Stories about eternity force us to ask the three questions Paul Gauguin painted onto one of his greatest canvases: where do we come from, what are we, and where are we going? The Bible says God "has also set eternity in the human heart" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). We may ignore those questions for years, but sooner or later they come knocking.
Below are five sermon illustrations about eternity, each retold in full in our own words: a painter's despairing masterpiece, a lonely telephone operator who taught a boy about "other worlds to sing in," a cardinal's hope of homecoming, the darkest line in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a Roman general whose battle cry still echoes. Each one ends with a takeaway for preaching or reflection.
Stories in this post:
- Gauguin's Questions: Where Are We Going?
- Information Please: Other Worlds to Sing In
- The Homecoming: What Awaits Us?
- Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Future Without Hope?
- Gladiator: What We Do in Life Echoes in Eternity
Gauguin's Questions: Where Are We Going?
Paul Gauguin is one of the most famous French artists of the late nineteenth century. He had worked as a sailor and then as a successful stockbroker before deciding to give himself entirely to painting. In 1885 he left his wife and five children in Copenhagen to pursue life as an artist. He spent much of his later life abroad, and his final years were marked by poverty, illness and despair in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia.
In Tahiti in 1897 and 1898, in the depths of that despair, Gauguin painted what he believed would be his last and greatest work. It is a huge canvas, almost four metres wide, titled Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? It now hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The painting is meant to be read from right to left. On the right, three women sit beside a sleeping baby: the beginning of life, "Where do we come from?" In the middle, young adults go about their daily existence, one of them reaching up to pick fruit: "What are we?" On the far left, an old woman crouches, close to death, her hands pressed to her head: "Where are we going?"
Gauguin painted the three questions themselves, in French, in the upper left corner of the canvas. After he finished the painting, he tried to take his own life. The attempt failed, and he lived for about five more years, dying in the Marquesas in 1903. But the questions he painted remain, because they are not only his. They are the universal questions every human being eventually asks: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Takeaway: Gauguin could paint the questions beautifully, but he could not find the answers, and the questions nearly destroyed him. The Christian faith does not avoid these questions. It answers them with a person: Jesus said, "I am the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6). If someone asked you Gauguin's three questions today, how would you answer them?
Source: Information on Gauguin and the painting from encyclopedia.com and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
This story touches on suicide. If you are struggling, please reach out to someone you trust or a local crisis line.
Information Please: Other Worlds to Sing In
This much-loved story is usually credited to Paul Villiard, who told it about his own childhood. A man remembers a special friend he made when he was just a boy.
When Paul was very young, his father had one of the first telephones in the neighbourhood. It was fixed to the wall, and Paul was too small to reach it, but he loved to listen as his mother talked into it. Then he discovered that somewhere inside that wonderful wooden box lived an amazing person. Her name was "Information, Please," and there was nothing she did not know. She could give anyone's number and the correct time.
Paul's first personal experience with this genie in a box came one day while his mother was visiting a neighbour. Amusing himself at the tool bench in the basement, he hit his finger hard with a hammer. The pain was terrible, but there seemed no point in crying because there was nobody home to give him sympathy. He walked around the house sucking his throbbing finger and finally came to the stairway.
The telephone!
Quickly he ran for the footstool in the parlour and dragged it to the landing. Climbing up, he unhooked the receiver, held it to his ear and said into the mouthpiece just above his head, "Information, please."
There was a click or two, and then a small, clear voice spoke into his ear. "Information."
"I hurt my finger," Paul wailed into the phone.
"Isn't your mother home?" came the question.
"Nobody's home but me," he sobbed.
"Are you bleeding?" the voice asked.
"No," he said. "I hit my finger with the hammer and it hurts."
"Can you open your icebox?" she asked. He said he could. "Then chip off a little piece of ice and hold it to your finger," said the voice.
After that, Paul called Information Please for everything. She helped him with his geography and told him where Philadelphia was. She helped him with his maths. She told him that the pet chipmunk he had caught in the park the day before would eat fruit and nuts.
