excitement under the facepaint, her grocery sack bulging with loot. She carefully sorted the treasure on the living room carpet: All the candy bars in one pile, the Life Savers in another, the Dubbble-Bubble, the chocolate coins, the candy necklaces, the Necco Wafers. At last, hands trembling, she selected a Fun Size Almond Joy, peeled off the wrapper and bit into it. Hallelujah!

She went on to gobble a handful of candy corn...savored six starburst fruit chews...munched a Snickers bar...you could watch the excitement fading. A sense of workmanlike discipline kept her going. She ate a peanut butter cup and a Charlestown Chew. She ate a Red Hot Atomic Fireball. Grimly, she slurped the syrup out of a set of wax lips...managed one more Tootsie Pop...one more Hershey's Kiss. With that Kiss, it was over. She was sick to her stomach, groaning and pale, she swore never to touch another sweet thing again as long as she lived. Another year, another repetition of Hallowe'en's harsh lesson in the first of the Buddha's four noble truths; Pleasure is fleeting. Sweetness turns bitter, joy doesn't last. Life is suffering.

So picture poor old Osama, lolling under the date palms by the river of wine with his virgins. He's got a stomach ache from all the dates, he's sick of Chablis. The virgins all want to talk about their relationship issues forever and ever and ever. Life is suffering. And if it's life, then eternal life must be suffering, too.

"I don't want to live forever," one of my seminary classmates proclaimed. "I'm sick of myself already!" I know just what she means. I know just what she means. Really! Spend forever with myself? Look, I've got quirks. I've got eccentricities. Okay, I've learned, over the years, to tolerate myself well enough, but eternity is a long time to spend with someone who, for all her good qualities, talks a lot, is a compulsive knitter, can't keep track of car keys, and still, at the age of forty, has issues with her mother.

And eternity is a long time to carry certain images around. The image of my husband's body in a coffin, for example, or of the fire that---for a moment at least---seemed to have taken my children away from me a few summers ago. Of course, maybe in heaven it will be given unto me to forgive Mom, to stop missing Drew and fearing fire. The heavenly me will never knit the sleeves too long on a sweater, never be crabby or idiotic or afraid. Maybe in heaven I will be perfect, and perfectly happy. But if I'm perfect, and perfectly happy, I won't be me. And if I'm not me, in heaven, not Kate Braestrup, the same Kate Braestrup you see before you in this pulpit, then Kate Braestrup will be dead.

Jesus is no help on this.

He never talks about heaven directly. He says things like "In my father's house are many mansions," (John 14) or "the kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed," or "the kingdom of heaven is like yeast, mixed in with flour" (MT. 13) These do not sound like the remarks of a man who has the architecture and geography of a place laid out neatly in his mind. And why would he? When Jesus offered his parables about Heaven, he wasn't talking about how we die, but about how we live.

My son Zach is the child of Unitarian-Universalists, so naturally he didn't know a lot about Jesus. I heard a lot about Jesus at my Christian seminary, and a lot of it was pretty cool. So one day, I found myself telling Zach about Jesus' life and death, the stories they told about him, what he is quoted as saying to his followers.

"When Jesus talked about loving as God loves," I said, "I think he meant something really radical. He told his followers to give everything they had, everything they were, to hold nothing back, not money, not time, not even life itself, everything was to be given over the service of love."

I went on about this for awhile, sermonizing in a motherly sort of way, and Zach listened carefully, because even as a young boy, he was always a careful listener.

"So, Mom," he said at last. "Let's say I decide to become a follower of Jesus Christ." "What?" I said, startled and alarmed. "No, but let's say I do." "Yes," I said cautiously. "And I die, and because I'm a Christian, I get to go to heaven instead of going to hell." "...yeah." "If I really take Jesus seriously, if I really am willing to give up everything I am and everything I've got in the service of love, if I am really a Christian...it seems to me I would have to give my place in heaven to someone else, someone who otherwise wouldn't get to go." I just stared at him. "I'd have to go to hell, so this other person could be in heaven. Right Mom? Do I have it right?"

Every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill be made low. "That's right, my love."

If you want my considered opinion on what I think actually happens to us when we die...I gotta tell you, I think we just die. I think we cease to exist, in any way, shape or form, except for the memories we leave behind with those who are still living. This has the starchy sound of certitude, as if I could cite research to back up my conclusions, but in fact you can't prove or disprove heaven in a lab. So my disbelief in any afterlife whatsoever is doubtless driven by my own desires and fears.

You know, sometimes I remember something funny that my late husband said, some off-hand comment that still makes me crack up, and I think: Ah! To be able to make someone I love laugh, years after I'm gone, that is all the immortality I could ever ask for.

But what if I'm wrong?

Let's say you die...and then you don't die?

And there's heaven and hell and all the rest of it, then what? That's when I think about Zach's interpretation of Jesus' message: If you are, in Christian terms, following Christ -- or in my Unitarian-Universalist terms, if you are in love -- then you are in heaven no matter where you are. If you are not in love, you are in hell, no matter where you are.

The stories we tell of heaven and hell are not about how we die, but about how we live.

Two summers ago, as some of you know, Woolie and Zach were badly burned when the gasoline my cousin Charlie was using to ignite a backyard brush fire essentially exploded in their faces. Being burned in a fire, incidentally, is one of the classic images for hell, and I have to say, it's a pretty powerful one. Being burned hurts a lot.

As I drove my burned loved ones to the hospital, I had the 911 dispatcher on the cell phone. She kept asking me whether anyone was having trouble breathing. What she knew, that I didn't know, is that if Charlie and the kids had inhaled the scalding air at the moment of ignition, the insides of their lungs would begin to swell and shred, and they could die very quickly. So she kept saying "are they breathing?" And I would hold the cell phone up in the air, so she could hear the hellish sounds of them cursing and crying.

Charlie was cursing and crying, because his own burns hurt and because he knew that the fire that had injured these children was his mistake, his fault. He was the adult who had decided to use gasoline to start the fire, and his was the hand that struck the match. So when he cursed, he cursed himself. "Are they breathing?" the dispatcher said, and I held up the cell phone. Charlie, seated beside me, in the passenger seat -- in hell -- said: "Oh my God. I am so sorry. I am so sorry."

Zach was sitting behind him, in the back seat. In the middle of his own loud litany of Oh God and Oh Hell, Zach leaned forward. He reached out with his burned arm, an arm blistering and shredding before his eyes, and put his burned hand on Charlie's shoulder.

"It's all right, Charlie," he said. "We love you."

If you are living in love, you are in heaven no matter where you are.

May heaven hold you. May you live in love.

Blessed be.