What would happen if a grade six teacher assigned an A plus to every student in the class?  The sharp and the dull; the industrious and the lazy; the studious and the sloppy—all receive a big, fat A plus.  My teaching career was short, only two years.  That, however, was enough time to enable me to predict the outcome of this pedagogical experiment. 

First there would prevail a general euphoria.  Warm-fuzzy feelings all around.  Smiles on every face.  Paradise.

After a couple of minutes, however, happy eyes would start to wander.  Necks would begin to crane.  The inevitable question: “what did you get?”, if not asked would nevertheless start to get answered.  Complaints would follow immediately upon comparisons and soon all hell would break lose.  “He never does his homework, so why did he get an A plus?”  “I’m smarter than her.”  “They don’t deserve it.”   A violent uprising would likely ensue, if not from the students themselves, then undoubtedly from their helicopter pilot parents.

This experiment becomes really interesting if the teacher pushes it one step further:  “Class, I’ll give you two options from which to choose.  Either everyone gets the A plus I’ve assigned, or I reassign each of you according to perceived merit.  The worst student will get an F, but the best student will get no higher than an A.”  I bet you that the smartest kids would forfeit their A plus for a mere A just to be above the rest of the class.  Just to be in a league of their own.  Pretty stupid, wouldn’t you say?

How stupid are we?  Do we want so much to stand out, to be on top that we’d accept less than what is offered us just so long as everyone else gets handed an even smaller piece of pie?  This kind of behavior is a classic symptom of the pandemic mental illness called egoism.  It also provides a good definition of hell.  Hell is voluntarily turning our backs on the best in order to get something a little better than our neighbor. 

This definition explains why hell is so full of rich people.  It’s not that the rich can’t get into heaven.  The Pearly Gates are wide open.  The problem is that the rich can’t stand to stay there, because in heaven everyone gets an A plus; everyone has the same wardrobe budget; everyone reaches the same rung on the social ladder.  In heaven there is complete equality before God, who loves each person not one jot more, nor one jot less than any other.  The sharp and the dull, the industrious and the lazy, the studious and the sloppy all receive the same A double plus love from God.

I bet you heaven would drive most of us nuts.

Heaven would drive us nuts because most of us consider ourselves rich in some way—materially, mentally, or spiritually.  And the only way that I can be rich is if you are poor.  Riches are absolutely relative.  They depend completely on comparison.  If everyone has exactly the same, then no one is rich.  By the same token, no one is poor. 

 I can be very happy and proud passing all the Fiats and Hyundais in my shiny, new Mercedes until I pull into a parking lot full of shiny, new Mercedes.  Suddenly, all I can see are scratches in my paint job.  It’s as if our existence hung on being higher than the rest.  As if our lives depended on not merely our differences, but more on our distinctions.  As if we would simply be erased if someone better showed up.  We fear that the world is composed in binary code.  If we aren’t number 1, then the only thing left is zero.

             All this reminds me of the tragic story of Alice the camel.  Alice was quite shrewd and knew how to pick her friends.  She always hung out with horses, who greatly admired her shapely hump.  In fact, her horse friends loved her hump so much that their hearts began to swell.  Their hearts swelled and swelled until they began to push up between the shoulders of their front legs.  After a while all of Alice’s horse friends had developed admirable back bumps of their own. 

This development did not please Alice in the least.  Realizing that she was no longer one hump ahead of her friends, Alice fell neck deep into depression.  She began taking dietary supplements in order to enhance the beauty of her now run-of-the-mill hump.  As too often happens, from simple supplements Alice slipped into serious steroid use.  So serious that one day she woke up with a second hump! 

Well, hump #2 made Alice an instant sensation among all the one-bump horses.  Her star had again risen and her happiness returned.  So fast did her fame and fortune grow that an oil sheik from Saudi Arabia caught wind of her and longed to make her acquaintance.  Alice, of course, was over the moon with excitement.  She took the first plane from Calgary to Saudi Arabia.  What a catastrophe awaited her when she stepped into the airport to find herself up to her ears in two-hump camels.  She looked exactly like the rest.  What intolerable equality!  Alice couldn’t face it.  She found a plastic surgeon who specialized in dromedaries. 

Alice bought a third hump.  But the anesthesia must have addled Alice’s brains, because she woke up after the surgery totally obsessed with humps.  No sooner was she discharged from the hospital after one hump implant, then she was checking in the next.  Finally medical complications put an untimely end to poor Alice.  At her funeral somebody whispered, “She looks like a hairy mogul ski-slope with legs.”

 “Truly I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, “Then who can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”        

For us it is impossible not to want more than what the next camel has.  Our egos experience equality as utterly odious.  We define ourselves by our distinctions and rank and gladly settle for bad so long as it’s a little better than what the rest get.  We camels are constantly condemning ourselves to the miserable hell of zero-sum competition.

But there is some good news.  The good news is that for God all things are possible.  And the greatest possibility that God offers is joy not only over our own humps, but also just as much  joy over the humps of other camels.  God invites us to the unimaginable love of pure equality.  God throws open and keeps wide the gates of heaven. 

And where’s heaven?  Heaven is precisely where my riches are not threatened by your riches.  Even better, where my riches are increased by your riches.  Where a hump on your back feels just as good for me as a hump on my back.  Heaven is that madhouse, that loony-bin where I go nuts and start loving everything that isn’t mine as if it were.

Truly I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.  Then who can be saved?  For God all things are possible.