In Heaven, there will be plenty of time to listen to the beautiful crazies February 22, 2008
Posted by Zack in , trackbackFrom the ordinary radicals Christian blogosphere…one of my favorite bloggers “Agent B.” This is really what’s it’s all about, if you ask me:
The other day …I stumbled upon a brief moment involving my true calling. Yet the shackles of my momentary position in life kept me from following through.
My true calling: befriending, listening, and being real with the undesirables.
My current shackle: being an employee of Son & Dad Tree Service, Inc.
His story made me think of a sermon series I just finished listening to: Ozark Christian College’s Mark Moore on Revelations. He believes (like a lot of Revolutionaries) that Heaven is not a place that exists now, but a place that will happen on Earth after Jesus returns. In that world, believers will come back in immortal, souped-up bodies. One consequence: over eternity, you’d be able to spend as much time as you want to with every person in the world.
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Hey, B. Props to you.
There is a marvelous idea I first heard from Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, addressing the question “won’t we get bored in eternity?” He does not claim this is official Christian teaching - just one way to think about the question of what kinds of things might take up all that time. (I hasten to say that I think it falls a bit short on the “new heavens and new earth” aspect — BTW, everybody go read NT Wright’s new book Surprised By Hope on this! He made me laugh in the forward by apologizing to librarians that they would have such a problem trying to shelve the book because it would be impossible to choose between “eschatology” and “politics” as its topic. I’m wondering if this may be the major “intersection of serious theology and political praxis” work the movement has been waiting for.)
Anyway, back to Kreeft. He proposes that in eternity, this is how you spend your time: first, you come to understand yourself completely and with perfect compassion (the reasons for every mistake you made, everything that happened, why you became who you became, all the what ifs).
When you’re done with that, you start on another person and come to understand them and their whole life with perfect compassion in exactly the same way as you did for yourself. And this process continues for not just your own beautiful crazies, but for every single person who has ever existed.
And if it should happen that you ever get done understanding and loving every “neighbor” there’s ever been completely…. well, then you can start on God.