Then there was the day Petey, his pet canary, died. Paul called Information Please and told her the sad story. She listened, and then she said the usual things grown-ups say to comfort a child. But Paul could not be comforted. "Why is it," he asked her, "that birds should sing so beautifully and bring joy to whole families, only to end up as a heap of feathers on the bottom of a cage?"
She must have sensed how deeply he felt it, because she said quietly, "Paul, always remember that there are other worlds to sing in." Somehow he felt better.
When Paul was nine, his family moved across the country to Boston. He missed his friend very much. Information Please belonged in that old wooden box back home, and somehow it never occurred to him to try the tall, shiny new phone on the hall table.
As he grew into his teens, the memory of those childhood conversations never really left him. In moments of doubt and confusion he would remember the calm sense of security she had given him. He understood now how patient, understanding and kind she had been to spend her time on a little boy.
A few years later, on his way west to college, his plane stopped in Seattle. He had about half an hour between flights. He spent fifteen minutes on the phone with his sister, who lived there now. Then, without really thinking about what he was doing, he dialled his hometown operator and said, "Information, please."
Miraculously, he heard the small, clear voice he knew so well. "Information."
He had not planned it, but he heard himself say, "Could you please tell me how to spell 'fix'?"
There was a long pause. Then came the soft answer: "I guess your finger must have healed by now."
Paul laughed. "So it's really still you," he said. "I wonder if you have any idea how much you meant to me during that time."
"I wonder," she said, "if you know how much your calls meant to me. I never had any children, and I used to look forward to your calls."
Paul told her how often he had thought of her over the years and asked if he could call again when he came back to visit his sister.
"Please do," she said. "Just ask for Sally."
Three months later Paul was back in Seattle. A different voice answered: "Information." He asked for Sally.
"Are you a friend?" the woman asked.
"Yes, a very old friend," Paul answered.
"I'm sorry to have to tell you this," she said. "Sally had been working part-time the last few years because she was sick. She died five weeks ago."
Before he could hang up, she said, "Wait a minute. Is this Paul?"
"Yes," he said.
"Well, Sally left a message for you. She wrote it down in case you called. Let me read it to you." The note said: "Tell him I still say there are other worlds to sing in. He'll know what I mean."
Takeaway: Sally gave a lonely boy the gift of listening, and in return he gave a childless woman a reason to look forward to her shifts. But her last message was about something bigger: death is not the end of the song. Paul the apostle wrote that "what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard... the things God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Corinthians 2:9). Who in your life needs to hear that there are other worlds to sing in? And which child's "small" worry could you take seriously this week?
Source: usually attributed to Paul Villiard; widely reprinted. We could not confirm the original publication details.
The Homecoming: What Awaits Us?
Eminence (1998), a novel by the Australian writer Morris West, tells the story of Luca Rossini, a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church who now serves in the Vatican. Readers who enjoy West's fiction may also like Sopranu's look at his earlier novel, The Tower of Babel.
Luca lives in the shadow of a terrible experience from his years as a young priest in Argentina. It was the 1970s, when the military junta ruling Argentina acted with appalling brutality. Luca was tortured in front of the villagers he served. He was lucky to escape with his life and was smuggled out of the country. The scars across his back are an outward sign of the scars he carries inside.
By the time we meet him in the novel, Luca is fifty years old and a trusted confidant of a rigidly conservative Pope. In one scene the Pope reflects that he will have a great deal to answer for when he stands before God in judgement. Luca replies: "We pray every day that our trespasses will be forgiven, Holiness. We have to believe that our end will be a homecoming, not a session with torturers!"
"Do you really believe that, Luca?" the Pope asks.
"If I did not, Holiness," Luca answers, "I think I could not endure the chaos of this bloody world or the presence of whatever monster called it into being."
Takeaway: Luca knew what it was to be at the mercy of torturers. His hope was not that eternity would be a cold courtroom, but a homecoming. That is the picture Jesus gave in the parable of the prodigal son, where the father runs to meet the returning child (Luke 15:20). When you think about meeting God, do you picture a session with torturers, or a homecoming?
Source: Morris West, Eminence (HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 106-107.
Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Future Without Hope?
