Just getting here.
I am back-logged with my reading, much less my writing.
This is an interesting one because it’s such a difficult topic. It’s an easy one to throw off lightly–I loved your comment about an American reincarnation versus a French for example–but it is difficult to really look at. I see a series of posts in the future that eventually address all of your wonderings. I expect to catch up at some point. Perhaps one or two of your questions will be addressed once I do.
The moments that are clearest to me are the ones with your mom and your heaven. So the table and the chairs, is clearest, because it makes the most sense for you. It’s a very eucharistic image, gathering around a table–the family table no less. I liked the shifting of guests, from meal to meal?
Before I lived in San Diego, I joked that its perfect weather must be what Hell is like. The same temperature, the same weather, year round. When I lived there I learned that there were variations. I grew to know and love the variations. It isn’t always the same. I loved it. Some folks can’t stand it.
In Christian thinking, Hell is a state of being, not a place. When I taught Theology to high school students I’d ask them to describe what it was like to fall in love. They’d typically describe crushes and being swept up by everything having to do with another person. Wouldn’t they get bored, I’d ask. Oh no, it would be unending bliss. Then I’d ask them what it’s like to have someone you’re not interested in fall in love with you. They were clear that there was no worse experience in life. At that point I’d point out that what they’d just described were the differences between Heaven and Hell.
Over the weekend I had a conversation with a fabulous woman. She’s the friend of a friend, someone whom I’ve never come to know as well as I’d like. She’s a widow. After her husband died, she wished for a sign that he was out there somewhere, and okay. She never found one. She’s resigned herself to this one life, as a result.
I told her that I could see what she hadn’t been able to. The values, the hopes and dreams that she had for a life with her husband? She brings them into being every day. She’s proof of the way a partnership that had barely started–before cancer ended it–had continued. She is the sign she was looking for.
To the degree she realizes this–echoing CS Lewis–I think she touches the edge of Heaven. I didn’t tell her that part. The way she glowed, it seemed self-evident.
