Maybe I believe in the afterlife more than I thought

Today I had the chance to finish a DVD I started watching a few days ago, a Dutch film called (in English) Antonia's Line. It's a beautiful, moving, lyric film about four generations of an idiosyncratic family, with assorted misfit hanger-on's, working a farm in Holland, I presume. I first saw the movie about ten years ago at The Tower, Salt Lake's independent theater.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting is because in one of those odd little coincidences that one of my spiritual mentors (now deceased) would have told me isn't a coincidence at all, there was this moment in the film when a little girl asks her great-grandmother if there's an afterlife, and the great-grandmother responds, "This is the only dance we dance." I hasten to add that in the context of the film, that line doesn't feel nearly as bleak as it may sound, since the film is a celebration of life and time. Still, when I heard the line, I thought, "No. Too bleak for me."

The coincidence here is that in the scriptural reflection I posted earlier this morning, when I was reflecting on Alma's teaching about the resurrection, I did my usual disclaimer about how I'm not really interested in whether there's actually an afterlife or not, because the value of LDS teachings about the afterlife for me is what I hear the Spirit telling me through them about how I should live in the here and now. Good and well. But watching Antonia's Line, I realized that I would simply not be comfortable saying, "This is the only dance we dance." Noble liberal that I am, tolerant of ambiguity and magnanimous toward secular humanists, I'm uncomfortable insisting dogmatically on the existence of an afterlife, and I certainly wouldn't maintain that disbelief in an afterlife leads to immorality since people won't fear future punishment. (I'm tempted to go off on a soapbox on that subject, but I'll save it for some future post). But I realized quite clearly today that LDS teachings about the afterlife are not dispensable for me. If I had children, I would not teach them that this is the only dance we dance. I would teach them that the scriptures of the Restoration tell us that someday after we die, we will regain our bodies and resume our lives with the people we love, possibly on this very earth and if not, then on someplace like it. When the kids get older, then we can complicate things, if their intellects run in that direction, with a conversation about the meaning of hope and looking forward with the eye of faith rather than knowledge.