Heaven
There’s something real about the communication between this world and the world to come, a kind of communion between saints and souls and sinners that spans the gulf of time. It is not just we who are praying, but we are being prayed for by a great cloud of heroic witnesses, some of whom, I believe, are attracted to us, who have our name and have our number and who remember us. It’s a wonderful thing to be remembered. I think we are. Br. Curtis Almquist, Society of Saint John the Evangelist, ssje.org, Brother Give us a Word
I have been rereading Heaven, a book edited by Roger Ferlo, where twenty-five well known spiritual writers write about some of their ideas about heaven. I bought it over ten years ago when I was preaching at more funerals and spending more and more time with people who were grieving. Heaven is almost always a question about which all will eventually ask.
Barbara Crafton writes that perhaps we will be with our loved ones in heaven and suddenly realize that they never left us. Nora Gallagher talks about a difficult parent who was dying and how they eventually find love and peace shortly before she dies. She begins to see her mother’s life from a different perspective. She finally reaches a place where she does not describe her mother as someone who “tortured” her, but that her mother led a “tortured life.”
Alan Jones describes heaven being already all around us. Heaven is a “code” word for the presence of God in our midst. Michael Battle discusses how we are to practice how to show love the way God does in preparation for heaven. “We are to practice heaven.” Barbara Brown Taylor writes that her sense of the communion of saints is so strong that she has never felt alone.
Kathleen Staudt writes about times at prayers when she imagines being in the presence of all those, living and dead, who have been spiritual mentors and friends to her. Maggie Ross writes that heaven appears to her when she is not looking for heaven.
Benjamin Morse humorously writes that pets will be in heaven but they will not chew “on the upholstery.”
Of course, none of us knows what heaven is like, but our promise is that God will be with us throughout all eternity. We know we have a God of love. We have that promise that God and love will always be with us.
Joanna joannaseibert.com