A couple of weeks ago I passed a long studied-for exam. As it was the first exam I’d passed in 18 years, I was delighted. I went out that night and met a few friends from work, had a nice meal, a few beers and came home a happy man. And that’s where my happy buzz ended for the night, because when I got home I found my little pet hamster had died.

Kind of funny right? Like something from a Farrelly brothers movie. Well, while the dark humour of it wasn’t lost on me, I did feel genuine sadness, because (as ridiculous as it sounds) I couldn’t help but see a noble aspect to how she went about her final couple of minutes. Knowing that she was about to die, some latent programming kicked in: she left her nest, dug a small hole in the centre of the cage, curled into a ball inside it and simply stopped breathing. I guess, in the wild, they know that it would be unhygienic to decompose in the nest. But to me as an emotional human observer, this was a sad thing to see.

Right, so what has all this got to do with heaven?

Well it starts with this: I’ve yet to speak to anyone, religious or not, who would say that my hamster is going to heaven. The notion is ridiculous, right? Of course it is. We are the only creatures chosen by God to go to heaven (as long as we worship the “right” God, but that’s a different matter). Hell there’s even people signing up to have their pets taken care of by atheists after the rapture!

So why should we deserve this honour? Why are we any better than cats, dogs, sheep, dolphins, fleas, cockroaches or whales? Why stop there? In the grand scheme of things, in the vast, incomprehensible, tick-tocking march of time, why should anything we do matter, or make any difference, in the “universal” long run? Why should it buy us a ticket to heaven? Looking at the big picture, does anything we do matter any more than the things the creatures all around us do on a daily basis? Do we get a heaven purely because we’re self aware? Why does that deserve to elevate us on the heavenly scale? Is it because we can appreciate beauty? One man’s beauty is another man’s rotten apple.

Our human heaven is borne of our human arrogance. The egotistical notion that we are more important than every other creature. And we’re not.

Perhaps it’s just that we’re too close to the earth to see that we’re no different than anything else on it. Maybe if every person got to see what the earth looks like from the moon, more would realise that we’re all just the same. We’re all struggling to survive. We’re all affected in similar ways by our many different loves.

I think, the pictures we paint, the songs we sing and the art we bring to life  matter right now. Sometimes that now lasts in the brief moments after the right words are spoken, and sometimes that now lasts a few thousand years in the right story or oil painting, but never the less, that now is fleeting. And that’s why we should treasure it. That’s why our lives matter at this very moment. That’s why we should do everything we can to make sure that our fellow human beings can enjoy their now as much as we do. Because there is no heaven, just now.

I think, these lives are all we have, so we should do all we can to make sure that whatever silly little dream we carry around in our hearts, happens.
And we should start now.