“’ God,’ said Pascal, ‘instituted prayer in order to give his creatures the dignity of causality.”[1]
– C.S Lewis quoting Pascal
The thoughts of mortality and the subsequent departure of our soul from this earth came to mind. It wasn’t so much the morbidity of the subject that enticed
my thinking to continue in this line of thought, but rather, what wonderous adventures await us in the eternal ethereal of existence. We are offered the image of the risen Christ as an example of the preeminent figure of the glorified body. The transition from this life to the next seems to be the greatest obstacle or fear of that imposed tragedy of situations.
The limitations of the finite mind relegate us to trepidation when considering the passing from one realm of existence into another. How much greater it will be when we are one step closer to our Creator, not as infinite, yet more so once we have shed this shell of decaying flesh and taken on our new body. In that moment of stepping onto the far distant shore, we will not only be changed in the twinkling of an eye, but in the exact moment, a new sense of being will overwhelm what we once saw through the limited perceptions of our finite soul’s blinders into one of trying to look into a blinding light of the realization of the expanse of eternity – the finite finally stepping from the terrestrial into the extraterrestrial.
With squinting vision, whatever that may be, we will peer into the vast illuminated abyss of the heavens, trying to make sense of what appears before us. As one trying to connect the imagery with known context, we’ll struggle to grasp what we find, yet we must also consider that we will not be the same as now. Even as I write this, one must keep reminding oneself that we will not have the same ocular abilities, and the same would hold true for all of the natural senses on which we came to rely on when living upon earth. No, in that heavenly realm, in the glorified body, not only will our ability to sense be changed, but the ability to comprehend will also take on an all-new quality never before imagined. It is here the joy of that which is to come should overtake us in the moment, perhaps making the tingling you feel when something spiritually grabs you and awakens something inherently built within us that allows for a moment, that split second when hit by an epiphany, you finally see the veil lifted and God’s treasure not built by hands, where no moth nor rust can reach, becomes a reality.
[1] C.S. Lewis – The World’s Last Night, pg. 8
