By GEORGE A. KENDALL
Why is the idea of reincarnation so fascinating to so many of us? Even a devout Catholic like mystery writer Mary Higgins Clark, who, while denying that she actually believes in reincarnation, clearly shares this fascination, and has used the idea in several of her novels. And I have to admit that it fascinates me at times.
In the first place, the obvious: Reincarnation is incompatible with Christian teaching. The clear witness of Scripture tells us: “It is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27). In other words, we only have one shot at this. Each human life is a unique, never to be repeated event.
The idea of reincarnation, with its dualistic notion of the relationship of body and soul, is fundamentally at odds with the Christian picture of man. For Christians, the soul is the substantial form of the body — it gives life to the body and is made to be the form of this particular body. Its relationship to the body is an intimate one — the particular soul and the particular body are made for each other.
For gnostic dualism, on the contrary, the soul is something with no intrinsic relationship to the body, actually made to exist without a body, but somehow imprisoned, at least for a time, in one. It can move from one body to another, even to the body of an animal or a plant. There is no mutual indwelling of body and soul — the soul is sort of like a little man in a control tower pressing buttons and pulling levers to control the body. It is, in a manner of speaking, like a foreign “body” within the body. Body and soul are not, together, a composite, but just two separate things yoked together for a time. In a way, the word reincarnation is a misnomer, because there is no incarnation about it.
That does not mean there may not be spiritual truths behind the belief in reincarnation, truths which some misinterpret by reading that belief into them. A clue to those spiritual realities may be found in our earliest memories, something Wordsworth did in his poem, Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood. My own experience, when I bring my memories of early childhood to mind, is the deep sense of mystery which these recollections evoke in me. My earliest childhood memories are from the age of three, so when I recall them now, it is at a distance in time of 70 years, a reality in itself quite mysterious.
These memories come from a time when I had developed just enough of an awareness of myself as an individual to make it possible for some of my experiences to be kept as memories, even though they are still not terribly far away from the mystery of the beginning, a mystery like a light shining behind us and in some way still illuminating us. There was a point where we realized that we were, that we had being. And here we come to the huge mystery that there was a time when we were not, something as impossible to be believed as the idea that there will come a time when we will be no more.
It is impossible, really, not to believe that we came from somewhere or something, some huge, mysterious reality that looms behind these memories — that we were not just “thrown into” the world, as the existentialists like to think. And that belief is true. We come from eternity and ultimately we return to eternity, an awareness which tends to gain strength in old age. We distort this awareness, though, when we forget that eternity is not time, it is not an indefinite extension of time into the past or the future, but the transcendent reality beyond time.
When people get confused about this, they interpret the experience of coming from eternity, of having eternity in some way prior to their present existence in time, as meaning that they previously existed in a time before their present life-time. That misunderstanding actually does away with the original experience, because it takes away eternity and replaces it with time.
Of course, we do hear stories about people who claim to remember past lives, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras being a prominent example. While doubtless many of these claims are fraudulent, I see no reason to believe that they all are. The only speculation I can offer here is that, because all souls have their source in eternity, all are connected. A particular soul may have special, mysterious relationships to other souls in this community of souls, and may even, in exceptional cases, become conscious of these connections. Something like this might well be compatible with Catholic belief in the Communion of Saints. But this is all pure speculation.
It is one thing, though, to suspect that these connections with other souls may be a reality, and quite another to assert that these souls were all different versions of myself in past times. The coming into being of an incarnate being, sharing in both the material and spiritual aspects of being, is an unrepeatable event — only one to a customer.
The beginning of a human life is a transcendent event; it is a point of meeting of time and the timeless. Something utterly mysterious happens during the process in which we go from two cells, neither of them human, to an embryo which is human — from the components to the composite which is a human being, however rudimentary. When you have this event at the very beginning of your life, an event in which time and eternity both partake (Plato’s metaxu, the “in-between”), it is bound to cast a shadow over the rest of your life, however determined you may be to ignore it.
This casts a whole new light on the sanctity of human life. As Wordsworth so beautifully wrote:
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:/ The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,/ Hath had elsewhere its setting,/ And cometh from afar:/ Not in entire forgetfulness,/ And not in utter nakedness,/ But trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home.”
“The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7).
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I remarked, in a previous article commenting on the impossibility of the U.S. successfully fighting a war in the Middle East to pacify the region, that we need to think in terms of a containment strategy. An important part of that would be to secure our borders.
Now people tell me that such a thing cannot be done in the present political climate. To which my response is: That may be true, but if it is, we are pretty much doomed, because if we lack the will do something about our borders, then we certainly lack the will to fight an all-out war in the Middle East.
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For many years now, a lot of my attention has been focused on my hopes for a restoration of Christendom, something I have in common with most of The Wanderer gang. Now I am beginning to wonder if there are grounds for that hope. Like others in my age group, I have memories of growing up in the 1940s and 1950s of the last century, in a time when there were at least vestiges of Christian civilization in the Western world, and Christianity was still a powerful force in society.
That is just about gone now. We see so many signs of the rapid decline of Christian influence in society — the falling away from the faith of so many people raised in the Catholic Church, for instance; the huge numbers of young people for whom Christianity is nothing more than an eccentricity held to by elderly people like myself; the fact that ex-Catholics have become the biggest religious group in the country; the increasing effort to force Christians to support the agenda of the insane asylum we live in today — things like same-sex “marriage” and abortion and euthanasia, and to penalize them for any expression of Christian teaching that conflicts with that agenda, and so on ad nauseam.
I will not try to predict the future (having been burned in that endeavor several times in the past), but it seems likely to me that we may be headed for a future as a Church in diaspora, a Church scattered throughout the world in small groups, something like the Jews. This does not mean that the Church will disappear.
We need to remember that the first three centuries of the Church’s history were lived out in relatively small Christian communities meeting for the Eucharist in each other’s homes — no huge cathedrals, probably few buildings at all of the kind that we now call churches, much of the institutional and sacramental life of the Church carried on in secret amid persecutions.
Yet the Church, living like this, was a powerful leaven in the world, eventually overcoming even the power of Rome. Much as we might long for Christendom, we have no reason to believe that it is God’s will for us to live our Christian life in that kind of setting. It may be His will for us to serve Him in diaspora. The fundamentals will remain constant — there will always be a Successor to Peter.
Again, no certainties about the future — it may be God’s will, after all, to restore Christendom. But we need to be prepared for the other possibility, and try to get ready to be the light of the world in diaspora. This could be how our descendants are called to serve.
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(© 2015 George A. Kendall)
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