Resurrections

AM Psalm 20, 21:1-7(8-14) • PM Psalm 110:1-5(6-7), 116, 117
Isa. 4:2-6 • 1 Thess. 4:13-18 • Luke 21:5-19

In our scriptures for today, St. Paul assures the Christians at Thessalonica that at the end of time, “The Lord will come down from Heaven at the word of command, at the sound of the archangel's voice and God's trumpet. And the dead in Christ will rise.... And we shall always be with the Lord.”

One day I was talking with my friend and mentor Miller Williams, who had given up on Christianity and didn't believe in the afterlife, about his translation of G.G. Belli's sonnet “Death with a Coda” and its irreverent remarks about life after death. I acknowledged that any kind of eternity was hard to grasp, but some people had, I reminded him, seen visions of their deceased loved ones waiting for them and welcoming them, and I added, “I sure would like to see my parents again.” He looked off into the distance and murmured, “So would I.”

There are lots of loved ones I'd like to meet again, and Dante in his Commedia multiplies the loved ones we can get to meet when he shows us people of different centuries conversing in Paradise, where one of the blessèd tells how people there give thanks for every new inhabitant of Paradise because each newcomer gives them a chance to increase in love. I would love to meet my great great grandmother Judith, whose letters, written in the 1860s, I found in my father's desk. I would like us, when God brings us back to life, to get our whole lives back, from birth to death, with the evil in us washed away. I could have my little brother playing in the back yard with me again, and, older, beating me at tennis even though he was playing barefoot, and sixty-five years old, laughing as we greeted each other at last. God can do it!

“Death with a Coda,” however, poses a possible problem with eternal resurrection. Here are the last two lines in Miller's translation:

Floating [in Heaven]... it's all the same.

The bitch eternity is going to be eternal.*

Even happiness, over the centuries, could feel like too much of the same thing. Our Book of Common Prayer with one of its prayers for burial services, however, joins with Dante to resolve Belli's problem:

Grant that, increasing in knowledge and love of thee, she/he may grow from strength to strength in the life of perfect service in thy heavenly kingdom.

There must be an infinite number of good things to learn about God and ways to love and serve God and all the new neighbors we will meet and love in Heaven. And think of the languages we can learn, and the poems we can learn to read and write in those languages, and all the planets and galaxies in God's infinite universe! Things will never be the same, just better and better.

Well, whatever God plans for us, we know it will be more and better than we imagine.

/- - - - -/

*Eppuro, o bbene o mmale, o a ggala o a ffonno,

Sta cana eternità ddev'èsse eterna!

Written by John DuVal

…who wishes you a wonderful Advent and Christmas season.