the thoughts about heaven I have been graced with this week have lifted my soul to a memory it forgot… like a waking dream… as if I have been asleep and it has had to be a dream that re-aroused my joy and wonder. Break. All very abstract, I’m sure. But one thing I solidly agreed with in medieval class was that abstraction is part of our way of understanding things. But if course, those things must be reunited and found again in the world they come from. Break. So begin stream of consciousness. Break. Mmm. Microwave pizza, its rare to sit and be still and eat something and actually savor it. This rushing about in life never really leaves time for digestion, that of thoughts or that of food, regardless of their light-and-fluffiness, or the gravity of the weight they place in the mind-stomach. Beak. So one for the digestive system which I just ate and am now savoring as a fine wine before figuring out where in the mind to store it and how to metabolize it into action: the fact that the place where I work operates the way it does because all of us love a person… and in that, that person, that love and the surrounding devotion, I see Jesus.
So before we talk about the abstraction of Jesus, we must talk about this love first. It struck me conversing with my coworker on the evening shifts… we are all working here, the assistant director, the full time staff, the part time staff, not because this is a good thing to do… not because we have a moral obligation to care for our fellow human beings regardless of disability; not because we love our client-children, though a lot of us do… because we met someone who is walking the hard purgatory of life, and Jesus is seeping through him. It was the job that first attracted me when I applied, I had no idea of who I would be working with, what kind of coworkers and bosses, but the clientele. Yet when I got here and began to be trained, discovering the magic of love our director had worked into the lives of the six women who live at the home I work in, the care with which he erected a stronghold of peace for them in an increasingly insane world… the way he gave up his health and life and even family to care for something he believed in… giving peace to six women. Maybe he saw it as a penance for something in life, maybe at conversion his heart was so swept up in the pursuit of God that he ran headlong, endlessly until part of his very soul had unravelled and been lost in the cause. He poured himself like a drink offering and now, we who are carrying on his cause for peace, because we too have come under the spell of some sort of heavenly love. My ‘little’ sisters I work with, who teach me so much with their struggles with a disease just to be at peace in the day, with themselves, with the world around them… so alike to my own. But here came a person who had walked the Ecclesiastes road, meaningless, meaningless he might have said and maybe I would have believed him, I havent seen enough life yet. We hold his soul, in our hands, one that committed itself to the lives of nine others, and there, it has spent its time, giving without knowing how to cease.
Jesus, I think You enchant with that same kind of love… a kind of love that draws around itself a centrifugal force from whose charm none of us really wish to escape. We flock around You, when we get a glimpse of You on that cross… we see what You’re dying for and we know we love that very same thing.. the beautiful, corrupted, that you again made beautiful because You never stopped loving it… but then again, neither did we. We couldn’t stop believing in the invisible beauty, so we ignored it and shut ourselves up to it until we fell in love with You; and looking at You, we see it all happening again: You put the very flesh off Your back and blood from Your veins into us, the people of Yours world. You have up more to try and love us all than simply that pile of clothing we stripped off of You with greedy hands; You exhausted Yourself to the point of nakedness, staked down and helpless before us in sacrifice, we took up what You were bringing to earth. A grace we were forced to accept. It made sense to us, we clustered round and saw the life dripping out of Your heart with each beat… and the world lapping it up at Your feet. It was then we understood the grace, in the core of our being… we were there drinking in the life too, and watched the Spirit leave You and enter us more fully than we’d had it before. It takes a giver to receive… the giving up of a life to bear much fruit.
SO I watch the river of life flowing around my feet and cant help but wonder how we missed Your sacrifice. We live with the reality of love everyday, and yet we are so befuddled by it… giving up our lives for each other always seems just ‘the least I can do…’ but what more is there to give? I guess there is my weakness. My fear. My trembling and hiding heart. I watch You Jesus, already emptied, take these inside to, consume them…. And let them bleed out with the rest of Your blood, transformed into life, caught up in a chalice and celebrated with the reoccurring discovery of more of Your flesh and substance in the grace of the everyday. I think, Jesus, we are starting to step into heaven. If in this home where I work, the giving up of one man’s life can give peace to a few, and the love of him can inspire many, what about the gift of all of our selves to You? I think we have already begun to bring heaven down to earth, purging ourselves of the selfish attatchment to the very life within our bloods. To hold is to kill, to have is to give. Your kingdom come, Your will be done… on earth as it is in Heaven.
