Profaning Faith

Lamenting a loss of vision, poet William Wordsworth famously wrote in Intimations of Immortality:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparell'd in celestial light,

The glory and freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;-

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen, I can see no more.

The poet hasn't gone blind literally, but has lost the gift of the child's eye, the child's natural ability to see the quotidian "apparell'd in celestial light."

The adult, they say, has to live with the burden of a particular kind of blindness which comes from experiencing life. Unlike the child, the adult can't see heaven on earth.

A recent New York Times bestseller in the non-fiction category, Heaven is for Real, celebrates the child's ability, not only to see heaven, but also to report back, with clarity, to his parents, all that he has seen, once he's back on earth.

But the child, Colton Burpo, is no Wordsworthian child; he doesn't see earth bathed in celestial brightness. He sees the heavenly light in heaven.

The story of a toddler's brief sojourn in heaven is summarized very well by Maud Newton:

At 3 years 10 months, Colton Burpo was a sunny child, a preacher’s son certain of his faith and his eternal fate. Then his appendix burst, and as doctors failed to figure out what was wrong with him, he lay in a hospital bed until his father, Todd, saw “the shadow of death” cross his face. “I recognized it instantly,” Todd, a pastor, recalls. With Colton’s face “covered in death,” Todd and his wife, Sonja, took the boy to another hospital, where he was wheeled into surgery. “He’s not in good shape,” the surgeon said. As Colton screamed for his father, Todd fled, locked himself in a room and railed at God.
Less than two hours later, Colton was awake, still shouting for his father. “Daddy, you know I almost died,” he said. But only over the months following his recovery did his parents hear his whole story: that while in surgery, he went to heaven and met Jesus, who assigned him homework; he also encountered angels, a rainbow-hued horse, John the Baptist, God the father, the Holy Spirit, a sister his mother miscarried (unknown to Colton) before he was born and his great-grandfather, Pop, as a young man. Everyone in heaven had wings; Colton’s were smaller than most. He learned that the righteous, including his father, would fight in a coming last battle.

So convinced is Colton that he was really in heaven during the time the doctors performed a surgical procedure, that he saw the doctor as a mere tool of Jesus' will:

"Dad, Jesus used Dr. O'Holleran to help fix me [...] Colton told his father as he asked him to pay the hospital bill which had amounted to a whopping 23k. 

It's easy to understand why in this day and age readers would take to this story. The average reader, despairing about the astronomical cost of basic health care, would have her anxiety assuaged by the thought of a Jesus that would come to her (financial) aid if she had faith enough.

With hyper-inflationary trends and the cycle of recession, stories of faith-based solutions to real social problems are attractive sellers.

Didn't Karl Marx once famously predict a relationship of inverse proportionality between poverty and religion? Else, how to account for the enormous popularity with the rapture stories, collectively titled Left Behind?

But Marx also spoke about change and the irresistible encroachment of modernity into our lives--the wheel of history will roll, he said, rendering into vapor all that was once "solid", and into lumps of profanity all that was once "sacred".

Books like Heaven and propagation of the virtue of absolute faith by politicians like Rick Santorum, is a fulfillment, not negation, of Marx's prophecy.

The wheel of history is rolling. What was revered as sacred even thirty years ago is now a commodity that is to be sold for money, media-attention and in the case of faith-based politics, votes.

Heaven's success has emboldened the Burpo family to expand into a multi-medium, million dollar empire, replete with bestselling picture books and a movie version in the making on the foundations of something quintessentially sacrosanct like faith. 

It's strange that the profaning of the sacred in this sense is not remarked upon, but innumerable bones are picked about the other, more obvious kind of profanation, reflected in yet another bestseller of our times, Fifty shades of Grey.