George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Hitler had been defeated and the Soviet Union was rising. Orwell imagined what life would be like under a totally authoritarian regime. Sopranu's review of Nineteen Eighty-Four looks at the whole novel in depth.
In Orwell's world, "Big Brother" controls everything: where people live, what they do, where they work, what they say, even how they think. "Thoughtcrime," thinking thoughts that go against the ideology of the Party, is the worst of all offences.
The central character is Winston Smith. He works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history so that it always matches the Party's version of events. He hates what he does and despises the regime that makes him do it. So Winston begins to rebel in small but deliberate ways. He finds a corner of his flat where the telescreen cannot see him and starts keeping a diary. He begins a forbidden love affair with a woman named Julia. And in his own mind he questions the way the world is. With each small act of rebellion, the chance that he will be caught grows.
The tension builds until the moment Winston's resistance is exposed. He is taken away to be "rehabilitated," which means being broken emotionally and physically and then remade into a loyal Party drone. His interrogator is a man named O'Brien, who wants to convince Winston that resistance is pointless, that the Party will never be defeated, and that the present will stretch on unchanged forever. At one point O'Brien says to him, chillingly: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever."
It is one of the bleakest images in all of literature: a future that is nothing more than an endless repeat of the cruelty of the past.
To that picture, the gospel shouts a loud "No!" It declares that death, disease and distress will not have the last word, and that the risen Christ will return to restore the whole universe to goodness and justice. That is the Christian hope.
Takeaway: O'Brien's vision of eternity is a boot on a face. The Bible's vision is a God who "will wipe every tear from their eyes," where "there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain" (Revelation 21:4). Which picture of the future shapes the way you live today?
Source: George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Gladiator: What We Do in Life Echoes in Eternity
One of the hit films of 2000 was Ridley Scott's Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe. The film centres on Maximus, a Roman general who holds on to his integrity whatever it costs him. Sopranu has a full review of Gladiator (2000) if you want to go deeper into the film.
Shortly before his death, the emperor Marcus Aurelius tells Maximus of his dream that power will be returned to the people of Rome, and asks Maximus to become the Protector of Rome and make that happen. Maximus does not want the job. He says he is not a man of Rome's politics, and he has no desire for power. All he wants is to go home from the war and live with his wife and son on his farm. But that is exactly why the old emperor chooses him: the man who does not crave power is the one who can be trusted with it.
Maximus's integrity stands in sharp contrast to Marcus's power-hungry son Commodus, who will do anything to become emperor, even murder his own father. Seeing Maximus as a rival, Commodus orders him executed and his wife and young son killed. Maximus escapes, but he arrives home too late to save his family. He is captured, sold into slavery and forced to fight as a gladiator.
In the arena he fights with far more skill than anyone he faces, and eventually he comes to Rome itself, where the crowds adore him. Once his true identity is revealed, his fame makes him a threat to the emperor again. Senators who share Marcus Aurelius's dream plot to free Maximus and return him to his army, so that he can march on Rome, restore power to the Senate and then walk away. Like the old emperor, they are so sure of his integrity that they trust him to give up power once he has it.
At the film's climax, Commodus himself fights Maximus in the arena. Both men die, and power is finally returned to the people.
What is the key to Maximus's integrity? The film reveals it in the very first battle, when he rides out before his cavalry and calls to them: "What we do in life echoes in eternity."
Takeaway: Maximus lived as though every choice mattered beyond the moment, and that is what made him trustworthy. Jesus told us to store up "treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy" (Matthew 6:19-21). If what we do in life truly echoes in eternity, what will your choices this week be echoing?
Source: Gladiator (2000), directed by Ridley Scott.
Final thoughts
A painter who could only ask the questions, a telephone operator who answered a boy's grief with hope, a tortured priest who dared to call death a homecoming, a novel that pictured forever as a boot on a face, and a general who believed his choices would echo. These stories about eternity remind us that the question "Where are we going?" is not just for philosophers. It shapes how we live on an ordinary Tuesday.
The Christian answer is not a vague hope that things will somehow work out. It is the promise of a homecoming, of other worlds to sing in, of a future where every tear is wiped away. Which of these stories speaks most to where you are today?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
Comments
Post a Comment