If Heaven is reabsorption, then Creation had no point

In vain produced, all rays return;

Evil will bless, and ice will burn.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Uriel"

The return to the Father, by resurrection, is like reabsorption into one's source. Just as you are not consciously awake while sleeping, so you will have no conscious recognition of this ultimate glorification. . . . Imagine for a moment that God is a pond of clear water, so still and smooth that it is not visible; one cannot see the still clear water, but can only see through it. It seems invisible. But when conflict is introduced the surface of the pond is violated and waves run counter to each other and there is splashing and chaos, a scene of violence, making the pond very visible. . . . Ultimately, the redemption of the world will be a cessation of the splashing, of such changing, and there will only be the nature of God left.

-- Roger Hathaway, The Mystic Passion

God's gonna trouble the water

-- Negro spiritual

It is a very common idea among mystics, including Christian mystics like Roger Hathaway, that salvation ultimately means losing one's individuality and being reabsorbed into God. In Heaven, Hathaway says, "There is no longer a self, nor even a history of one . . . . The conscious individual self doesn't exist, even in memory. There is only 'Godness.'"

This is basically the Indian idea of nirvana, expressed in theistic terms. The ideal of nirvana arises from the recognition of the futility of the merely cyclical. Samsara -- the endless cycle of birth and death, birth and death -- is intolerable. Why gain only to lose? Why grow into maturity only to decline into senility? Why be born only to die? The point, then, is to escape from the wheel of samsara and enter nirvana -- or re-enter it, rather, since it is from that state that we originally came. This of course implies the corollary that samsara-and-nirvana is just another pointless cycle like birth-and-death -- a sort of higher-order "meta-samsara." A Taiwanese Buddhist friend of mine once explained that we were all originally Buddhas but had fallen into the world of maya, and that Enlightenment and parinirvana were a return to that original state. "But if Buddhas can fall into maya," I said, "how is becoming a Buddha a permanent escape from maya and samsara?" The answer of course is that it isn't and can't be. If state X led to state Y, then a return to state X is obviously no guarantee against Y. In vain produced, all rays return.

Returning to the Christian version of this doctrine, as expressed by Roger Hathaway (but certainly not only by him!), if there is "no longer a self, nor even a history of one," then the reabsorption -- the return to a former state -- is complete; and whatever it was that caused our "fall" from that former state to this present one, it can be expected to happen again. This is the myth of Sisyphus -- generally understood to be an encapsulation of hell, not of Heaven.

But suppose that what originally caused our "fall" from Heaven was God's free choice to create us as separate beings -- and that upon our return God will choose never to do so again. The Sisyphean cycle is thus avoided, but we are left with the question -- What was the point? Why create in the first place beings whose only purpose is to return to their pre-created state? It seems to reduce God to the level of the G.O.D. of York -- who, you will recall, marched his ten thousand men up a hill and then marched them down again.

There is certainly a sense in which Heaven is a "return" to God, but it cannot be entirely that. Nothing makes sense or has any point unless Heaven is a fundamentally new state.