Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Mooring at The North Sea
[Art note: painted by this blogger copying a photo by Carol Ann Munro taken on an early morning on the SW side of Lake Michigan]
Is the source of heaven only in the human imagination? Is it a pondering we all share as humankind of a mystery no living person solves — a life beyond life? Maybe it is the just reward for goodness? It is human nature to fill the unknowns with myth, guessing a heaven that plots to serve our need for just rewards handed out – if not now, then beyond. We long to be rewarded and punished as though we are trained falcon, soaring and hunting, but then returning to the glove for a tidbit of reward.
As for myself, who travels time without any full benefits of a justice in the sky, heaven is present even without a gift of death. Heaven is a state of joyful peace, a creative bliss, smiling, laughing with God, crying tears that are dried in the nurturing nearness with other humankind. Thank you, God, for this thing I call “heaven” even in my ever-living life, emerging from the depths of nature, absorbing me in prayers.
Jesus spoke of it as a huge, out of control weed, seeming to spread from only a small seed. He talked of it as the joy of finding something that was lost, maybe the happy peaceful moments that roll over us, drawing us to belong in a vastness of life as though it were a whole kingdom, but not of earth. Maybe that’s why words for the bliss always seem to end up in the sky, or maybe it is sky. It is that for which the God-created-earth is the metaphor used to describe it in God’s own poetry. Thank you, God. I love you too.
This beach fire that, on other nights, would draw us together for wild stories and drinking and singing, would be too tame for this relentless wind right now. No one gathers around the dancing and leaping flames so the untended fire just spreads out panting its last, as embers.
Worn rags of old sails were waxed to be tarps, now spread from the gunwales of the beached ships onto the sands, then held to the earth with heavy rocks. This makes something of a shelter for men. But now in awe of the skies most of us just stare into the roiling darkness, looking windward, waiting for the storm.
Strange patterns of lightning flash among the distant clouds with no flush of rains and any booms of thunder are muffled by the roaring sea.
Whatever way we wonder at this – heaven or hell or Valhalla — it is measured differently by each individual’s notion of justice.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 