Will You Fly Away?

So a few weeks back I was visiting my parents, who are religious. My grandmother, who is extremely religious, also lives with them now, and makes a habit of inviting us to go to church with them whenever we happen to be there on a Sunday morning. Well, on this particular occasion my daughter agreed to go, and I went as well.

The service wasn’t too bad to sit through, apart from disagreeing with most of what was said. Except for one really jarring piece that disturbed me greatly, and apparently my daughter as well based on later conversation. That piece was one of the hymns, where the entire congregation stood up and sang the following words to the strains of joyful musical accompaniment:

Some bright morning when this life is over
I'll fly away
To that home on Gods celestial shore
I'll fly away

I'll fly away, oh glory
I'll fly away in the morning
When I die hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away

When the shadows of this life have gone
I'll fly away
Like a bird from these prison walls I'll fly
I'll fly away

I'll fly away, oh glory
I'll fly away in the morning
When I die hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away

Oh how glad and happy when we meet
I'll fly away
No more cold iron shackles on my feet
I'll fly away

I'll fly away oh glory
I'll fly away in the morning
When I die hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away

I'll fly away oh glory
I'll fly away in the morning
When I die hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away

Just a few more weary days and then
I'll fly away
To a land where joys will never end
I'll fly away

I'll fly away oh glory
I'll fly away in the morning
When I die hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away
I'll fly away

I’ll be blunt about it: that is creepy as hell!

I mean, it’s not like it’s a horribly uncommon hymn. It’s actually pretty popular. As they were singing it, I could remember having sung it myself back when I still went to church. I just never really thought about it. But after being out of that culture for so long, catching this glimpse from an outsider’s perspective was like a punch in the gut.

I was standing in the middle of a crowd of better than a hundred people, all of whom were singing about how awesome it would be to die!

I mean, does anyone ever stop to think about how deranged that is? Doesn’t it trouble any of these people?

And we’re not even talking about dying to serve some great cause for which one might be glad to sacrifice oneself. The song portrays merely being dead as something so great, so wonderful, so glorious that being alive seems like “shadows,” by comparison. Life, in all its wonder, complexity, and vitality, is compared in this song to “prison walls,” and “iron shackles.”

OK. I get that Christian theology teaches that heaven will be a better existence than what we have here on earth. And in that context, I suppose it even makes sense that death would not be portrayed as something to be feared; that it could possibly even be a good thing. I can see why someone might want to believe that, in that it certainly allays anxiety induced by the fear of death. I guess I just don’t see why anyone actually does believe it.

And songs like this go well beyond trying to allay fears of death. They celebrate death. This song joyfully asserts the glorious wonderment of being dead as if it were an established fact that the singer were soaring off to an eternity of bliss (which, by the way, isn’t a certainty even within the context of the religion). It portrays death as something you should want far more than you should want to be alive.

If you’re like me, and don’t believe in the god posited by the religious traditions of which such hymns are a part, this sort of thing is very disturbing. It actively disparages the one and only life we know we get – the one we’re living right here and now – and encourages people to joyfully cast that life aside in favor of one that nobody has ever managed to demonstrate even exists. It looks like a hideous con game with people’s lives as the stakes rather than just their money. Except that nobody who gets to the other side of the con ever gets to come back and warn us that the con artist’s confident assurances of a better life are lies. You never have to hear from the victims about how they treated their real lives like a place to wipe their feet while waiting for the better life to show up, only to find out after they died that there was no better life. So you get to tell yourself that the reason you never hear about that disappointment is because those people are so full of joy and fulfillment that there is nothing for them to warn you about.

But it seems to me that the reason you don’t hear the complaints of the victims is the simple and obvious one: they’re dead.

So will you fly away? Maybe, maybe not. I can even hope for your sake that you will. But I can also hope, for everyone’s sake, that we not count on it. That we can dispel this song’s vision of this life as “shadows,” “prison walls,” and “iron shackles,” and give each other (and ourselves) the joys and comforts we know we can give in the here and now.