Crime and Punishment

We got into a discussion in High Priests Group this morning. I’m not sure the particulars because I got a flash of inspiration that took me off onto my own tangent while the discussion went elsewhere. I would not have been able to remember even my tangent after coming home, shoveling the driveway and eating lunch but I had a little notebook in my pocket and I jotted enough down to recreate my thoughts.
The discussion centered on the goal of eternal life. In typical high priest fashion, we were debating the fine differences between “eternal life”, “exaltation”, and “immortality”. Most of the confusion revolved around the meaning of the first two. We all seemed to agree that immortality wasn’t such a prize unless it meant that your situation during the endless life were better than that which we find ourselves in now.
This whole discussion took place under the larger question of “why do we go to church?” One of the reasons of course is to warrant a better after-life. One of the men remarked that we weren’t ready to die yet since we weren’t ready for exaltation. Ever the voice a different perspective, I asked how we knew we weren’t ready for exaltation? If one of us were to die tonight, are we saying we would have no hope of heaven as Mormons define heaven in the fullest sense?
Death overtakes everyone who has ever lived before he or she is really ready for the celestial kingdom. This is true because no one becomes perfect in mortality. What qualifies us most for exaltation, or to be allowed to continue on the path of exaltation after we die is that we place ourselves firmly on the “improvement path” while we’re in mortality.
This is when the “thought” occurred to me.
We concern ourselves with becoming “better” but find it difficult to do much about it until we contemplate death, which serves as the ultimate deadline for getting good things accomplished. We also need to contemplate the threat inherent in that deadline; get it done before you die or else…or else what?
Will God put us in prison? Will he build a barrier that we can’t get through, over, under or around, that separates us from heaven?
My thought is that God might not need to do any such thing. What if all he has to do is remove the deadline and the threat. Won’t we separate ourselves from heaven without his needing to do anything “to” us at all? When we die, life will be good—even for the worst of us. And there will be no discernable deadline for us since time won’t be a linear thing for us anymore. Time will return to just “now”. We will lose the incentive to improve because we can do it later. But since later never comes, we don’t ever need to move. We’ll just stop progressing because we lack incentive to do so.
To me, this is a more awful thought than being thrown into prison by someone else. The notion of simply losing the incentive and desire to improve and therefore becoming immobile and unchanged is simply hideous.
If this thought represents at all the truth of how it will be “up there”, (and I’m not willing to defend the notion with any real vigor yet) then our only hope for the next life is to act in such a manner that moving forward and improving ourselves becomes the thing that we automatically do. It has to stop being what we do temporarily when the thought of the death deadline and the punishments or rewards on the other side goads us into some temporary action that is foreign to our natural habits. In other words, learning and following truth must be what we are about from the centermost part of our souls, if we are ever to continue to do that after we shrug off this mortal coil.
Anyway, that’s what happens to a man when he lets his mind drift in class. Probably better to stay focused on the main discussion.