A little more of a little thought

[i'm going to go ahead and publish this, although i heavily recommend scrolling down and having a stare at m' boy. He's mighty cute. Cheers. --ed.]

There's a funny phenomenon about very long, ongoing Dialogues (or at least it's funny to me; but i'll admit i'm pretty easily amused) that the component streams of them have the habit of coalescing into very broad, homogeneous Generalizations. For example, when discussing the thoroughly eternal, wholly holy Land of Heaven, there seems to be a sort of commonish image i have in mind with whom i'm normally having such a conversation. There're golden bits and bejeweled bits and green-pastured bits through which a quiet water flows to, presumably, a crystalline sea. (Or at least there is a crystal sea. i guess it's less than clear what sort of river it's at the end of.) But we don't typically bring all of those component parts up in any single context-- for the very good reason that (to drag in a possibly inappropriate image) it'd take longer to set up the game board than it would to play the game. That's just to say that when i get together with my more respectable friends or, more normally, when i get together with myself to consider Heaven, we don't normally revisit all the possibilities/ variants/ models/ shinyhappy pictures we have or could come up with; that'd make having such a conversation (or any conversation at all, for that matter) untenably laborious and, well, infinitely long.*

But it seems there are other, special reasons we don't put Heaven together in one place, so to speak, that are beyond that more pedantic, obvious reason we don't re-lay all the groundwork for each ongoing Dialogue we carry. For one, many of the images of Heaven in scripture are awfully weird, or just vague, and they are at least tricky to weld together into anything like a coherent, presentable concept. For example, the less-than-reverently harvested collection of descriptives above do, irreverence notwithstanding, make an odd diorama. The very small glimpses we get of the Other Side from the Psalms and the prophets, from Jesus in the gospels, from Paul, and from the Revelation don't necessarily gel very well. And to do damage control before it becomes demanded, they certainly don't necessarily have to; there aren't many claims among them that a definite imagery or landscape or mode of being is being revealed by the writer. That is to say, most of those images have a raison d'etre having nothing whatever to do with revealing the contents of Heaven. So with that in mind, to gush on about the skyline of the New Jerusalem or the chemical makeup of our New Bodies is to speculate (even toward the goal of upbuilding and encouragement) without much bedrock beneath. Not that there isn't a place for some encouraging gushing**-- only speculation (along with, perhaps, personal testimony) can be an undulating sand dune on which to build one's eternal hope.

There is, i think, another reason we don't more often lift each other up with visions of Heaven, which reason i'd like to use as a springboard for further reflection (and maybe even, in the end, a little encouragement). Some of the images are, according to the person treating them, just flat-out uncomfortable. i'll admit it: i used to sit in various Sanctuaries staring wistfully at the vaulted Gothic buttresses thinking how much less a waste of wood they'd be if there were some climbing routes set on 'em. Then i'd drift off considering how boring Heaven would be if there were no boulders there. Surely it was a less than mature phase of my life (although arguably not a less mature phase, sadly); the point is that the whole "slouching about in luxurious green fields by a lovely li'l creek" scene sounds desperately less than a happening way to roll for an endless eternity. Likewise, the Jehova's Witnesses' archetypal painting of the frightfully happy Non-Hundred-Fourty-Four-Thousanders lugging baskets of easily-acquired oranges and-- what? avacadoes?-- around Subheaven sounds like it'd be fantastic 'till somewhere around lunchtime. It's not that i'm against peace per se; it's that i'm not equipped to imagine infinity without some sort of purpose, some goal. For that reason, i tend to eschew the whole Shepherd's Paradise scenario (although i'd give some serious thought to shepherding on Mallorca or Malta. Phooey with the sheep, but there're some skies i could stare at for a really long time.) On the other hand, i can much more easily empathize with the Elders' and the Four Living Creatures' situation: falling down perpetually on my face before the throne in awe of GOD. But then i wonder if it isn't a kind of arrogance or wrongheadedness on my part to put myself in such a place. i just don't know.

There are, though, some things said about the next life that are apparently very definite. With this abusively verbose introduction i'd like to dive off into some of those.

* Perhaps that's the sort of conversation for Eternity where (i strenuously hope) it will be unnecessary.

** To be sure, i wonder how some of the more straight-laced of our ilk maintain their posture for a lifetime. It seems that many spend their lives vigorously pursuing the failure to drink, gamble, have sex, associate with (or be) wild women, or cuss; and they build their fellow cloistermates up with stimulating imagery of an eternal Not-Hell. If that doesn't whip you into a frenzy to hop on the Morning Train, let me recommend a Lagavulin primer.