Ed died a couple of weeks ago. We went to his funeral, incongruously in the stately beauty of St. Mary Church in Newport where the Camelot Kennedys were married. Regular readers have met Ed here in another post. He was the gentle and once suffering soul who lived in an unmaintained mobile home with filthy floors, smoked too much, could barely clear the couch in his hovel to get to the bathroom, and took in homeless people just a click worse off than he was. He slept fitfully on his sagging couch with disheveled gray blankets of an indistinguishable original color, and his guests slept in his bed.
Later he was moved against his will to a nursing home when pneumonia and advancing neuropathy and Parkinson’s took him down. The ambulance brought him to the hospital, and they wouldn’t let him go home again. We continued to bring him the Eucharist on Sundays after Mass there and celebrate a brief liturgy. It wasn’t a bad place as such places go, and the staff was kind. He was always astonishingly attentive and grateful and reverent with the Blessed Sacrament.
I took him on an outing one morning in late September after he had recovered somehow from a bout with COVID. He was officially in hospice, but the nurse said I could take him out if I promised to bring him back as soon as he got tired. He could no longer walk, but the nurse helped me move him into the car from the wheelchair. His frail body weighed about as much as my twelve year old granddaughter.
I had hoped we could go in the chair to a bench overlooking Second Beach outside the Sachuest Point Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center where we volunteer on Fridays. He once loved to walk the trails there when he could. Now even the move in a wheelchair to the bench was beyond him. So, we remained in the car and talked and just sat. Then we drove a couple of miles to Sweetberry Farm, drank coffee, and ate blueberry muffins from their small bakery there. We parked overlooking the orchard and fields and distant hills next to the tall hydrangeas. He most wanted to lower the windows and examine more closely the blooms on the hydrangeas. He was content to sit in silence and contemplate the flowers until he asked quietly if we could go back to his shared room so he could take a nap in his bed.
“When they heard the sound of the Lord God walking about the garden in the breezy part of the day..” from Genesis 3
Adam and Eve hid from God because they were afraid and ashamed, though they had never been that before they listened to the snake. They ate the fruit of the tree of good and evil, which was the only fruit of all the delightful trees in the garden from which they had been forbidden. Even though they were completely happy, they wanted more even though they had been warned it would ruin them. They wanted to become like God, to be God, and we still do strive to be so. In doing so, we struggle, fail, alienate ourselves from God and from one another; hurt ourselves and others. We want to be God, but we’re not and cannot be.
But we are given a lovely image, a glimpse before the Fall when the Lord God walked about the garden in the breezy part of the day. Adam and Eve could join Him, talk with Him about all that is wonderful, laugh with Him, take in the incomprehensible beauty of the garden, of all God had made for us to enjoy, to be utterly joyful within.
Now, this little bit of anthropomorphizing God is metaphor. We have no idea what before or after are.
We have been told that whatever comes after our earthly heart stops and our brain stills will be more than we can ‘ask or imagine,’ but we cannot know what the beatific vision will be like. We have been told that there is more than dying and returning to the earth – dust to dust. More than ‘that’s all folks.’ More than a final corruption.
We have been promised a new body that will last forever, a spiritual body, but not a spirit alone. We won’t be angels. Angels are a different order of creatures. We will be human beings with bodies as we were created from the earth, but in the image of God. Like Jesus, we will be resurrected as He promised for us. We will be ensouled but also embodied. A perfected body in the presence of God. Without disappointment or fear or pain. The breath of God will be within us.
I dreamed last night. Ed was there. We somehow slid down along the stair walls together in a circular rotunda, very fast, laughing like fools, nearly flying. At the bottom I walked down a well-lit whisper quiet institutional corridor with light tan Formica walls with a pleasing design and matching Formica countertops until I came to a doorway and entered a small room with a desk. Ed was in the room helping an older lady write a letter she needed to petition some authority for help. He was happy to be her companion and aid. He looked up at me and smiled. I woke up.
My imaginings of heaven are woefully inadequate, but I hope there are little houses in neighborhoods of friends that I love and with whom I am completely affable. Laughter is often heard. We share leisurely conversations about all things that are beautiful with lots of comfortable pauses to enjoy the evening breeze. And there is a yard with a garden to work in until it is green and pleasant and orderly with healthy shade trees, oaks, maples, and birch, perhaps there is a hammock looking up into one of them through the branches into a bright blue sky and billowing clouds, and hydrangeas to prune when I want.
In the evening when the sea breeze comes up, maybe a walk in the vineyard overlooking the beach with my Lord talking softly or merely silent in sublime company and nothing needs to be said. Blissfully leg weary at the end of the day accomplishing fruitful things in the garden with my well worked hands leaves me pleasantly tired from a day well spent.
Although Jesus told us that there will be no marriage in Heaven, deep friendships will persist. I like to think I’ll still be able to spoon sleepily with my dearest friend, Rita, with her hair that smells like spring. I like to fall asleep at night. In heaven I hope to fall instantly asleep and dream the unfettered joyful dreams of the redeemed.
“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High and abides in the shadow of the Almighty says to the Lord: My refuge, my stronghold, my God in Whom I trust” Psalm 91 and the beginning of Sunday Night Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours.
If we had lived in the Roman Empire, which lasted about 500 years as the Western Roman Empire and another thousand or so as the Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople, we would have expected that daily life probably would never change
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