A Christmas Favorite

                                 

                            After  Annunciation

             This is the irrational season

                 when love blooms bright and wild.

             Had Mary been filled with reason

                 there'd have been no room for the child.

                                                             Madeleine L'Engle

A Foretaste of Glory

The philosopher, Peter Kreeft, says that touching eternity in this life is like hearing an echo. The old hymn, "Blessed Assurance," calls this "a foretaste of glory divine."

We smell the salt air of the sea, even here, far upstream in the river of time.  Whenever we touch wisdom or love, we swim in salt water.  Earth is God's beach and when we are wise and loving, we are infants splashing happily in the wavelets of 'that immortal sea.'  But when we are spiritually full grown, we will buoyantly plow its breakers of wisdom and be borne up by is bottomless depths of love.  Boredom, like pain, will be remembered only as a joke when we are drenched in joy.

                                              (Kreeft, Heaven, 1989; p. 96)

 

Do You Believe in Aliens?

The Apostle Peter describes "God's elect" as being "strangers in the world" (I P. 1:1).  The Apostle Paul says this is because our "citizenship is in heaven" (Phil. 3:20). 

Have you had the experience of "earthly alienation," a sense that this earth is not your final home?    A Puritan prayer describes it this way:

O Lord,
I live here as a fish in a vessel of water,
only enough to keep me alive,
but in heaven I shall swim in the ocean.
Here I have a little air in me to keep me breathing,
but there I shall have sweet and fresh gales;
Here I have a beam of sun to lighten my darkness,
a warm ray to keep me from freezing;
yonder I shall live in light and warmth forever.

(From Arthur Bennet's The Valley of Vision as quoted in Joni  Eareckson Tada's Heaven: Your Real Home, 99).

How Close Is Heaven?

I think most of us think of heaven as something that's "out there," i.e. both from the standpoint of distance and time, it is far off.  But I can't help wondering if that's an illusion.  Maybe heaven is much closer than we realize.

Several years ago I read a book by Karen Mains called The Fragile Curtain.  In it she told of her extended visit to a refugee camp in southeast Asia.  Several times while she was there, she felt she could almost see through "the fragile curtain" that separates this life from the next.  She talked about those times when the curtain fluttered. 

In a similar way, Celtic Christians used to speak of "thin places," those locations where the distance between heaven and earth had been "thinned out" and where a person could simply sense that God was near.  These usually became pilgrimage destinations.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote:

    Earth's crammed with heaven,
    And every common bush afire with God;
    But only he who sees takes off his shoes . . .

How close is heaven for you?