Distance

In the afterlife you find yourself in a beautiful land of milk and honey: there is no poverty, starvation, or warfare, only rolling hills and Lilliputian angels and evocative music. You discover that you are allowed to ask one question of your Maker.

You're led ceremoniously through the glistening arcades of the palace to the great hall, where your Maker sits enthroned in lights that hurt your eyes. You cannot direct your gaze fully at Him.

Nonetheless, you stand bravely in front of Him and ask, "Why do you live in a place like this, so far from Earth, instead of living down in the trenches with us?"

He is given pause by this question. Clearly no one has asked Him this in a long time. It is hard to tell in the bright light, but it looks as though His kind eyes well up.

He gazes wistfully out into the sky. "For a while I did live on Earth," He answers. "I was never one for exuberance, but nonetheless I had several homes in several countries. All my neighbors knew when I was there, and they would wave. I was well liked.

"I could run things well from that vant­age— down in the trenches, as you say—and I actively enjoyed each acre of my creation by walking on it, smelling it, feeling the soil between my fingertips, living on it.

"But one day I came to one of my homes and found that all the windows had been broken."

He winces in reminiscence.

"Then that happened to a second one of my homes. I don't know who did it, or what their reasons were, but it dawned on me that the respect I once commanded was caving in. People began to cut me off in traffic. One morning I awoke to find people picketing in front of my driveway."

He falls silent, misty-eyed, contemplative.

You clear your throat. "That's when you came up here?"

"I came here for the same reason doctors wear uniforms of long white coats," He an­swers. "They don't do it for their benefit, but for yours."

Reins

First you notice there are many blunders: the good are going to Hell and the bad to Heaven. When you approach the woman at the front desk to inquire, you find she is re­calcitrant and insolent. She tells you to go to line number seven, where you will fill out a complaint form and turn it in to desk number thirty-two. As you wait in line and strike up a conversation with the woman be­hind you, you discover that the afterlife was long ago given over to committees.

It turns out that power was wrested from God near the beginning, when he began to lose control of the workload. Humans began doing whatever they liked; adultery flour­ished, crime materialized and escalated. God realized that He had no concept of the skills required to run an organization of this magnitude. Because of the excessive procre­ation of His humans, the population was doubling at a blinding rate, and the mana­gerial load for a hereafter became staggering. A file had to be kept on every individual, planet-wide, with constant updating of new sins and good deeds. God tried taking care of all this Himself, pushing through pencils so fast they smoked. Compounding the work­load was the fact that God, in His big-heartedness, had also established pleasant afterlives for every animal. He grew ex­hausted but stated resolutely that He would not degrade His promises of afterlife. He would not abandon a single baby, a single animal, a single insect. He would not downs­ize. He had made His promises and intended to keep them.

The angels who had supported God in the beginning watched with concern as it seemed the whole operation might slip out of His control. They began to sow the seeds of discord, introducing the idea that God would never have gotten where He was without them. As the system grew progressively dis­organized, they hatched plans for their own rise to authority. As humans invented better technologies, the angels progressively took advantage of these to automate the process. By the 1970s they were zipping through un­countable piles of punch cards; by the 1990s they had reduced the operation to a ware­house of computers; at the turn of the mil­lennium they had constructed a sophistic­ated intranet by which they could track in real-time the disposition of all souls. God de­veloped a reputation of being old-school, and the reins of power became increasingly slip­pery in His uneasy grasp.

Very few people visit Him anymore. He finds Himself lonely and misunderstood. He often invites over men like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi, and togeth­er they sit on the porch drinking tea and lamenting about movements that sweep over the tops of their founders.