When we wonder about life after death, there are so many questions of varying subtlety. None of us has all the answers. But there is a wisdom in recognising that love may be one of them. The very suggestion that love is the answer is so well worn that it may well seem worn out. But that may be because we have let slip our awareness of what we mean by love. We know about the emotion and we know how mercurial it often is. We recognise it too as something more than feeling: it is the bond that binds us in decisive commitment, the fruit of desire, something we have willed. And then love also names us as we are at our best.
I think of a couple in their later middle age whom I used to visit years ago. The wife had had a stroke, and her medication had caused side-effects that disfigured her. One day her husband said to me, “I wish you could have seen her when she was young. She was lovely”. And I in my foolishness said to him, “I suppose you can still see glimpses of that in her”. He told me, “That is all I see”. Love is more than a quality we possess. It is not an abstraction. It is ultimately what we are called to become.
Heaven is code for the presence of God where love is made perfect, and we are perfected in love. There we shall see one another as we really are, when all imperfection has been wiped away.
Read it all.
Roderick Strange: Remembering those who died raises questions about loss and early death
When we wonder about life after death, there are so many questions of varying subtlety. None of us has all the answers. But there is a wisdom in recognising that love may be one of them. The very suggestion that love is the answer is so well worn that it may well seem worn out. But that may be because we have let slip our awareness of what we mean by love. We know about the emotion and we know how mercurial it often is. We recognise it too as something more than feeling: it is the bond that binds us in decisive commitment, the fruit of desire, something we have willed. And then love also names us as we are at our best.
I think of a couple in their later middle age whom I used to visit years ago. The wife had had a stroke, and her medication had caused side-effects that disfigured her. One day her husband said to me, “I wish you could have seen her when she was young. She was lovely”. And I in my foolishness said to him, “I suppose you can still see glimpses of that in her”. He told me, “That is all I see”. Love is more than a quality we possess. It is not an abstraction. It is ultimately what we are called to become.
Heaven is code for the presence of God where love is made perfect, and we are perfected in love. There we shall see one another as we really are, when all imperfection has been wiped away.
Read it all.